"What was that about?" you ask Ryuzaki when you get back to your apartment. You're annoyed, and you don't bother hiding the fact in your voice. "Some kind of payback for the fact that I slipped up?"
Ryuzaki pauses in the middle of slipping off his shoes and looks over at you seriously. "Light-kun, that's not how the game is played. If you slipping up was going to have consequences I would've discussed that with you beforehand. But I'm not interested in that." He glances down at his nails and says, "Is me having painted nails causing you to lose face or something?"
When he puts it like that it does sound pretty stupid. It's not really like anyone else in the task force thinks the way Ryuzaki dresses should have anything to do with you. (Not consciously, anyway.) "I guess… maybe… it's nothing," you say, a little uncomfortable. "But if it wasn't payback then what was it all about?"
"I can't just enjoy having pretty nails?" Ryuzaki asks.
You look at him flatly.
"No."
"Spoilsport." He takes off his shoes and you take off yours.
"You were making a big joke out of being interested in me," you point out. "The task force probably saw it, too. Don't you think that's a little dangerous?"
"It only seems dangerous to you, since you have something to hide, Light-kun," Ryuzaki says. "No one except for Misa-san seriously thinks we have anything going on, and she's thought that since the day I put you in handcuffs. In fact, the more I make a joke out of it in front of her, the less she believes it. 'This is just Ryuzaki being himself' she thinks. I guess I was considering how you said there's no point making her jealous, since neither of you know anything to confess to. So I thought I would make overtures. And it worked," he says, with a smile, admiring his nails again. "I think she's really starting to like me."
"In your dreams, Ryuzaki," you say, pulling your phone out of your pocket and handing it to him.
"Well, even if not, I got something nice out of it," he says, taking it from you and putting it on the console table.
"You actually like that stuff?" you ask, gesturing vaguely towards his hands.
"Yes," Ryuzaki says. "I'm sorry if that makes you uncomfortable, but it's not going to change me, so you'll have to get over it."
"It doesn't make me uncomfortable," you say, lying through your teeth.
You can tell by the way he looks at you, vaguely pityingly, that he doesn't quite believe it, but all he says is, "okay."
/
He hasn't said whether this is to be a recurring thing or not, which you realize on Saturday after your shower, when you pick up your towel and weigh it, for a moment, in your hands. You could let this slide like you did yesterday morning, and Ryuzaki would either forget about it or make it into another rule. Or you could take the initiative yourself. And you've never been one to be passive. Even if this isn't really a fight, you still have to attack in order to win. Even if "attacking" in this case looks like holding the towel toward him and saying nonchalantly, "want me to dry you off, Ryuzaki?"
"Thank you," he says. You're still wet, and anyone might expect you to dry yourself off first. But it doesn't fit with the impression you're trying to make, so instead, still nude, you start across his chest and arms; pull the fabric across his back, around the crag of his hips. You don't know why, all of a sudden, you feel an odd kind of nervousness in your belly; this certainly isn't the first time you've been this close, or touched him in an intimate way. Surely it should be par for the course by now?
But something about this feels different. Uncertain and perilously careful, like a new thing. And maybe it is. As you run the fabric down his legs, crouching on the ground to reach his ankles, you feel exposed in a way that has nothing to do with nakedness. This is still all part of the same game, but there's something different even from responding to rules than in this. In the way that, when he lifts one foot slightly from the floor, you take your time to wrap the softness around him, to let it linger against the underside of his foot and around his toes. This is something that Ryuzaki's Light would do, you think; but only in a bounded game; one with set beginnings and endings. Now… has the game expanded in scope, or did you just put words to what was already there? He puts his foot down; lifts up the other one, and you carefully wipe his skin dry, your hands strangely cool, your pulse pounding fast in your throat. If you didn't know better, you would call this fear. Perhaps it is; but not of him. Not of anything you can even name. So you keep going through the sensation, through the confusion and tumult of your thoughts. I'm behaving with honesty, you think. Certain of it. But whose honesty? The version of yourself that can do this… surely he stands across an un-bridgeable gulf from your past selves. You have no ulterior motive here. You are not trying to convince him of anything.
Who are you, then, without your motives?
