Morning; and the cool shadows play softly through the air. Ryuzaki is on the computer, on some website where a small pixel animation of a frog will follow his cursor around. It's very serious business.
You're lying next to him on the bed, your head resting on his thigh as you watch it do hops and jumps, zinging from one side of the screen to the other.
"So what is your plaything supposed to do, Ryuzaki?" you ask. Why? Well, for one thing, Ryuzaki might be endlessly entertained by a jumping frog, but to be honest you're not as into it. The other reason is more calculated. If Ryuzaki is going to consider you indispensable, the best way to do that is to figure out what he wants.
Er… besides jumping frogs.
He moves his cursor in a circle and the frog spins in and then outward again. "It sounds like you're asking for rules, Light-kun."
"Of course; that's what makes it a game."
All games have rules. These formal agreements create the basis for the ultimate purpose of a game—to win. After all, you can't win unless both parties have agreed as to what winning entails; what success and failure look like within the context of the game.
For a moment, Ryuzaki doesn't answer. Just scrolls his cursor over the page, watching his frog make loop-de-loops. Then he says, "so is that why you want rules, Light-kun? Because that's what makes it a game?"
"Well, yeah," you say.
"And if I said, 'my only rule is that you behave honestly,' what would you say?"
"I'd say you're being purposefully obtuse."
He laughs, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he glances down at you. "Should we add to that, 'you'll do as I say?' I think that covers just about everything."
"If you're being technical about it," you complain.
"Yes, I know, it's terribly boring."
"Almost as boring as watching frogs on a screen… oh wait…"
"See, I'd add 'don't insult me' but unfortunately it would get rid of 99% of your personality."
"At least I have a personality."
"Light-kun, contrariness is your forté."
"I try."
"You do more than try."
"Oh, I succeed?"
"That's what you want to hear, isn't it."
"Well, if you don't say it, I'll have to assume you're the one being contrary."
"Light-kun," Ryuzaki says portentously, "you definitely succeed in being contrary."
"Thank you."
/
You pour a handful of rice onto the table, the uncooked grains making a soft sussuration as they hit the surface, and start quickly moving them with a brush of your fingers into another pile nearby. Every so often, there's a bit of dried leafy material or a stone hidden among the pearlescent grains, and this step ensures that there's nothing you don't want to eat once you cook it. When you were younger, and would sometimes go to Minato's house after school, his mother would sit you down with snacks while she sat at the table, doing exactly this and listening as Minato chatted to her. You'd been surprised even then by the way they would talk about whatever came to mind, not just how his school was going. Sure, as soon as you were all done eating you'd be off into Minato's room, not to come down again until suppertime, but the difference between your households had impressed itself upon you in an interesting way. Your father and mother, through no fault of their own, made mealtimes a boring affair. Sometimes you could convince dad to talk about work, but other than that it was "how was your day" a general catching-up, and then quiet, except sometimes for Sayu talking about her plans for the next day, which she always seemed to have in excess.
Ryuzaki takes the rice from your finished pile and lines it up into a maze on the counter.
"You know," you say, as you watch the thin line snake ever outward, branching across the pale wood, "you could actually help."
"I am helping," Ryuzaki says. "I'm making a maze. See?" He steers a grain of rice into the opening. "Which way, left or right?"
"Right," you say. "And then left, left again—right, go to the end, skip that turn, yes—no, that way." You direct Ryuzaki until his piece of rice has returned triumphantly from the maze, and then scoop the finished pile together, off the side of the table into a small bowl.
You stand up, bowl in hand, and Ryuzaki follows you over to the sink, where you fill the bowl with water and then stick it on the counter to soak.
/
Everything is covered in droplets when you get out of the shower, and as you wrap a towel around your waist your footsteps leave water-prints on the tile. Ryuzaki himself rarely bothers with a towel, preferring to stand around until he's gotten dry enough to pull his clothes back on without them sticking to him, so you're slightly surprised when he reaches to one, clean and fluffy and white, folded on the shelf under the sink and shakes it out in one snapping motion. For a second, he considers it.
"Something interesting there?" you ask facetiously.
He holds it out absently. "Dry me off, Light-kun?" he says.
Oh, I see, you think. He's testing out the rules of the game. He wants to see if I'll actually do it.
"Sure," you say, taking it in your hands.
