Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"You're not going to respond to Lind. L. Tailor's taunt, Light?" Ryuk the shinigami asked. "You could kill him very easily. Just write his name in the Death Note I gave you."

"Kill me if you can, Kira!" the TV shouted, still trying to egg him on.

"No, it's clearly bait of some kind. And there's absolutely nothing they can do to me if I don't respond: it's not like they could possibly guess they need to look for a magic murder notebook. Besides, I have no intention of killing people who work with the law."

"Seems a bit boring."

Light tried to resist a flinch. He knew his survival likely depended in part on Ryuk finding him 'entertaining'. Did that mean he might be forced to do something reckless and stupid?

"There is something I could do, that might not be too risky," he thought aloud, and noticed keenly how Ryuk's strange visage seemed to perk up at that. "Something to potentially throw L off the scent. Can you guess what the trap was?" He gestured toward the TV.

It might entertain Ryuk more if this was interactive.

"That it wasn't your L?" Ryuk guessed.

Light glanced back and forth between Ryuk and the tall, melodramatic man on the screen yelling about how Kira was injustice. "How would you-? Even if his name wasn't really L, that wouldn't mean he wasn't L..." Ryuk was chuckling at him, so that clearly wasn't it. "Can you see fates or auras?"

"Lifespan. I'm not supposed to tell you the lifespan of a human, though. Though, I could trade you my eyes."

"But I am allowed to guess," Light deduced. "If L isn't stupid enough to offer himself up, then that most likely is a man on death row sentenced to die very soon, and his fate has been unnaturally altered by my death note regardless of what I do here now. Which makes it odd I haven't heard of him, honestly. Many countries have significantly slowed down their rate of executions or gotten rid of them altogether. It is true that I didn't focus on many death row inmates the first two days, though, being a sort of waste of time compared to more meaningful targets... He must have reacted very quickly to events to try to remove that information, perhaps even to the point of hacking websites. Or perhaps it was treason and his native government kept it quiet because it made them look bad, which would mean Tailor might even be the good guy."

Light... was not happy, actually, about his online behavior despite taking basic precautions: he hadn't exactly been in his right mind immediately after a magic murder notebook landed in his lap or he would have spent the whole week or more studying internet security instead. It was a possible weak link, and if L had the ability to hack websites, then he could easily recode them to send visitor information the next time Light visited to get information about criminals. Using services to encrypt and obscure all his incoming and outcoming data even from his internet provider and configuring things to give off a random browser fingerprint every time could potentially look suspicious in and of itself.

But looking merely suspicious was OK as long as he didn't start scaring governments enough to start arresting people on minimal suspicion, aka if he didn't go after too many politicians or the billionaire upper class en-mass. They had no reason to think 'magic murder notebook'.

If he did go after billionaires, he should probably be far more subtle than heart attacks, like using criminals to threaten them to behave better and support a higher tax on the upper bracket and higher minimum wage, and green energy so humanity didn't go extinct. It would make Kira pretty pointless if global warming took out half the human population and brought mass anarchy and war. Maybe he could fake another Kira with an entirely different MO?

"Was that all of the trap?" Ryuk eventually asked. "Just to figure out if you would kill him?"

"Ah? No, it's surely being broadcasted first in Japan, where the first Kira killings occurred. That man is clearly a native English speaker, yet his Japanese is pretty decent - he's even pronouncing the 'L' more like we do - and doesn't seem to have been dubbed over by a translator. He may have spent hours practicing. If I killed him right now, I'd be confirming my location and giving them a place to search. It's pretty clever, actually. It will probably be broadcast elsewhere after this."

So clever he almost didn't mind giving an infinitesimal nod to L, granting a clue (though not of his location of course) and acknowledgement of his existence that L otherwise wouldn't have at all. The alternative, hm, was probably L facing humiliation for his stunt. Perhaps even accusations this was best left for disease control.

"So it will be safe to respond soon?"

"Yes, but I'm still not killing him, at least not today. That would be revealing I know he's a criminal at worst, and at best make it look like I'm the sort of Kira who would go after innocent people for offending me. And it would reveal how quickly I can kill and confirm an almost supernatural ability to it."

"But that would also make you seem more like a God."

"True, that would be a good benefit," Light pondered. "If one wishes to test the inhibitory effect of seeing crime punished from above, it would work better if more people believed it was a God-like power." Should he do it? He didn't like doing what someone was clearly baiting him to do, even if it was on his own terms. Showing he had the ego to do that, seemingly confirming he actually existed (though if it were a real disease it would do nothing of the kind), that would be a clue in its own right.

There was a knock on the door.

"Come in!"

"Onii-chan, dinner is ready! Come watch a movie with me while we eat?"

"By the way, if anyone touches the notebook, they can see me."

Light minutely flinched. Now the shinigami told him?

"Thanks, Sayu! Just a moment."

He would have to see if he could replace the cover and perhaps put plastic coverings over all the pages as spill protection. The chances anyone would deliberately take out pages on the offchance they were magic seemed miniscule. However, he'd still lock it in his dresser so it couldn't get snatched by idle hands looking for something to write a note with. How horribly ridiculous would it be to get murdered by his own family by them asking him to do a chore or informing him that they had to go out?

