You wake up, disoriented by how bright the room is even at four in the morning.
The room is bright because it isn't the bedroom, it's the main room, where you and Ryuzaki had been sitting last night. Instead of getting up and going to bed, Ryuzaki had just lain on the couch silently, and you hadn't felt much inclined to move either. Exhaustion had crashed over you, and you can recall at one point pushing Ryuzaki's feet to the side and lying down squished beside him; not with any intent to fall asleep, but rather still in that space of finding it too complicated to move, and feeling unwilling to go through the whole ordeal of your nightly routine. Instead, putting it off, you had drifted… and now it's been almost the whole night. His legs are all tangled up in your own, and one of his hands is picking at the edge of your sleeve, twisting it around and around until the fabric is misshapen. Of course he's awake, and that had probably been what had woken you—the subconscious awareness that his breathing had changed. In a state of unusual calm, your mind drifting, you watch the shadows in the room and feel the heat from the body beside you; from Ryuzaki's pointy, bony elbows digging into your chest, the tickle of his wild hair against your cheek and brushing against your mouth. It's a whole hour until he speaks—at least, that's what your watch, which hasn't yet quite unwound, tells you.
"Good morning, Light-kun."
"Good morning Ryuzaki."
He doesn't seem to be in any hurry to get up. Neither are you, and so for another hour you drift in and out of soft-focus, marveling in the unusual ways the sun peeks through the windows; the unfamiliarness of the room and its collection of furniture; the way the very airflow through it is slightly other than what you're accustomed to.
At five o'clock, by mutual decision, you both get up, poking into the kitchen; and Ryuzaki makes coffee. By the time it's done, and you're quietly drinking your first cup of the day, you notice that time has stopped. Literally (in a sense); your watch has finally run down.
Ryuzaki's spoon is resting in his cup, and every so often he picks it up to stir the liquid around again. It clinks softly, and the chain jingles in quiet harmony whenever he moves or when you pick up your own cup. Your own coffee, black, is strong, but the taste is deep rather than bitter.
"Would you like to play tetris together?" Ryuzaki murmurs, looking down at his cup. His spoon, held between two fingers, is standing up and down, paused in its circular motion.
"Sure, why not?" you say.
You finish your coffee and Ryuzaki makes a second cup for both of you. On the way out of the kitchen, you pull some leftovers out of the fridge and follow Ryuzaki back into the bedroom. Putting your cups onto the side table, Ryuzaki boots up his computer and opens the game, and you sit next to him with the container in your hand and break off pieces of fish with your fingers; it had slipped your mind to bring a utensil so you obviously still aren't as awake as you'd like to think. As you watch Ryuzaki's fingers fly across the keys you make suggestions. "Left—right—no, over—spin, yeah—" a constant stream of words. He's playing on a pretty easy level, so there's time enough to make choices this way, and when it finally gets too fast for you to speak along with what's going on, he loses the game and restarts it.
Neither of you mention going downstairs or working on the case. Even when you both get up for whatever reason—to use the bathroom, to make more coffee, to grab a bunch of fruit from the fridge. Ryuzaki tries unsuccessfully to play one-handed while he eats a strawberry and loses his quickest game yet, and then you take over the keyboard commands.
Ryuzaki's a particularly quiet commentator, but that doesn't mean he's easy to ignore. Most often, he just gestures his suggestions, and more than once accidentally drops a piece of fruit onto either you or his keyboard. The second time this happens you grab the unfortunate piece of strawberry and absently bring it up to his mouth. He takes it from your hand, the edge of his soft, dry lips brushing against your fingertips. You glance over at him and find that he's watching you again, but not with his usual intensity; it's a more quiet thoughtfulness.
After a moment, he says wryly, "I think we lost the game."
/
No lunch and dinner, but rather a continual progression of snacking, coffee, and playing the game, fitting the falling pieces into place.
Friday is your date with Misa.
You're opening your wardrobe door and considering what to wear while Ryuzaki is sitting on the edge of the bed; or rather, sitting half on the bed and half on your dresser table, his feet stretched out in front of him and his back bent over a book he's got propped open on his legs. He glances up at your perusal and says casually, "I'd pick the green one."
You've got a blue sweater in one hand, a green one in another, and you glance over at him in surprise, saying automatically, "like I'd trust anything about your fashion sense."
"It goes with your eyes," he adds, and looks back down at his book, pressing his thumb to his lip.
"My eyes are brown," you say.
"Yeah, so?"
"So, green doesn't go with brown any more than blue does."
"Then it goes with your hair."
You roll your eyes, though Ryuzaki is focusing on his book and so misses your pointed reaction. Of course it doesn't surprise you that Ryuzaki has somehow found out your favorite color is green; it's just one more piece of evidence to him. You put the blue sweater back on the rack and throw the green sweater onto Ryuzaki's book. He flinches, then looks up and frowns at you.