Ryuzaki's, you think; because it starts with Ryuzaki; his stability of self the bulwark against your ever-changing nature. Ryuzaki's plaything…
You pause. For a second, against his calf, the entire scope of the world pulls in around the side of your vision, and you feel almost faint; you swallow, and keep going, slower than before. Is it exertion, that is making you tremble—or something else? Some disconnect between your sense of proprioception and the universe? You've brought it up, not quite in jest. You've used the words yourself. For an instant, you're not sure why. If it had been to remind him, or… to remind yourself. Like a shirt you'd decided to put on because you thought it would flatter you. Something Ryuzaki's Light had so flippantly slipped into. You hadn't even noticed when you'd stopped being him and become this new thing; but shouldn't the deaths of our past selves be something we're aware of?
You've almost stalled, and you keep moving before Ryuzaki can wonder if something is wrong. Back up his body to stand, at last, in front of him. To press the towel over the thick mess of his hair, to wipe the edge of it across his forehead, tracing the curve of his eyebrow. You're looking at him, but without meeting his eyes. If you did, something of your turmoil would show; some sharp piece would rip out unexpectedly and break something somewhere. Him, or you; you're not sure. You leave the towel on his head, let go and feel suddenly shaky, and it's to keep yourself up that you take hold of his hands, loosely. His flat nails are as blue as an ocean sky.
Were you worried about this only yesterday? How insignificant a thing to be stuck on, when you can't even find your center of gravity anymore. The only thing left is Ryuzaki's, that spiralling force tugging you in. A long time ago, you'd become cognizant of that danger; Light can't live inside a black hole, you'd thought. And it's true.
But Ryuzaki's plaything can do nothing but dance on the edge of the event horizon, the aurora of brightness a ring of fire around a gravity well.
You laugh. It's short, but it pulls yourself from somewhere underneath your ribs like wire; and you trail off into chuckles as Ryuzaki says, "Light-kun? Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," you assure him. You don't know how you'd be able to explain the humor of the situation to him. You barely understand it yourself.
/
It's hard to feel like anything but a polite and helpful person when at breakfast you push your bowl over toward Ryuzaki and remind him, "the sugar cubes will be there later, all right? Why don't you have some soup."
"Good idea," Ryuzaki says, and dips his spoon in the broth, blowing on it carefully to cool it.
I mean, so what if I don't have ulterior motives anymore? you think. Isn't that a good thing? What kind of a person completely freaks out over being honest for once in their life? A compulsive liar, probably.
Which you're not.
So you had a mental breakdown over a towel. Stranger things have happened.
/
In thermodynamics, there's different types of systems a state can be in. In an open system, both matter and energy can be exchanged between the inside and the outside. In a closed system, only energy can pass through. But there's a third kind of system, and it's called an isolated system. When cut off from without in such a way that neither matter nor energy can pass into the system, it may end up in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. And in that state, when the temperature and pressure are just right, the system has a place known as the triple point. This is the point at which every possibility can be reached with the merest change; from here, water, ice, and vapour can coexist. At pressures below this point, if solid ice is heated, it will sublimate and turn directly into steam. Above this point, if heated it will first melt, and then, if heated more, finally vapourize. If instead you change the temperature to just below the triple point, then compression will turn water vapour to solid, then to liquid. But at the triple point all three states can be found together. Water isn't the only substance to have this point. Everything from arsenic to platinum has a triple point.
This isolated system, in an equilibrium of pressure and temperature, is where you are now. First terror, then humor, then a kind of calm; each state, which usually has to travel slowly from one to the other, seems equally accessible. It's you who tells Ryuzaki you'd like to not go downstairs today, though on some Saturdays you do; Matsuda and Mogi, at the very least, will be hanging around, patiently plodding through an already-solved case.
You page through Ryuzaki's book The Madman. There was a poem here, very short—oh yes. There it is. You read it silently:
The grave-digger
Once, as I was burying one of my dead selves, the grave-digger came by and said to me, "Of all those who come here to bury, you alone I like."
Said I, "You please me exceedingly, but why do you like me?"
"Because," said he, "They come weeping and go weeping—you only come laughing and go laughing."
You're hanging out on the bed, and till a moment ago, Ryuzaki was typing on his computer and ignoring you. But now you feel him scooch over to sit looking over your shoulder, and he sees at once what you're reading.
"Thinking about dead selves, Light-kun?" he asks.
"Yeah," you say.
"If all this is too much—"
"What," you say, putting the book down beside you, and turning on your back to look at him, your hands folded behind your head. "The rules? I don't have a problem with that. It was my idea."
"Liking an idea in theory can sometimes be different than liking it in practice," Ryuzaki says.