To avoid suspicion, he would make the key easy to find. His family wasn't that invasive, so he didn't have to worry they'd go around intentionally trying to unlock his drawers, but if an investigator came in and simply found what seemed to be his notes with a note 'SAYU, STOP SPILLING DRINKS ON MY THINGS' on the first plastic covered page, he doubted they would think much of it. Heck, he could even spill a little soda on it to make the pages stick hard to the plastic, making it impossible to remove them and put them back without him noticing and making the story seem even more authentic.

-----

"There was a tiny lull in killings after the 16th broadcast. Does that mean Kira is afraid of L?" the Head of Interpol asked the meeting room.

"The initial killings were a spree murder and not just the start of serial killing. During the first couple of days, Kira seemed frantic to write down as many names as possible. In the first week, Kira killed a suspected 57 people, but the bulk of them were in the first five days, with about half of them being in the first two days. Then, the behavior switched to being much more careful. Only two people were killed on the 6th day. We may presume that Kira calmed down or sated their bloodlust somewhat, but the count increased again on the 7th," L responded. "I had guessed someone so prone to judgment would be rash, but a lull as a response is the exact opposite behavior. It may be Kira is feigning reacting at that time in order to throw off his location. On the other hand, the dip was short enough it may have been no reaction at all and simply a result of Kira taking more time to research the innocence or lack thereof of their next victim, although the timing of having the last killing being right before the broadcast and then no more for a whole day does potentially paint a dramatic picture we cannot be too quick to rule out coincidence or a feint."

There was one more possibility that intrigued him, which was that Kira had paused as a way of acknowledging L. But that seemed... narcissistic? Kira had no reason to have any kind of fondness for someone insulting him. No, it made more sense Kira paused to throw off L's sense of Kira's location, mocking him. All it really confirmed is that Kira probably wasn't at the 16th broadcast location.

A board with killing rates per day displayed the following:

Day - Kills - Sidenote

1 15 (A pause after the hostage situation, then about 1-2 per hour. Kira seems to not sleep much if at all.)

2 12 (27. Again, Kira seems to not sleep much. No killings during Japanese school hours.)

3 8 (35. Again no killings during Japanese school hours.)

4 5 (40 total)

5 5 (45)

6 2 (47. Possibly Kira finally crashed from lack of sleep if a single individual.)

7 10 (57. Count may be added to if some unlikelier heart attacks or other methods of death are added to the count.)

"If Kira is not rash, then can we respond by removing criminal name and faces from the media?"

"The chances of that being successful have gone up significantly, but it's still risky." He made the mistake of a small pause, thinking about whether he needed to spell it out. L was out of practice with having conversations with other people.

"Are you sure you aren't just worried that he'll disappear forever and you'll never have the glory of catching him?" one man seemed to take the pause as giving turns to others to speak.

"If there's a chance we can frighten him off and stop the crime entirely, and you think the risk of retaliation on the public itself is low, I think perhaps that's a risk we should take," replied a... Mr. Yagami, was it? "Criminals may not be innocents, but they still have the expectation of equal and fair treatment under the law. I'm sure L isn't just thinking about glory, however."

"If you would have let me continue: there is something else I'd like to try first, which also has a similar risk, but now that I've gotten a taste of Kira's personality seems very low. In a way, this would also be removing names and faces, but only partially and would seem 'accidental', which would mean Kira would be unlikely to get angry..."

It was true L was starting to get more worried about the opposite reaction, a complete shut down of Kira's activities, which while a 'success' in terms of stopping him was the absolute last result L wanted for solving a mystery. But L didn't care about the fame or glory, just the puzzle. It was obvious his opponent wasn't as childish and impulsive as the 'playing god' description one would initially describe to him would suggest, so perhaps they weren't as childish as L. He still didn't believe it was an organization, but he mentally adjusted the odds of it upward slightly nonetheless. Such a large scale organization should eventually have leaks, so he was more worried about the individual scenario.

"What do you suggest?"

"I'll tell you later, after it is done."

Before they could protest, L turned off the connection.

His accomplices should be done right about... now.

---

'I've basically won at this point', Light thought in worry after completing creating a more innocuous looking modified cover with no words like 'DEATH NOTE' on it for everyone to go 'hmmmmmmm, suspicious' at. 'So how do I keep Ryuk entertained? Apples and video games?'

His confidence and good mood was interrupted by the power suddenly going out, mid-sentence during him writing down a criminal's name.

"Well, this just got more interesting, hyuk hyuk," Ryuk laughed.

Shit! Light mentally swore. 

He had to hope this was just a temporary thing. Thankfully, Light had a radio, which should still have news-

he froze just as he was about to turn it on, then turned it on anyway but tucked his murder notebook away into its drawer and locked it, but left the key in.

Even if this was unintentional, there was no way a clever investigator wouldn't take this into account opportunistically. But the funny part was without a face, Light wouldn't be able to use the radio regardless. Even as it blared about a 'high speed chase' in 'breaking news' with a name given and a location (the local police station) where one could go find a face on a wanted poster. Obvious bait. Would anyone in the world be stupid enough to fall for that?