"That wasn't very nice."
"It's the green one. Happy?"
He looks down at it. Picks up the corner of the fabric between his fingers and holds it close to his face, staring intently as though inspecting it. After a moment, he says, "yes."
"Then don't complain," you say.
"I wasn't complaining," Ryuzaki says.
"You're being contrary."
"No I'm not."
"Now who's the one being childish?" you ask.
Ryuzaki looks into the distance as though considering the matter deeply. Then he says, "you."
"Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest detective in the world," you say.
"Thanks, I'm glad you noticed."
As you pick your outfit up and walk into the bathroom with Ryuzaki slouching after you, he says, "They aren't just brown though."
"Hm?"
"Your eyes. They're more of a reddish amber."
"I guess so, maybe. Why do you care all of a sudden?"
"I just wanted to tell you that you were wrong."
"And now that you've done so, is your day complete?"
"Quite possibly, yes."
You take a shower, get ready for the day: face, teeth, etc. Get dressed in your outfit with the green sweater, your watch on your left wrist, wound up so you know exactly how much longer your date's taking than it ought to. When you get into Misa's apartment she's waiting around in something bright, humming a song. When the door buzzer announces you she spins around on her toes and envelops you in a surprise tackle; you go crashing into the door while Ryuzaki neatly sidesteps the collision. "Hey, Light! I missed you!"
You gently push her to arm's length. "Hey, Misa. We saw each other just yesterday."
"For like two seconds!" Misa retorts. "I didn't even get to talk to you! Oh, I can't wait to see what movie you picked! It's going to be so much fun!"
You stifle a grin, trying to look poised. "Yeah, sure."
She's chattering along in a great mood right up until the movie actually starts rolling. Then, a little confused, she says, "is there something wrong with this film? It's just a bunch of still pictures!"
"That must be what the 'montage' part means," Ryuzaki says drily.
"Oh," Misa says. After a moment she continues, a little less enthused, "is it all gonna be like this?"
"Pretty much," you say. "It's really good, though. It's science fiction."
Misa leans forward, her face screwed into an expression of concentration and her eyes boring holes into the screen. 'If Light likes, it I'm gonna like it too' it all says.
The film is called La Jetée. The jetty. You saw it in school, in the film club you'd joined the semester after you'd quit tennis. For you, that had been practically a teenage rebellion. The club was pointless; it wouldn't help you get into college or the police force and it was too nerdy for anyone to brag about. Your mother had taken it with a shrug. You're not sure your father ever even found out. The voiceovers are all in French, but Watari's gotten the film with Japanese subtitles.
Ryuzaki seems more or less uninterested in it all until he realizes the plot has to do with time travel. You can actually see him straighten up a bit in his crouch. "This is very unrealistic," he says.
"Well, it's obviously not meant to be realistic," Misa says. She stares at the huge shots of the narrator's face screwed up in silent screams, visors on his eyes, hooked up to wires for the experiment that, the film explains, made other men die, or go mad.
"The man doesn't die, nor does he go mad. He suffers.
They continue."
She shivers, and hugs her arms around herself. A moment later, she's sliding closer to you, gripping onto your hand. In the film, the prisoner is beginning to see images from back in time, beginning to travel in more and more refined ways to the image that had obsessed him as a child: the jetty; a woman, standing, waiting there. A man, running. Dying.
Peaceful images of the past: parks full of people, children, the bustle of the city, juxtaposed with the underground catacombs in which the present exists, locked there from radiation by World War III; desperate to survive. The sound of a racing heartbeat, loud as a galloping horse. The future: strange, disembodied images. Strange human faces floating in voids of black.
The man and the woman go to a museum. They walk among taxidermied animals, remnants—tamed, categorized, displayed, dead. Once, her face, opening eyes from sleep.
Misa jumps, hugs closer to you. "Ugh, I didn't think she was gonna move! It's so creepy!"
"Creepier than a woman walking backwards out of a well?" Ryuzaki asks.
Misa leans over you to make a rude gesture in Ryuzaki's direction.
The film is less than a half-hour long. A fragment of a story. Humanity is saved, and the man, choosing to go back to live out the rest of his days in the past with the aid of the future, returns to the moment. The jetty. The woman, waiting. "He ran toward her," the narration explains, matter-of-fact. "And when he recognized the man who had trailed him since the underground camp, he understood there was no way to escape Time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death."
"So it was a time-loop," Ryuzaki says, satisfied. "I thought so."
Misa stares ahead for a moment, frowning. Then she says, "that was totally lame. Light, I really, really love you, but you've got to get better taste in movies."
