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1.
Light’s world grows very large, and then shrinks.
He remembers: the path from home to school to cram school and back, the time-table for the morning and evening trains, the squelch of his soccer cleats and the clean white serenity of his tennis shoes, the buttons on his shirts, his mother’s iron creasing the collars, rice with miso, writing his name and the date at the tops of his assignments, the route to his father’s office, the secretary with long nails whose laugh he found embarrassing, the awkward pleasure of turning down confessions, the smell of the pavement after a night of heavy rain, and the comfortable sterility of his bedsheets.
He does not remember: wrist cramps, subterfuge, addiction, the continuous oscillation between rage and glory, building backdoors into the NPA’s digital infrastructure, gaining a disciple, controlling her with a careful combination of self-exploitation and authoritarianism, giving the same monologue over and over again with only minor adjustment, or what he bought all the apples for.
Then: his vertebrae collapse down over one another, shoulders bent out of alignment, wrists chafed, itchy, greasier than he knew possible, unable to escape the smell of his own piss or shit, head-aching, muscles approaching atrophy, constantly indignant but almost always silent, living off of tap water and two bland meals a day, his only stimulation the buzz of the intercom, nasal murmur undistorted by the modulator, goading only minimally disguised, preaching some statistic or other in his ear for fifty days straight, and now:
L’s circulation is lousy, and his hands are always cold—Light knows from exchanging papers with, and being hit by, him—but it’s still stiflingly warm to be within six feet of another human body at all times. Light gets used to the heat just like he got used to the cell. A habit can be made out of anything. He adjusts to sharing a bed, to showering with someone else on the other side of the gauzy waterproof curtain, cuff clanging around his wrist. He adjusts to undressing while L watches him, because the chain needs to be momentarily removed in order for either of them to change shirts. He adjusts to L’s elbows jabbing him in the night, the ceaseless whir of his laptop fan, crumbs on the duvet, and his subtle and slightly crooked sense of humor.
“If Kira kills me, I’m certain Light-kun will be the only one capable of finding him and bringing him to justice.”
Custard smeared around his mouth, loose fingers jabbing keys, eyes someplace beyond the far wall. Everything he says or does is a gambit.
“The joke is that I’m Kira, right? The joke is that I’m supposed to find myself?”
“Please, Light-kun, this is a murder investigation. I would prefer you save your identity crises, such as they are,”—here: hitching his lip up at the corner—“for later on in life.”
Light scoffs. “At this rate, I’ll be lucky if I get that far.”
“I will, in fact, toast to that.”
L clangs their teacups together so hard that a sugar cube spills out of his and over into Light’s. He doesn’t apologize.
Light has always held himself within an impenetrable cellophane coating of magnanimity, self-sacrifice, patience, and honest effort. L is the only person who’s ever figured out how to slice through it, and he figures it out fast. Advantages of ingenuity. Light will hold himself as still as he can, repeating mantras of forbearance, but L knows how to come in sideways, jabbing him diagonally in sore spots he hadn’t been protecting because he hadn’t known he had them—“I’m afraid to say that I’ve seen people treat dogs with more favoritism and respect than Light-kun shows his girlfriend”—and he won’t even have time to patch up cracks in the veneer because the whole thing will just shatter.
Loss of control feels like: the jab of L’s front teeth against his knuckle, vibration of his back hitting the floor, warm pulse of his skin beneath his hips, slow shudder of his breath as he stares up at Light with glassy amusement in his eyes. Light hits him again because L gets too much pleasure out of it. The reply is a heel-kick to the jaw that sends him backwards, knees bending in ways they aren’t supposed to, skull shuddering against the gray office carpet. Around this part, somebody comes rushing in to break them up.
Shrugging Mogi off, L sniffs, wipes the blood from his nose with the back of his hand, and gives Light a look of conspiracy that makes him afraid of what they’d do to each other if there wasn’t anyone around to pull them apart.
The more they brawl, the easier it becomes to clean up afterwards. The more they argue, the better Light learns the strange back routes of L’s mind, following intricacies of deduction that almost frighten him with their largeness and their relevance. Cold feet brush his in the dead of night, waking him briefly, when L finally settles down to sleep, murmuring soft apologies that don’t suit his voice. Light grows used to the smell of him, sweaty and almost burnt before a shower, sharp with the drugstore scent of plain soap and mint toothpaste after one. His body stops being an intrusion and becomes an extension.