"Eh, Raito, I'm not a mind reader. Is the book really secure like that? Shouldn't you maybe set up a bomb to protect it under a false shelf or something? Maybe a little plastic bag you can set on fire at any time with a spark?"

"That would be ridiculously suspicious and liable to blow up in my face. Why, some substances can even degrade and eat through plastic, and thin plastic is not the most reliable material in the first place. Admittedly, accidentally setting the Death Note on fire would be a good way to ensure no one can disprove my innocence, but that's not a route I'm interested in taking for now. You've been watching too much McGuyver."

He had put a marathon on the TV to entertain Ryuk, since re-attaching the notebook to another cover (actually, covering the original cover, as apparently it could not be entirely removed without destroying the notebook's power to make unlimited pages, which made a vague sort of sense as cutting from the spine would have him holding a finite count; thankfully, leather covers can be kinda thick, so it shouldn't look too out of place, and nothing said he couldn't damage the original a bit as long as it was still part of the cover, right? He could easily cover much of it with another material or even make an almost complete cut of the front and back and tuck them inside something else and permaglue or sew it closed; Ryuk also confirmed the rules don't have to be there, only the name DEATH NOTE) was a very boring task to watch unless you had a deep love of books.

He was extremely meticulous to not damage the actual pages in any way, beyond the 'accidental' soda spill he was planning on the plastic slips that would go over them. He also put a few normal pages full of asinine teenage ramblings at the beginning, including one confessing he's not sure he's interested in anyone but surely if he tries hard enough he'll fall in love with a girl, right? That he just wished he could meet someone more on his intellectual level. That way he'll have something to fake blush about and act secretive.

After some thought, he also adds something that sounds more like what he'd actually put in a diary: his suspicions about possible Kira victims. It's kind of amusing to write down victims in the note and then meticulously remove those pages, only to re-add the names on different paper. It does ensure if he doesn't have time, for whatever reason, to remove all the used murder pages that they won't look out of place. He makes sure to leave a typo on one of the 'victim guesses'.

"So what are you going to do about the blackout?"

"There isn't much I can do. If I use newspapers, it'll be pretty obvious what my sources are and that I must be in the blackout region, just as much as if I don't kill at all." He sighed. "I got cocky. I should have looked into how to space out the killings sooner."

"So they got you good."

"It may have been an accident. Sabotaging a country's electrical system is highly illegal everywhere that I'm aware of. Yet, a part of me does kind of hope it was intentional," Light confessed.

"You want to get caught?" Ryuk said with a little too much malicious glee tinged with disappointment at the idea of his game ending so soon. Gee, thanks Ryuk for the support.

"No, of course not. But it was a bit boring having everything going perfectly my way and having all of my enemies completely outmatched, simply because I proved to not be a complete moron on their first and only move, don't you think?" He doesn't even need an answer for that, Ryuk is very easy to read and predict at this point, strangely enough for an ethereal being from another world he's known for less than a week. Ryuk seemed to really only want one thing: entertainment. He cared for nothing else except perhaps apples, but one could also consider that entertainment so it hardly counted. "I could try an area that would have backup generators, but many of them would have cameras and they wouldn't be keen on sharing their internet network I imagine in an emergency..." Well, he could always use a sob story, but then they'd ask why he couldn't just phone, and the more elaborate the story the more memorable he'd be, which was the opposite of what he wanted.

Hm. A rich classmate might have backup power.

"I'm going to go take a walk and try to see how far the power outage extends." That was a perfectly normal teenager thing to do, and it would give him some idea of the scope of his trouble, if it was trouble at all.

When Light speaks, sometimes even he isn't sure if he's being honest or not. He knows the act he has to put on for Ryuk, so he does. His performance is flawless.

But the easiest person in the world to lie to is yourself, and he wondered, lazing in the dark listening to the radio, what a less calm and more arrogant version of himself would never have wondered:

Is this something he really wants to do, or is playing God something he invented to save his own skin and comfort himself for all the murder he did in his initial spree, trying to make his existence mean something before some angel of death noticed his 'theft' and stole his soul away? That he had to do it, that his initial 'joke' killing before he knew what it truly was, was justified?

In any case, he is now certainly classed as a serial murderer instead of a spree killer. He paused from his fervent spree to acknowledge L for an hour... and then he had moved on. No, to be more accurate, he'd calmed when Ryuk came and thought he was getting everything together then.

But now he needed to rethink. Maybe slam the breaks on everything.

But how long could he wait without Ryuk getting dangerously bored?

A very good option was simply going through school and getting into a position of power where he could be reasonably expected to access databases of criminals, and take some good time getting more familiar with internet security and hacking. Or he could simply make his search history seem more normal in the first place. He could lobby off the occasional looking at crimes as simply interest from a man passionate about mysteries.

But... was there another way to kill that didn't involve Light directly accessing the internet at all?