"I don't know," you say, finally allowing yourself to grin. "I thought it was pretty entertaining."
"And we can't be done with our date yet," Misa says. "This, like, wasn't even a real film."
"We could have tea and cake," Ryuzaki says.
Misa stands up and flips her hair. "Sure, whatever. Come on, Light." She grabs you by the arm and drags you out of the theater and into her main living room/kitchen area. There's an island-style counter between the two, though connected to one wall, and tall barstools along one side. You sit at one while Misa picks up the phone and calls Watari.
"We need some tea and cake here," she says. "Actually, make it a full lunch. Thanks." She hangs up and sits beside you. Ryuzaki, who is perching precariously on the edge of his stool in his usual crouch, tries to figure out if he can make the seat swivel without falling off.
After a moment, he dangles his legs so he can get more leverage. The chair makes a soft swif-swif as he turns it back and forth, back and forth.
Misa rests her elbows on the counter and her chin on her hands.
"Have you ever been to a museum like that?" Misa says, at the same time as Ryuzaki says, "it's a good thing I managed to stop World War III."
"What?" you and Misa say, in unison.
Ryuzaki shrugs. "At least, theoretically. I guess there's no way we could actually know what would've happened if that man hadn't been stopped. It's interesting to think about."
"...That's one word for it," you say at last. "Come on, Ryuzaki, you can't just say something like that and then not give any details."
"Unfortunately the details are still top secret," Ryuzaki says. "I mostly remember it because it was my first official case. The first one that anybody noticed, really. If it hadn't been for that man, who knows? I might not even be L today."
"I suppose he's dead too," you say after a moment.
"Naturally."
"I mean, not necessarily," Misa says. "There are lots of countries without the death penalty. This guy could've been still alive. You're not that old, Ryuzaki."
"That's actually a very good point," Ryuzaki murmurs, sounding vaguely impressed. "There wasn't a death penalty in that country, actually. But I've found that if governments manage to keep a case hushed up enough it doesn't matter what the law is. People can just 'disappear'... and by the time I was in any position to figure out what had happened to the criminal I'd caught, he'd been wiped out just like that."
Misa looks down at her hands for a moment. Then she laughs, uncomfortably. "Well, it's a good thing I'm famous," she says, flippantly. "It'd be pretty hard to disappear me!"
"You'd be surprised what's possible."
"Yeah, we all know what you're capable of, stalker-san," Misa says cattily. "Sheesh. Way to bring down the mood."
"I was only answering you."
The door buzzer rings, and Misa stands up. "That's the food. I'll get it."
There's plenty of it. Watari takes from the tray a full spread of black tea with sugar, lemon, or cream to add; small tartlets covered in berries; and a full lunch of vegetable and seafood curry with rice, and fukujinzuke, (pickled-vegetable relish) to go with it.
As Watari leaves the room, Ryuzaki sneaks his hand out for one of the tartlets.
"Really? Come on Ryuzaki, have some lunch first," you say.
Ryuzaki, who is engrossed in trying to fit an entire tartlet into his mouth at once, doesn't answer. You and Misa serve yourselves, and then you serve Ryuzaki a bowl of curry as well. He pauses in the middle of his second tartlet to have a bite of his curry, and then becomes interested in stacking his vegetables to one side of the bowl, roughly dividing them into groups by size and color, and then eating from one group at a time.
You're staring, and Misa is too. "That looks like a lot of work," she says.
"No, it's easier this way," Ryuzaki explains. He takes a bite, and waves his spoon. "Really, don't mind me."
"Ugh, Ryuzaki! You splashed all over me!" Misa shrieks.
"Okay, listen—Misa, why don't you move over a seat."
"But Light, I want to be next to you."
"And Ryuzaki, be more careful." You look over at him as you speak, mouth, 'I know you were aiming for her' and he shrugs minutely.
'Guilty as charged,' he taps out on the corner of his spoon.
Misa grumpily moves over, leaving an empty bar stool in between you and her. For some time, everyone merely focuses on eating lunch; but at last you end up winding down to the occasional cup of tea. Misa's conceded to eating a tartlet as well, sighing at the taste with a smile.
"We should probably be going soon," Ryuzaki says.
Misa puts down her fork. "Actually, if you stay a minute, I've got a surprise…" she hops off her stool and ducks down, banging around under the counter before reappearing with a huge, already-opened bottle of vodka.
"Misa, I don't think this is appropriate," you start, but she waves her hand.
"This is social. We're having a party. It's totally okay." She thunks three shot glasses onto the counter.
L reaches for one of the glasses and downs it as Misa drinks hers.
"Cheap, tastes like paint stripper—I approve," he says.
"Thanks," Misa answers. She looks over at you. "Come on, Light, have a little fun!" she cajoles.