The shock of the tug at Light’s wrist fades into a gentle reminder of his radius, and then even that disappears when he instinctually ceases straying further than six feet away from L. They begin to make pathways around one another, and the clumsiness of the first few weeks gives way to the ease of a learned pattern. Light has four legs and four arms now, two bodies, two minds, working in peripheral sync. The sight of L’s naked body ceases to embarrass him. They piss beside one another, and shit with the door cracked. Occasionally, for the sake of expedience, they shower together, back to back, exchanging soap and muttering requests and thanks, chain clanking noisily between them.
They trade blows with peculiar gratitude. Bruises form, change color, and fade. Sometimes L will say something unnecessarily vile, but usually his provocations are even-tempered. Sometimes they are even good natured. Rarely, they approach a pulse-grinding honesty.
“I can’t believe that anyone else can be Kira,” he says, “because I can’t believe that there are two of you.”
Light used to find him strange, but he is becoming familiar.
That, or Light is becoming strange, too.
The first time they kiss, neither of them is surprised. The warm slip of flesh against flesh is not a digression from the pattern, but an inevitable continuation of it. To not kiss would have felt more foreign, and it had, in the days leading up to this moment. Every incidental brush of L’s skin had left a dull achey question behind on Light’s. The shape of his jaw had seemed more distinct, his voice had aggravated more acutely. Light blames the build of attraction mostly on self-denial. He’d heard an instance or two of pointed silence punctuated by shaky breathing that could have been L masturbating in the shower, but he’d flatly refused himself the same indulgence and he’s paying for that now with a deeper and more pervasive slip of impulse.
L had been wildly unattractive until he hadn’t been. Now, flushed and bleary, half-smiling, folding into Light’s lap without a pretense of hesitation, he eclipses description, dodges categorization. He is sexual without losing his ugliness. He clogs Light’s senses, cooing morbid encouragements in his ear.
“Do you think Kira would want to fuck me, Light-kun? I think he would.”
Light pulls him back by the scalp, but he can’t manage to detach their hips. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
By way of answer, L starts unbuttoning his shirt.
They waste valuable time in this way.
It is always half-shy and stifling, within the engulfing familiarity of the bed, mouths to pulses, palms to cocks, hips seeking, ankles knocking, panting, and heavy limbed. After coming, Light feels euphorically detached from himself. The person that once made polite conversation, laughed when appropriate, did homework, cleaned up after his mother did the cooking, and made predictable and admirable plans for the future recedes in these moments to the point where he is undetectable, replaced by a gratified stranger.
The tug on the chain comes too soon after his orgasm, pulling him, foggy and soft-boned, out of the bed to stumble across the dark bedroom and into the fluorescent glare of the bathroom, where L hunches shamelessly over the toilet and spits.
Light pinches the bridge of his nose. “Well, that’s just—disgusting.”
“I don’t recall asking Light-kun to come in my mouth.”
Light’s flush stings his flesh. “Ryuzaki, don’t say things like that.”
L wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “But doing them is fine? Curious.” He hands Light a wadded up handful of clean toilet paper and nods to the stain cooling on his abdomen.
Human bodies are so degrading. Light takes it curtly and wipes himself down, under the hard glare of the track lights. L watches without judgement or revulsion, just a kind of invasive clarity. The intimacy of his attention humiliates Light more than any of the dehumanizations of his imprisonment had. It’s as if L can see past his body, to the less pleasant thing beneath.
“Thank you,” he says, because it’s the correct thing to say. He feels a baseless, vulgar rage.
L’s face stays perfectly still. It doesn’t seem like he buys it. “You don’t have anything to be ashamed of, Light.” He drops the honorific and the playful idiot-savant tone, voice stark and nearly kind.
Light feels expressions attempting to form, but none of them do. He doesn’t have a face for this.
Mercifully, L reapplies his slapstick bug-eyes, and adds, “Unless you’re Kira, of course.”
Light opens his mouth to shoot back, but finds his rage deflating, full of holes.
He sleeps heavily that night, with the warmth and weight of L’s insomnia at his side, and has a dream about death that he forgets upon waking.
He suspects that this isn’t what the counselors and after-school specials had in mind when they spoke about young love. He must not be doing it right. It’s the first thing in his life that he hasn’t done right.