Giving even a torn off note to a controlled victim would be very risky, but presumably he could order them to swallow it or otherwise destroy it in the event of discovery. There was a question of how he would even propagate them. The last thing he wanted to do was paint a straight line toward his location. The obvious courier would be Ryuk, but could he even get Ryuk to do something like that? If Ryuk refused to leave Japan, he'd have to use the international mail system, but having Ryuk drop the letter off in the right spot (bypassing checks) could make that relatively safe. He might have to double check to see how good electronic mail tracking was, since having a mysterious letter that wasn't logged correctly in the system appearing with a dummy sender address could cause a headache, but many places didn't even have good internet access, so that was far from insurmountable. If some random dude in the wrong country got the ability to see Ryuk because they illegally opened mail, well... Ryuk wasn't even in the country with them, so there was that.

And there was a problem that using commands in the death note to cause even more deaths than what was written was iffy (was supposed to lead to an immediate heart attack), but... He was pretty sure something like 'they write in this deadly book' wouldn't count, because then the extra deaths WOULD be not extra at all, because then they would be what was written, they would be accounted for in the death note itself. So that was a nice loophole.

In the morning, the power was still out, and it was a weekend so he had no worries about school. He pulled some of his art books off the shelf for Ryuk to look at, figuring he might enjoy art such as The Death of Socrates.

He had to rub his eyes when looking at the creation of Adam. For a moment, his tired eyes played tricks on him and he imagined very vividly himself in the spot of Adam reaching out holding an apple being touched by Ryuk, who replaced God.

Clearly, the excitement of last night had been terrible for him actually sleeping. He wasn't even quite sure when he had made it back home in the dark.

While Ryuk was distracted with the picture books, he eyed his psychology shelf and criminal law and investigation books. Unfortunately, he had read them a bit too recently to really enjoy rereading them again. The architecture and engineering books, he might be able to entertain Ryuk very briefly as they did have a couple of images, but they weren't really flip-through books the way the art ones were, the point was to actually read them.

He decided to check out the areas that still had power.

Light carefully observed the trains and their cameras, wearing a hoodie, sunglasses and a medical mask, but did not go on. It was more of a quick scouting session and, maybe, in the long term, a possible escape venue (though if it got that far he was probably fucked). He noted the subway and several non-residential areas had power. A coffee shop bragged about 'paid internet available'. Depressingly, he saw what seemed to be a homeless person with all their life's possessions strapped to their side sitting by the cafe; they were probably living there using the new overnight services.(*)

A mailman walking by and handing the woman mail confirmed this tragic picture.

As he walked by a McDonalds, he saw some 'McRefugees' living there too and accepting mail.

As Light walked and explored in the sunlight, he felt himself becoming very calm about the situation, thinking about things from L's hypothetical point of view:

Option One: Kira panics and flees to another region.

Option Two: Kira panics and buys services from an internet cafe, leaving a record.

Option Three: Kira is not even in the area, but gets startled and goes relatively quiet for awhile. Possibly stops killing entirely.

Option Four: Kira is in the area, but sits tight and stops killing for an extended period, then kills at completely random intervals (if intelligent and not brash enough to brag about being able to kill at any time).

Option Five: Kira does something smart-stupid, like obviously hack the police information network or tip off he knows how to get into it. The Police Station still has power... for now. L for this scenario would rather keep things secret from the police, if one of them is Kira. Did he? It's possible L did not tell any of the people he's working with what is going on, however, which mean L has stooped to committing crimes as he didn't get permission to mess with the power.

Option Six: Kira reveals a new power or ability. Probably L's least favorite, or maybe that was number three. Thus, it should hopefully be easy to convince him it was one of the others, right?

Option Seven: Kira happened to have a vacation at the exact same time as the power outages and wouldn't have reacted anyway.

Option Eight-ish and onward: a bunch of little things not worth thinking about right now, like 'Kira is really a god' or 'Kira has a pet god doing all of their bidding and does not even need information to operate', but, that could probably be shoved under option six.

Even if it the last was almost sort of true.

Light crumpled up a few pages of paper. "Ryuk, can I bribe you into doing a favor? I promise it will be interesting and I'll get you a candied apple and an apple pie."

"Oh?"

"I want you to give one of each of these pages to several different criminals. But I don't know if you can even track them down, so maybe I'm asking the impossible." Ones he had considered previously but hadn't written down yet, who were 'at large' and thus technically not convicted. If he could appeal to Ryuk's pride, that would be great: it would reveal something about the shinigami and be another tool in Light's arsenal of manipulation avenues.

"I can see anyone's name, but the only person I know with certainty where they are is you, Light."

That... was honestly unnerving. So much for the maybe-plan of running away while Ryuk wasn't looking, changing his name and wearing a mask for the rest of his life. Which now that he thought about it wouldn't work because it wasn't like he'd be able to completely forget his old name.

"I do have some idea of where they may be. But if it's not an option at all, I can pick out different targets." It was pretty unlikely this power outage was going to extend to two weeks, but if it was planned and orchestrated, it would probably last through the weekend to at least one weekday, just to maximally unnerve Kira and cover a good range of their schedule.

L was morose.

It seemed L's true worst scenario might be here: Kira going dark entirely, no matter how satisfying it was to see the initial dip in kills that confirmed Kira was basically exactly where he thought he was. The kills that did happen, he chalked up to previously accessed information that simply hadn't been used: Kira had gotten a lot slower and more methodical after the initial 5 day spree which had seemed almost.. frantic, if the person was Japanese then the first night they would not have slept at all. Initially he'd attributed it to excitement and glee, but now he wasn't so sure.