"I can't," you explain patiently, "I'm underage."
"What?" Misa asks. She looks over at Ryuzaki with a confused expression.
"It's illegal for me to drink yet," you say.
"I'm afraid he's serious," Ryuzaki says.
Misa shakes her head. "Wow. I didn't know anyone actually cared about that! Light, you're… unreal!"
"I agree," Ryuzaki says, pouring himself another drink. "Light-kun is as fake as they come." He grins slightly and glances over at you, and you take pride in ignoring him completely.
"That's not what I meant!" Misa exclaims. "I meant he's really awesome and unusual and… Light, come on, you knew what I meant, right?"
"I don't know, Misa," you say regretfully. "I was kind of offended."
Misa's lip wobbles. "Oh no! I'm totally screwing up my chance at getting you to love me, aren't I?"
"Well…"
She pours herself another drink. "You just have to pretend that never happened, okay? I'll forget your stupid movie happened too, and we can be even!" she finishes cheerfully.
Ryuzaki snickers.
You look over at him, startled and curious. This is only the second time you've ever heard him really laugh, you think. The first had been when you introduced him to Misa, and it had terrified you then; that harsh, nearly-silent chuckle. You hadn't known that he'd had evidence tying her to the Second Kira, but the laugh had been a noose tightening around your neck…
The noose is still there. But it hasn't tightened, and you're still on solid ground; for now. You're not sure if this laugh is different or if it merely seems so to you; it's been months after all since you've observed it. It's quiet and still kind of controlled; you can't possibly imagine Ryuzaki in paroxysms of happiness. But, here: a smile that's tilting up both corners of his mouth, and the low, soft noise, a little unsteady. His eyes are crinkled the slightest bit. He's not even looking at you, and perhaps it's that unguardedness that surprises you most… the moment is over as quickly as it had started but you're staring at him still, feeling as though you've just seen a cosmic event like an eclipse, something that won't come around again for years.
You grab your glass and take a sip, then splutter. For a second, confused, you'd thought it was water, but it's the glass of vodka that Misa had shoved next to your hand. You're in the middle of a coughing fit, your throat burning; you can't believe anyone actually drinks this stuff voluntarily. Misa watches you for a second. "Oops," she says, not sounding remotely sorry. "Well, the best cure is more, right?"
"No," you say, putting your hand out in a 'stop' motion, "really. I'm okay. Thanks."
She shrugs. "Suit yourself!"
Ryuzaki pulls a cherry from the top of a slice of cake. It's not even his slice of cake, it's just sitting there, untouched. Probably Misa's, then. Though you guess it could be yours; you hadn't had your piece either. After a moment, Ryuzaki swipes a piece of frosting off the top with his thumb for good measure.
You slide the cake over to him. "Seriously?"
Ryuzaki shrugs. He fiddles with the cherry, pulling off a long stem, sticks it into his mouth and after a moment of his tongue poking this way and that inside his cheek, pulls out the same stem tied in a knot.
Misa is watching him, blushing bright pink.
"I bet I'm a better kisser than Light-kun," Ryuzaki says.
"That is not true!" Misa says, standing up and slamming her hands into the counter.
"Well, how can you know if you've never compared?" Ryuzaki says.
"Like I'd need to compare with you," Misa says. She leans across the counter, though, and grabs Ryuzaki's face, practically shoving her tongue down his throat. You avert your eyes and pour yourself another cup of tea. After a few minutes of wet squelching, Misa pulls back and turns to you with a dangerous gleam. "Okay, now it's your turn!"
"No, Misa, I really don't think we need to—"
"But Liiight, Ryuzaki's insulting your honor!" Misa insists. "We have to show him he's wrong!" She tries to aim her face toward you and you grab your shoulder just to keep her away. She stares up at you with a pitiful pleading look, and while you're trying to figure out how to convey that this really isn't at all necessary, or half as important as she thinks it is, Misa takes the chance to dart forward and… smash her lips against yours. You freeze, keeping your mouth shut, while Misa moves her lips around for a bit before leaning back with an annoyed huff.
You'd thought Ryuzaki chuckling was an odd sight. You weren't prepared to ever see him actually laughing, but he is, now; a full, aching laugh, so that tears are actually gathered at the corners of his eyes and he's almost lying across the counter.
"I win," he says. "I totally win, hands-down."
"Light's just shy, okay?" Misa retorts. "He's underage, remember? You wouldn't expect him to be experienced! Anyway, I think it's cute."
"For drinking! Underage for drinking!" you say, red-faced and too loudly, pretty much about to sink through the floor in embarrassment. How old does she think you are, anyway? Twelve?
Ryuzaki bursts out laughing again, and you bury your head in your hands.
.
.
.