L had at one point seemed massive and indomitable, a voice crowing out of the television. Now Light sees him as he is: irregular, but occupying the same scale as anybody, corporeal and subject to the physical laws, if not the civic ones. He has his trivial likes and dislikes, his sudden turns of mood, untranslatable jokes, incomprehensible midnight theories, fetishes, anxieties, and bad breath. Sometimes he’ll upset Light deliberately, and other times he’ll do it by mistake, unthinkingly, attention focused primarily on something else. He is intentionally eccentric to disguise an inherent awkwardness, and his fear of death is equaled only by his devotion to its inevitability.
He wears his history on his body. Three silver fillings, a thin and ugly appendectomy scar, toes and fingers broken and healed permanently crooked, a scattering of burn marks, and mild structural scoliosis. His posture has deformed him, and his diet has damaged his liver, fucked his metabolic function, and severely elevated his risk of kidney and heart disease. He tells Light all of this with the blasé disinterest of a doctor speaking about a patient, hanging upside down from the edge of the bed while Light does his morning sit-ups. The rattle of the chain is lulling.
Sometimes he purges. Light doesn’t say anything to him about it, just waits patiently on the other side of the door with a glass of water for after he’s brushed his teeth. Sometimes he won’t eat anything at all, tea going cold, soft powder pastries hardening to stale. His eyes are almost always bloodshot, and he will wince at odd times, citing a high-frequency buzzing that Light cannot hear and doesn’t think is there.
He tells Light about his dour childhood in England, about his first cases, the detective wars from which he’d procured the identities of Deneuve and Coil, Aiber’s long con of the Central Bank of Argentina, tracking Wedy through half of Europe’s upscale retailers and art museums. He speaks with distant deprecation of a self-important teenage boy who reminds Light uneasily of himself, minus all the trappings of normalcy. The more he speaks, the more sober his voice becomes, shedding its facetious charm.
“And what about you, Light? How did you become the person that you are?”
“You know, I really don’t believe there’s anything that you don’t already know about me. Your case files probably contain details of my childhood that even I can’t remember.”
L blinks. “Has it ever occurred to you that there is more to you than can fit into a file?”
It really hadn’t.
L has no shame of his own. The first time they have quote-unquote sex, of the penetrative sort, Light shoves a hand over his mouth to obscure his expression of smug pleasure at being fucked into the carpet by the eighteen year old boy that he thinks is a mass murderer, but it’s still there in the eyes. None of this scratches his ego, or troubles his conscience. He touches Light with scrupulous care, as if he knows and regards seriously the power he has over the situation, but he is indifferent to his own debasement, which robs it of its power to debase.
“What are you thinking about?” Light breathes, letting his palm slide down L’s jaw to hover over his throat.
L taps his heel against Light’s lower back, urging him in deeper. “The truth? I was wondering how he kills.” It is a cruel and also a predictable thing for him to say.
“Don’t you really mean how I kill?”
L gasps, control slipping for a moment, fingers fluttering against Light’s shoulders. “Yes. Yes, that’s what I mean.”
Light grips him so tightly that he thinks—no; hopes—that he’ll leave bruises, but Kira is only present for the sex. Afterwards, in the hot rush of the shower and the enveloping soft pull of the bed that Light convinces L to sleep in for an uncharacteristic four hours, it is just the two of them.
The rest of the team must at least suspect. He and L are too superior to be ashamed, too obsessed with one another to be subtle. They sit too close together in the office, knee-cap to knee-cap, thigh to thigh, hunched over documents, trading theories which are really just accusations, which are in turn just flirtations. It is sometimes hard for Light to believe that L still means to see him prosecuted and executed for a crime he didn’t commit, and other times it is not. The intention lurks not in the taunts or the incriminations, but in the silences that surround them.
L’s silences are heavy and unassailable and growing more frequent by the day. Light tries to charm him out of them. Light’s father keeps his eyes pointedly to himself.
“I’m going with you,” Light tells him when they’re alone in the conference room at one in the morning, dyed blue in the light of the screens. “When this is over and we’ve caught the real Kira and you inevitably jet off to solve whatever new crime catches your interest without a pause in between for a vacation or mental health counseling or anything—when you go, I’m going with you.”
L stares at the keyboard for long enough that Light doesn’t think he’s going to answer, but after some deliberation, he says, at the same time that he begins drafting an email, “Perhaps you are.”
2.