He perks up when he sees a kill. The information from the kill could be quite old and drawn purely from memory, the man in question had been wanted for a long time now, but it meant Kira hadn't gone dark entirely.

He needed to provoke Kira in a way that fit the new profile.

"I would like to take advantage of the power outage that happened recently in the Kanto area," at his orders, actually; power stations rarely have much in the way of security so this is quite easy, "There's an American news story breaking about a school shooting. Let's make sure Kira hears about it if he's in Kanto. After all, it may well have been inspired by him: vigilante violence begets copycat killings."

That, L obviously hadn't orchestrated as he had his limits in how far he'd go to catch a crook, but there were so many shootings in America (an average of 7 deaths per day by firearm) he could easily have expected one or multiple within the week, though not necessarily one of this scale or severity at exactly this time (mass shootings were far less common than just shootings)**. He was quite lucky the Americans were so immensely stupid: Japan and most other civilized countries certainly didn't share the American gun problem.

---

School was lousy with candles provided for the classrooms with smaller or no windows. The teachers decided to let them skip the indoor gym and let them walk home early today. He noticed many of the teachers were carrying ham radios. "In case of emergencies like weather warnings," they explained, "We'll at least be able to hear what is going on."

He passed by some shops as he walked home.

Light froze, horrified as many TVs in the commercial area were suddenly turned on and started displaying a news story. The really weird thing is that this 'breaking news' wasn't even from Japan, which made it pretty obvious it was bait.

But it was absolutely horrific bait.

There was a dead fucking body of a child on the screen. A picture and name of the killer floated next to it, as if mocking him.

To his own surprise and absolute mortification, Light found his own eyes were getting wet and his fist was clenching in rage. He had to stop himself from running home, but he knew his gait was faster than his normal walk.

When he got home, the taunting didn't end. He could hear the fucking radio turning itself on, as if this was some emergency broadcast instead of something happening completely across the ocean. It was loud too, he could hear both his radio from his room and the one in the kitchen despite entering the living room.

"L, you fucking dick," he lost his composure.

"Light? You're crying."

Correction: he thought he had lost his composure, but on Sayu seeing his wet, angry face, he had a sudden fierce need to go cry and scream into a pillow where no one could see him. Instead, he sucked in a ragged breath and put on a perfect smile to pretend he was fucking fine with all of this. "I'm fine." He was such a fucking liar.

It was unfair of the world to make him feel like he could do something, only to render him powerless if he didn't want to alert L like a fucking bloodhound. Make him feel personally responsible for those corpses, for those kids who were as innocent as Sayu.

He entered his room and removed the batteries from his radio, then stared at the drawer with the death note, contemplating making a break for it. Did it really matter if L knew he'd likely been in Kanto? Or was foreign, at much lower probability, and somehow noticed the Japanese power outages and was long term faking being in Japan.

"Light?" Sayu opened the door. "I don't think I've ever seen you so upset. Don't do the Stepford Wives act to cover it up, it's creepy. Boys can have emotions too you know!"

He forced himself to smile, ineffectively pretending he wasn't sitting on his bed with his head against his knees just a moment ago, but he let a little more pain shine through to make it 'less creepy' as she would put it.

"The radio personally offended you pretty bad, huh?" She gestured to the batteries, then sat down on his bed next to him and hugged him. Listening to the silence of the house, he realized she'd unplugged the kitchen radio for him.

Unable to plausibly pretend any longer, he gave in. "I just... I couldn't help but imagine it was you there, and-"

And suddenly the power came back on.

He could practically hear L say 'Kira, are you trapped in school right now? Do your powers somehow require the internet? Let me help you make a desperate error.'

"And I think I'll skip cram school today," Light said.

"Me too."

As his brother, he should object to this, for her study habits are not as good as his in the first place and she could actually use cram school.

But the part of him that has kept everything about Kira bottled up, every little bit of stress and worry, that part of him selfishly wants his sister there. Feels impossibly lucky that a piece of shit like him even has a sibling that cares that much, has anyone that cares that much.

"Don't tell mom I sobbed over total strangers," he warned her.

"Don't worry, I won't let anyone know what a secret total baby you are," she teased with her tongue stuck out. "I love you, big bro. Let's hang out like we haven't done in awhile!"

"Alright." He gave her one of rare genuine smiles. Ryuk catches the corner of his eye, and he feels slightly unnerved by that flat, expressionless face observing them. He couldn't begin to imagine what the otherwordly being was thinking of this family drama. More entertainment?

"If you could have anything in the world right now, what would it be?"

"A mass spectrometer," Light answered instantly. He had been thinking of getting one, but they were really pricy.

Sayu wrinkled her nose. "You're such a nerd. Let's go out and watch a movie! There's a new Hideki Ryuuga one!"

"Alright." It is certain to be a movie Sayu likes rather than one Light likes, but he doesn't mind. Slipping back into his old mask of perfect, unbothered golden boy who dotes on his sister (even if that's true) makes him feel comfortable and in control of things, even as it feels inexplicably somehow slightly fake, like he's an imposter to his own life.