You start with the arm nearest you; draping the towel across his shoulder, pulling it over his forearm, down to his wrist and hand—held open toward you. Like always, you are somehow amazed by the size of his wrist, the way, bird-boned, it seems to float delicately in the swathe of fabric; a contradiction in terms. Because, like any skin, it is solid against your hands, full of movement against the ligaments and the bones of his forearm, the ends round like pebbles under your fingers.
You glance up and see him watching you; his face, still pinked from the heat, is sheened with water and the ends of his dark hair drip careful points across his collarbone, which you pull the fabric across; resting against the vulnerability of his neck. You feel, through the pile, the surface of his throat, the jut of his Adam's apple and the minute vibrations of speech as he opens his mouth.
"Interesting enough for you, Light-kun?"
"What, the towel? Or you?" you send him a smirk.
"Obviously, the towel," Ryuzaki replies. "It's Turkish cotton. Did you know it's actually the length of the staple fiber, and not thread count, that creates softness?"
"No, I didn't," you say, stifling a soft laugh. "Where do you learn all this trivia?"
He shrugs. "When I don't know something, I get curious about it."
"Not many people are."
"Yes, it is a luxury," Ryuzaki says. "Most people are very concerned about what they need to know to get something done. So am I, of course; but I find that the most incredible quality about life is the fact that we're capable of being frivolous, interested in knowledge for no reason at all. You must be the same."
You shrug. "Most of the stuff I know, it's because I had to learn it, for school or work…"
"That doesn't account for the extent of your library."
"I suppose not," you say. "I always felt—that I had to know things. To understand the world. I guess you'd call it curiosity."
"Past tense?"
"It was a long time ago," you say.
"Oh? And yet the power of curiosity is the one thing that no privation can steal from us."
"And is that something you know a whole lot about?"
"Privation?"
You nod.
"Certainly not; at least since early childhood. But something that carries you through the beginning of life is never forgotten."
"I wondered, you know," you admit.
"Something about my habits?"
"You have all this stuff, and you obviously enjoy it, but I've never seen you take it for granted," you explain. There's a difference—subtle, but striking once you realize it, between Ryuzaki's brand of arrogance and the attitude of your schoolmates. "Taking for granted"—yes, that's the only way you can think to describe it, because that's how it had felt. As though the entire world would necessarily conform to your wishes; not in big, grand ways but in small ones—you would have the newest clothes and gadgets; you expected to have your own room and what you considered civilized amenities; you easily threw away what you had no more use for, without a thought. No wonder life had appeared so stifling and stale. Without even realizing it, everything had been made easy for you from the start, and the only thing you had to do was live up to your proscribed role within the perfection all around you.
It should be a grand epiphany, but it isn't. It's something more fleeting, but settled; a single moment of I suppose that explains it, then.
The affluent child. You wonder if, in some inexplicable way, the person who has known nothing but affluence, no matter how old, is always, in some sense, a child.
/
You're pretty impatient, and never bother to rinse the rice more than once at the end of soaking it, letting the water run until it's swirled away the starch. Then you cup your hand over the edge to pour away the water, and stick it into a pot with new water that reaches up to the second knuckle of your finger. You wait for it to boil, then turn it down so it can cook for about ten minutes.
"Light-kun," Ryuzaki says, "do you know you're a very good cook?"
You laugh. "Not really, Ryuzaki. I barely know how to make anything."
"But you never burn the rice."
You give him a horrified look. "You burn rice? What did you do, walk away from it?"
"Er…" Ryuzaki gets a shifty look. "Well, it got pretty boring so…"
"You know you could just get a rice cooker," you say. "Then you can walk away from it as much as you want."
"Why would I do that, when I have you to make it, Light-kun?" he asks.
"Well… I don't know…" you say. "What did you do before? Besides burn the rice?"
"Sometimes I had Watari make it. Or I'd just eat leftovers." You have nothing against the concept of leftovers but really…
"For rice? It only takes ten minutes!"
"Fifty minutes," Ryuzaki corrects you.
"Seriously? It doesn't take fifty minutes." When the timer goes off, you turn off the heat and draw his attention away from the coffee he's grinding.
"See? Ten minutes."
He lets go of the grinder and gives the rice an unimpressed look. "Oh, can I eat it then?" he says, reaching for the cover, and you swat his hand away.