It comes back.
How does one set of principles rationalize itself with another? Easy; it’s Darwinian. The stronger survives. When the thoughts, memories, ideologies, sweat-drenched fantasies, strategies, desires and fears of Kira return, those of Light Yagami, denoted by their well-intentioned triviality and lack of imagination, collapse beneath. The struggle is momentary, but gutting. He sits in the helicopter and he relearns himself. His dogma recites itself. Every name sends a little arch of pain down his spine, but after a second or two, the ache is familiar, almost comforting. At one point the bodies had kept him warm at night. They had kept him warm.
He sweats, swallows. Maybe he hallucinates.
“Light, are you alright?”
The words come at him as if down a tunnel, echoey, with soft consonants. That voice makes him angry.
He turns sideways to look at L. The mix of euphoric purpose and terror sharpens into a single concrete emotion. He tries not to let his abject disgust show on his face when he turns and smiles softly. “What? I’m fine.”
L doesn’t look like he believes him. Light imagines the mess of arterial spray and crushed bone that he could become with a few pen strokes. He can see the words in his head, black ink on a white page. He admires the shape of the letters in begs and for and his and life. Victory looms against the horizon.
Higuchi’s screams are only a primer.
They all talk over one another in the conference room.
Aizawa yells and Light’s father bristles but L’s monotone is low and placid as ever. Words blur past Light. He cannot stop himself from dredging up images of things that happened in his absence. It is frightening to know what he is capable of when left unchecked. Embarrassed and a little queasy, he wishes that circumstances would allow for L’s death to come sooner. Now would be best. He holds in a nervous bounce of his leg, and says something diligent and vapid about the danger of the Note. Just seeing it gripped awkwardly in L’s fingers makes him feel enormously uncomfortable, as if two entirely separate aspects of his ego are chafing against one another.
Predictably, L doesn’t believe the rules he’d manufactured. Less predictably, he asks Light if he does.
“I’m not sure what to believe, Ryuzaki. We should pursue all possible suspicions, but we need to do so in a way that’s morally responsible and safe for everyone on the team.”
Matsuda nods with fervent stupidity. L says, “Hmm,” and gets up and slumps to the elevator.
Light, who had been leaning against the table next to his chair for the duration of the conversation, winces instinctively when L gets more than six feet away from him, though they took the cuffs off hours ago.
His senses play tricks on him. His body still overbalances to account for L’s weight, and his room—his own room, down the hall from the one he’d shared with L—seems eerily silent without the rattling or the sighing. He cannot get to sleep. The bed is too large and cold, and he had grown too used to the white noise of the laptop. He realizes after hours of lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, that he is waiting for L to knock on his door.
He falls asleep waiting.
His face feels tight from sleep deprivation, the way it had when he and L had first started sharing a room. Misa’s perfume makes him dizzy when they fake an embrace. He keeps stopping halfway down hallways, waiting for someone who isn’t there to catch up with him. At breakfast, he pours himself two cups of coffee.
He tells himself that there is nothing missing. He tells himself that there is nothing to miss.
Rem will do it. Rem will do it if he tells her to.
It’s disappointing; he’d rather do it himself.
L keeps his distance. Nothing is very different between them in front of the rest of the team, but when meetings end they go their separate ways. Light finds himself trying to put himself in L’s path, and finds L frustratingly good at avoiding him without appearing to try. Light cannot help thinking about him, so he thinks about him dead. He thinks about the most gruesome, humiliating, and well-deserved ways for it to happen, but ultimately decides that a heart attack is the only thing intimate enough.
He has to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, who is killing him. He has to know that he brought it on. He has to know that if he had just been different, been better, more just, or decent, or good, he could have lived.
He could have lived with Light.
For months all he’d wished for was freedom and now that he has it, he’ll take any opportunity to surrender it. He finds L on the roof, getting drenched, stringy and hunched, talking like a man who expects to die soon.
He says, “Tell me, Light, from the moment you were born, has there ever been a point when you actually told the truth?” and Light cannot avoid the achy patch of sense memory—late nights, early mornings, L’s soft flesh and hard skeleton, the warmth of his breath against his neck, the weight of his attention, obsessive and unremitting, the bond that had been carved out between them through repetition, the similarities beneath similarities revealed with every layer pulled back, the companionship, the urge to stay—brought upon by just hearing his name in L’s wan and unforgiving voice.