That reminds him, he needs to buy some dirty magazines. Will it look suspicious he clearly has no actual interest in the magazines he bought? Maybe, but some of dad's coworkers are dumb as rocks, and Light trying to hide he was gay was the most innocuous secret imaginable if you weren't a bigot so maybe it would fool L's more suspicious eyes as well.

Unless L was a bigot, which... was not at all mutually exclusive with climbing to a position of power like L's, unfortunately. L had an impressive record, and maybe it was time he double-checked over that record and see what those cases really said about him.

There is an itch to do something more productive about half-way through, and Light realized then and there that if he hadn't had Sayu, he would have snapped and committed the killing, obvious bait or not.

He still can't wait for when he can feel he can do it more 'safely'.

Except... the news comes in that like so many mass murderers, the suspect doesn't live through their capture. It was a stereotypical murder slash suicide by cop.

He wants to scream, to do something.

Again, it is Sayu who breaks him out of things.

"I got some candles. I was thinking we could light them and have a moment of silence for the victims of gun violence around the world."

"An angry letter to politicians might be more effective." Fortunately or unfortunately, Light is not an American citizen so his voice has no weight in the matter. But he could pretend to be an American and demand they stop shooting their own kids with an angry email. He could even dumb down his English skills to help him pass as a real American. Would that be ethical?

"You'll still feel better doing something, even if that something is just a ritual."

"I suppose you're right," he acknowledges, suddenly feeling very tired. "Alright, let's do it."

"Do you want to make little paper boats to set the candles in and send them across a river?"

"Sure. That sounds beautiful, Sayu."

And for whatever bizarre reason, the senseless, illogical act of lighting candles on tiny paper boats *does* make him feel better, does make him feel more grounded.

Humans are such an irrational species.

So, L wanted 'confirmation' of where he was, did he? Fine. The power outage was over, and Light had kept up the occasional killing by simple memory the entire time (if at a lower rate), but he'd fucking taunt him with it now.

---

L is faced with a discomforting situation. Kira has stopped killing.

Normally, this would be a good thing. He just started a power outage in another area of Japan, just to cover the possibilities.

But Kira has suddenly stopped completely, and that wasn't what, by now, he expected by Kira if Kira were really located in the Johto region.

He would have expected a few 'previously chosen criminals' to go over that time span, just like it had for Kanto.

Instead, he's pretty sure the killings actually stopped slightly before the damn power outage, on a Friday.

Has he spooked Kira, or is he being taunted? He hopes, uncharacteristically prays, that it is just a taunting and Kira has made a tentative prediction of when the next power outage would be in another region if it is (a) intentional and (b) follows a potential logic to its timing of wanting to cover part of the weekend and at least one weekday so Kira will potentially reveal patterns about their free time versus work time depending on how they respond. That would reveal Kira is fairly clever and perhaps a bit paranoid, and perhaps more than a little pissed about L's last stunt.

Maybe, best case scenario, Kira fled to Johto just in time to get caught in the outage, in which case they have a nice reduction of the suspect pool. He bets he is not that lucky.

If Kira actually goes completely dark and never kills again, L has absolutely no chance of catching him. Having the mystery go unsolved like that would be torture.

Normally, serial killers would taunt by escalating. However, L put Kira in a position where he couldn't act without giving in to 'bait', and Kira seemed exactly the methodical type to want to obscure what region he was killing from. Pretending it was really Johto would be exactly his style, and shutting down the killing completely during that period instead of merely slowing down would have the side effect of forcing L to sit through a similar fear of being completely unable to act. Even if it was nowhere near to the same situation or same degree, it must have been satisfying to have a psychological revenge.

This Kira was possibly a much cooler headed than he would have guessed (or perhaps more fearful), but he wasn't necessarily inhumanly unflappable.

There was a very simple test to see if it was fear alone motivating the other, but he was going to complete his power outage tests first and... hope Kira killed again, for all that damned L's likely nonexistent soul.

-----

"You're not going to kill today, Light?"

"Mostly no. It may not be on the news, but it's really likely there has been another power outage in another area." He does write down a couple names but puts down dates for two weeks ahead, in a pattern that fits his usual times. If he guessed right, the 'power outage' number two should be ending soon.

He does not need to sneak into police databases to see guesses about him being a student, teacher, or someone with a job along those times. He will use the dates and times to ensure there are kills fitting along with that schedule even on days, unknown even to him now, where for whatever reason he can't make a kill.

And he's going to set up the plan to make Kira even more independent of his schedule, with heavy bribery of Ryuk. He doesn't entirely like it, the loss of control, but it's the best he can do for now, and he does include a failsafe command to let him control them, though this admittedly requires Ryuk's assistance.

'This criminal will obey Kira and his messenger Ryuk and carry out Kira's style of judgment, carefully researching heinous crimes (by international fully Democratic country standards, not Russian or Chinese, so no killing people simply for being gay or part of an opposing political party) to the best of their ability and writing down the name in the death note paper given to them during 6pm-7pm, using their local time zone. On random days no killings will happen. If discovered, they shall swallow or otherwise destroy the paper, and they will make discreet preparations if possible or needed ahead of time for the destruction of evidence. When the paper is full of names or when their time for life is almost up, they will destroy the paper. They will release anyone they have kidnapped or any person they have caged, and give up pets or trafficked wildlife to appropriate caretakers, but otherwise hide from the law. If the paper threatens to be discovered or touched by others, they will destroy the paper. They will get rid of paper or computer evidence of their investigations of criminals and avoid discovery by others. At the end of the maximal amount of time allowed by the Death Note for a delayed death, after completing the mentioned destruction they will leave their secret residence to a different area and die of a heart attack.'