"You have to wait!"
"For what?" Ryuzaki asks, giving you a look of wide-eyed innocence.
"For the rice to be done."
"I thought it only took ten minutes…"
Actually, it takes ten more minutes to finish steaming with the heat off, and then you can fluff the rice and eat it. So maybe he's correct about the fifty minutes, but still. Sometimes his laziness confounds you.
When the rice is done, you stick it in a bowl and throw some pickled vegetables on top while Ryuzaki pours the coffee into two sturdy cups, carrying them over to the table and putting one in front of your place.
"I think," Ryuzaki says, "you should remind me to have some of your breakfast in the mornings."
"Oh, my breakfast?" you ask, teasing.
"Of course," he explains. "It's no fun if I have to eat my own breakfast."
"You don't eat any breakfast."
"I know," he says. "It's a bad habit, but I always get interested in something else and then I forget about it…"
"All right then," you say, pushing your bowl a little closer to him. "I can do that."
"Thank you, Light-kun."
/
From the other side of the game board, Ryuzaki stares at you intently. It's your third game of shogi today, and Ryuzaki is first move this time. Best two out of three will decide the winner, and each of you have already won a game. He drops one of the pieces he'd captured, a flying chariot, onto the board. Originally it had been part of your own army, but it has switched loyalties, now facing against you. You take a look at the new pattern and realize at once the danger he's put you in, moving accordingly.
"Light-kun," he says.
"Yes?"
"What is your favorite type of crime?"
"I don't have a favorite type of crime."
"To solve, I mean."
"Oh, is that what you meant?" you ask, feigning ignorance.
"It was just a topic of conversation…" he murmurs.
At last you relent.
"A challenge, I guess. It doesn't really matter what the type of crime is. As long as it's something that's not immediately apparent…"
"How about a locked-room mystery?"
"No, those are always too flashy. They look impossible and complex, but once you've figured out the way in and out of the room, you've solved the whole thing. Every mystery hinges on one key piece of evidence—and instead of hiding that piece, the creator of the locked-room mystery puts that right in front of the detective's eyes."
"Sometimes it's used for distraction, to hide something more crucial…" Ryuzaki says. He makes another move.
"Yes, but a crime that advertises itself as a crime is completely stupid, no matter how technically complex." You move, too, and watch his reaction. He peers at the game board thoughtfully.
"Somewhat like Kira, then?"
"How so?"
"Well… Kira could have killed people in smaller numbers and at completely random intervals, evenly targeting all sorts of groups, and no one would've ever suspected that there was a crime taking place. Instead, his actions would serve as an epidemic, culling humanity with the same uncaring pattern as nature does. Instead he advertised himself."
"Well, sure, but what if Kira didn't want to just randomly kill ordinary citizens? What would be the point in that?"
"What's the point in killing criminals?"
"I don't know, you're the great detective—you tell me."
"Surely Light-kun has a theory."
"I do, but you aren't trying to get me to confess anymore, remember?" you say easily. "What's your theory?"
"Kira wants attention. Even if it means he's in greater danger."
"I agree."
"Kira feels he's doing the world a service."
"Or he knows that, by killing criminals, he'll gain adulation," you say. "I'm not sure he actually believes he's doing the world a service."
Ryuzaki has his fingers on a piece, about to move it, but he pauses, and glances at you, almost startled. "Is that so?" he says. "I thought your profile of him was quite different. A child with some purity left, wasn't it?"
"Well, like you've said, Ryuzaki; that was before we knew about the way he operated… how he likes to frame people. Nothing about that profile is valid anymore."
"I see…" he slides his piece across the board. A capture. You surrender your foot soldier willingly. "So our image of the original Kira is now someone who's nothing but a glorified serial killer, in love with the idea of his own notoriety," Ryuzaki sums up.
"Yeah."
He's looking at you deeply; first with that thoughtful expression and then, suddenly, as though he's made a decision. "You used to be more protective of him, Light-kun."
"What?"
"Kira. As though you had some personal investment in the matter."
"Of course I had a personal investment in the case. I wanted to impress you."
"And now you don't?"
"I thought you were already impressed. Or am I wrong?" you add, with a challenging smile.
"Well, the percentage goes up and down…" he says offhandedly, and you roll your eyes.
.
.
.