He dodges the jabs sloppily. Inside, when L drops to his knees, thumb on the sole of his foot, Light has nothing with which to defend himself. The feel of L’s skin calms a panic attack he’s been having for days.
He digs into the tendon. “It’s the least I can do to atone for my sins.”
Light contains a shudder. “What—sins?”
“You’re not going to make me list them all out, are you? I suppose you’d like that. Or maybe you’d rather? They’ll sound better in your voice, anyway.”
He is relentless with Light’s foot. He no longer seems confused by the question of his innocence. Light keeps up the act, anyway. He doesn’t know how to talk to L in his real voice. “What are you talking about, Ryuzaki?”
He runs his palm over Light’s heel and up his ankles, and, fingers resting on his achilles tendon, says, “You want to kill me.”
Every hot and morbid thing that has settled in the back of Light’s ribcage this week surges forward. He is aroused and angry and a little euphoric. L has not addressed him as Kira since he has been Kira, and the pleasure of being seen behind his mask fogs his head. He swallows, and does not speak.
“You want to kill me,” L repeats, and presses his other palm over the crotch of Light’s jeans.
Light grabs his wrist so fast it shocks the both of them. He feels terrified, like a virgin again, unable to contend with the heaviness of what he wants. It fills his entire body. He stares at L staring at his hand wrapped around L’s knobby wrist bone, and says, “You want me to kill you.”
L’s eyes get darker. He chews at the skin of his bottom lip. “Yes, but that’s only a fantasy. In real life, we have to stop the bad guys.”
Light’s grip tightens. He pulls L forward so that their faces are within the range of heat exchange. “How can you be so sure of who the bad guys are?”
L gives him a slightly pained smile. “Light.”
“What?”
L shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. “I miss him. That boy you’re wearing.”
Light punches him. It’s an old instinct, easy to fall back on. He knows this isn’t going to look good on the tapes, once L is dead, but he’s not worried. He could feed them anything and they would gorge themselves on it. L falls sideways, catching himself on the steps, and even though this will be much harder to justify, Light kicks him down the last few. His rational mind gives way to an animal impulse. When L lands, he crawls on top of him, pressing their bodies together, finding him just as he left him, with all the same bumps and angles, just as startlingly solid, with a pulse that flutters and eyes that blink up lucidly.
“For the last time, I’m not Kira,” he teases, before putting his mouth over L’s.
It’s less like a kiss and more like asphyxiation. L, in a move that is sensible but difficult for Light to fathom because of L’s history of acquiescence, grabs him by the back of the head, tugs him off, and hits him hard on the side of the jaw. The pain is bright and infuriating. He tries to grab L by the wrists, but he’s thrown backwards and kicked in the chest. He coughs, sputtering, and tastes hot copper blood. L straddles him and holds him down by the shoulders, breathing hard into his face. His eyes are manic, his hands twitching.
“You don’t have any proof,” Light snaps up at him automatically.
L shakes his head. “You still don’t understand. I’ve never needed proof. I just want to understand what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and to stop you.”
“Great.” Light swallows the blood pooling in his throat. “Good luck.”
L sniffs, releases Light, and sits back on his heels. He shifts as if he means to stand up, so Light catches him by the hips and holds him there. “You should kiss me,” he says. “You might not have another chance.”
L blinks, and then laughs, as if he is charmed by the implicit threat. He takes both sides of Light’s face in his hands and presses his lips to his forehead in a way that is frustratingly chaste. The blood in Light’s body boils. He is angry and hungry and very, very tired. He can hear a phantom chain clinking. They stay stuck together like that for too long. Light intends to pull back, but doesn’t.
Softly, against the crown of his head, L says, “So, this is quite the predicament. Either I catch you or you kill me, right? Or….”
Light stiffens beneath him. Pulling back slightly, still holding L, he frowns up at him. “Or what?”
“Remember when you said—or, a version of you said—that you wanted to go with me? Well, a lot depends on your answer to the next two questions I’m going to ask you.”
Light blinks at him, reverently. The cut in his mouth has stopped bleeding. His hope thrashes against his rage, each as tyrannical as the other.
“The first,” L says, “is: do you still want to go with me? And the second is: if so, where are we going?”
Light opens his mouth, but no answer comes out. His grip around L’s body tightens. Outside, the rain continues.
Maybe Light has always been strange.
fin.