He had experimented of course first with timings of death before writing all that out. It would be a waste otherwise.

The specification of time zones was to prevent the criminal's name accidentally being written at the same time by different Kiras. He was careful to choose potential 'Kiras' in different time zones.

If Ryuk somehow crumbled to ash from him writing Ryuk's name down, he wouldn't cry and in fact would celebrate all week despite the added inconvenience, as he had never forgotten Ryuk's threat to kill him one day when his time was up.

This does not stop him from playing video games with Ryuk, of course.

"What do you think of this draft, Ryuk?"

Ryuk shakes his head. "I don't think you can use a death in the Death Note to cause more death. It might work because it's also via the Death Note, but I don't know."

"Ah. Easy to fix if it ends up not working out that way," Light scratches a new draft, removing a fair few of the lines, which he transfers to a different paper with 'Agree to this or die' at the top, and adding a new one:

'The individual will continue as they previously agreed.'

"One part, all the bits about destroying evidence and how they die, will be on the Death Note. The other part, the agreement to use the Death Note paper to write down names, will be on a different normal piece of paper. I'll have them see you or the floating bit of paper you're carrying, agree to the contract, and thus have the deaths not be directly caused by the death note."

"What if they scream and run?"

"That's where I give them a time limit to agree. Regardless of what happens, I'll sign their name in the death note. But, it would be optimal if you could give me some kind of signal." Light tapped his hand idly. "There's always a risk in any kind of communication via networks though. You're sure you can't just teleport?"

"I can get anywhere within 86 hours, after which I must return. But no, I can't teleport. I'm not supposed to go to the shinigami world at this time, although I'm not sure if anything would really happen if I did violate that rule. Probably I'd get a stern talking to, since it's a minor offense, if anyone even noticed."

"Do shinigami have an instinctive sense of time? It is pretty important to your work after all, especially if you have so many rules about it."

"We do."

"Alright, how about this. I'll test out method one first, to see if we can skip the extra hassle. If we have to use method two, then I will write down their name in three days after you go, at an agreed time of day... let's say ten at night, nobody should bother me then. I'll include a clause that if they didn't agree, they die right away of a heart attack. If they did agree, then they are compelled to keep the agreement, destroy all evidence, and kill themselves under threat of discovery."

"You're really tricksy, Light-o. I don't think any shinigami has thought of as many ways to kill as you."

"Thanks?" Light wasn't sure that was really a compliment.

"You know, if you kill all the criminals, you'll be the only wicked one left."

"I know. But statistically, there will always be impulse killers."

"If Kira is meant to be a deterrent, isn't that admitting defeat?"

"Humans only have so much willpower. In the end, removing people from wider society is more about other people's safety than about punishment. Or it should be. I don't actually agree with sadistic prison conditions, despite my own draconian punishments. In the end, all of this is just a hypothesis that there will be a net benefit. It may be that I'm entirely wrong and it just makes society worse." Light shrugs. "For instance, it could increase crime via vigilantism. People will punish those who don't conform, even if that lack of conformity is something scientifically indicated to be pretty harmless, like being gay or asexual or lefthanded or albino."

Light decided to read over the draft and maybe fiddle with it a bit more, perhaps sleep on it. But he definitely wanted to test it out soon. For now, he'd just mess with times, but not in any way that would suggest he was anything but a student, teacher, or part time worker with similar hours.

The conversation is still niggling in his mind, so, unprovoked, he continues it. "I haven't really killed that many, to be honest. There are literately thousands of criminals across the world and I try to spend ten minutes to an hour researching each one, and I still have schoolwork... At the rate I'm going, I might not even live long enough to make any significant dent in the population." Damn, it sounded really stupid now that he'd calmed down to think it out.

"Then why are you doing it at all?"

"I don't know," he said honestly. "Frustration? It feels better to the human psyche to do something than to do nothing. If I had this power and I did nothing with it, I would feel terrible. When I think this power might be just making things worse, I don't feel quite as bad as that, even though logically I should, perhaps because I can tell myself it's just a maybe and surely the world is better off without such people? Or maybe because the idea of it maybe being worse doesn't really feel real and concrete in its consequences, it's very abstract."

---

L isn't pleased. When the third power outage starts and a 'faking-Johto Kira' should have felt comfortable killing again, or an unaware (he has tried to have the power outages blamed on anything other than himself, obviously) Johto Kira would have had the opportunity to go after some nicely selected bait, Kira still didn't start killing again.

It did have the nice side effect that the international police now believe him that Kira is located in Japan, even if the broader public is still skeptical Kira is entirely real and not some disease. That doesn't seem like a beneficial tack for Kira to take, but Kira is clearly cautious and cares about more than his own ego and perceived godhood. Unfortunately for L.