"Of course it's different. But that doesn't mean I regret it. I told you not to keep assuming I don't want to be with you."
Ryuzaki pushes his thumb against his lip, his fingernail a bright spot of color against the pale skin. "Still," he says. "I've played games like this before, and you haven't. I do know how things can be different than expected."
"Who did you play them with?" you ask. "Anyone I know? The acquaintance who killed himself…? Or the one you killed?"
"Both," Ryuzaki says. "But with the latter I was in your place."
Your eyes widen. "You were the submissive partner?" Surely it shouldn't surprise you; even Ryuzaki had to, at one time, be younger and less experienced. Still, it's hard to picture; and you comb through everything you know about the second acquaintance (hell, at this point it should be his official designation—Second Acquaintance—just like there is a Second Kira) trying to put it into a different perspective.
"You met when you were twelve?" you ask, remembering his explanation about learning Japanese.
"Ten, actually. But we didn't start getting into this kind of thing until I was almost fourteen."
"Oh, of course," you snark, "what a big difference."
"Yes…" Ryuzaki says, with an absent look in the distance. "We were both children. We had no idea what we were doing and we fucked each other up." His gaze focuses, then, suddenly. "I don't want that to happen to you, Light."
"Ryuzaki," you say gently, "I'm not ten, and I'm not fourteen. I'm—"
"Eighteen, I know," Ryuzaki says. "And from your perspective you've lived an entire lifetime. But from mine, it's—" he stops, and then starts again, "it's easy to make mistakes, even with the best of intentions. Even when you aren't caught up in criminal investigations and dealing with life and death."
"I understand," you say. "We didn't exactly get a fresh start. But even so… sometimes I think this is the only way we could've met."
"That's not true," Ryuzaki says. "If Kira hadn't come along, you would've gotten into the NPA and made a name for yourself among the detectives of the world. Five or six years from now I would've gotten wind of you, and asked for your help on a case—"
"—And we'd work on a case together with you sitting holed up in one room, hidden away and talking to me through a computer screen," you continue. "And then the case would be over, and you'd say we should work together again sometime. And maybe we would. But we'd never meet each other. Without Kira, without this case… you know it as well as I do."
Ryuzaki opens his mouth, then closes it, looking pensive. "Maybe," he says at last. He hugs his hands around his knees. "But maybe that would've been for the better."
"You like me better now, the way I am," you point out.
But that only makes him more miserable. "You shouldn't make decisions based on the way I like you better."
"Well how about the fact that I like me better now?" you say. "Does that hold any weight in the oh-so-great L's judgment?"
"If I coerced you—"
"If you coerced me, you coerced me," you say, annoyed. "What's done is done. You can't change the past, you can't go back in time, and I'm fucking happy. Do you understand? The me that I am now is fucking happy, and don't you dare try to take that away from me or tell me how I ought to feel. We don't all have time for your pity party over your traumatic past."
"...You're right," Ryuzaki says. "I'll defer to you, Light-kun. If you're happy, I'll be glad for you. Or at least try. Sometimes my head tells me things that makes it hard for me to believe anything positive could happen, but… if there was to be something positive in this world that I could give anyone, I'd want to give it to you."
He lies down next to you and tucks his chin against your shoulder.
"In a very polite way," Ryuzaki begins in a more chipper tone, and you snort.
"Okay, out with it," you say, a little amused.
"What were you thinking of when you were reading the poem?"
You're not sure going there now would be appropriate, but on the other hand what the hell. "I was thinking about being yours. About being your plaything forever, like you said. I guess I was wondering where my head was at, and I'm not sure, but I still want it, you know."
"You said you'd be mine," Ryuzaki corrects. "It was me that said I'd take only a plaything. I'm frequently more selfish than I should be."
"What, have you changed your mind?"
"...No."
"Then don't say, 'more selfish than I should be.' I said I would be yours, and those are your terms. I'm okay with that. And more than that I do want it. It's hard to explain," you say. "I didn't think I'd be so okay with it and it surprised me to realize… that I'd already come to a decision without realizing it. The me that I am now… he is Ryuzaki's plaything. Forever, just like you wanted."
"You can't promise forever," Ryuzaki warns.
"I'll promise whatever I please," you retort.
"Light-kun, Light-kun," Ryuzaki sighs.
"Ryuzaki, Ryuzaki," you say. "Have some optimism for once. There's no reason we can't come up with a future together. I believe it."
.
.
.