He keeps to the schedule he had decided and starts a fourth, despite his restlessness. If this is 'a faking-Johto Kira being spooked but actually entirely knowing about all the outages', they'll probably keep up the lack of killing until the outages stop entirely. Just to be sure, L laid down some bait in the form of having the information available to police computers that the power outages were happening (albeit blamed on criminal activity and not L).

Instead, the killings start again.

L is both relieved and confused.

After awhile, it becomes fairly clear:

Kira has established a new pattern of randomly going dark for several days or even two weeks at a time. It is methodical, well thought out, and points very strongly to either a very well informed Johto Kira trying to fake being a Kanto Kira faking being a Johto Kira (hence the dip before silence), or the reverse. Probably the reverse, because that seemed extremely risky, but likely Kira knew that. Lower probabilities but not impossible of being elsewhere, such as the third 'no kill during black outs' region even though the no killing started before then; for his sanity, he discarded these for now and hoped he had gotten lucky. He didn't really have much of a chance otherwise, the pool of suspects even narrowed down was horribly immense.

Kira might not even have known about the other power outages or any intentionality to them, if they were a Kanto Kira they may have simply realized future outages would be very bad for them and decided to switch to a randomized schedule right then and there, which happened to correlate with the power outages. But the exact timing chosen for that first stop... L couldn't help but feel it was a taunt and entirely intentional.

The dip after the Lind L. Tailor broadcasts had suggested a non-Kanto Kira, but the exact broadcast chosen hadn't been the Johto one. Did that mean Kira had a necessary delay in their killing? The live Shinjuku broadcast with the hostages (perhaps Kira's first kill) before the Tailor gambit suggested no, so that too was just misdirection.

Kira may have gambled L would switch it up slightly and choose Friday instead of Monday to disrupt. He may have moved and simply gotten unlucky. There were a number of possibilities, and he would simply have to hope, for now, that he could make progress with the most probable one: a Kanto Kira.

He had yet another piece of bait to put up, but this one would be very subtle and required, amusingly enough, for Kira to be fairly meticulous, and not completely ruthless.

He was going to put evidence of a man's innocence on police servers, and ensure it was only there (well, unless Kira traveled to the scene of the crime himself).

Kira wanted to pretend to be compassionate. Well, L would see if he could kill Kira with his own kindness.

To be honest, this was a less cruel gamble than it sounded. L had a strong suspicion already from other cases where the evidence of innocence was far clearer and readily available on the police network than anywhere else, and Kira had shown his character fairly strongly.

If this went through, then he would feel comfortable recommending shutting off news of names and faces of most suspected criminals from the wider media. Why? Because if Kira knew they knew Kira was accessing police databases, it wouldn't actually change the status quo. Thus there were much lower chances of escalation. Plus, Kira would have already been provoked numerous times and not escalated.

Now, it was time for him to start making task forces in the various regions. He would focus primarily on Kanto, but occasionally visit the others to see how they were doing. L was extremely dubious they'd make any actual progress independently, but he needed their trust if he was going to get to spy on their families with their permission.

---

L was really, really starting to infuriate him.

The annoying thing was that he couldn't even retaliate, beyond killing a few corrupt cops to spook everyone working with L (which he was already doing anyway, because... corrupt). If he killed the innocent man, it would just make him a worse person than he already was. So he simply did nothing. It didn't necessarily mean anything, after all he'd sometimes delayed a long time before killing people before, right?

"Hey, Light-o, I'm not on your side or anything, but, it's really started to creep me out."

"Hm?"

"Being stared at. You're being followed."

Light didn't freeze up and simply kept walking. "Ryuk," he said quietly. "Can you do me a favor when we get home and look for cameras and blindspots? I won't be able to feed you that last slice of apple pie I got you otherwise. I'll have to eat it all myself, right in front of you." He stopped to stretch and yawn, using the opportunity to glance at a reflection to look back behind him unobtrusively.

"Have mercy, Light-o! Have you seen me when I go into withdrawl? I go into pretzels!"

"Mah, it's not my fault how other people behave."

"You really make a shinigami think about killing you." Light doesn't even flinch. Instead, he levels a cold hard stare at Ryuk.

"Damn, Light, you're scary for a human. I was just making a joke."

"Ha."

--

There was a camera in the fucking bathroom. Light was so pissed.

"News report! Thousands of investigators from around the world from developed countries have been set on the Kira case in Japan by the ICPO!"

Light was feeling really contemptuous at this point, so he said something he probably shouldn't have. "Sayu, what do you think of this? Does it seem a little over the top to you?"

"Hm." Sayu pondered. His sister was not a complete idiot, she just didn't like homework and for whatever reason, their parents were less harsh on her about it than they were him. A different brother might have resented her for the different treatment, but Light honestly didn't care since he actually did enjoy homework. Well, math homework at least, since there was an element of thinking instead of just pure memorization. "Well, if they have millions of suspects, thousands of investigators in comparison really isn't that much, is it? If the situation is that bad, it's actually just sort of sad, really."

"I'd hope Dad had some more narrowing down of the suspect pool by now," Light said. "In which case, they'd have more investigators than suspects. And in your case, large teams often have troubles coordinating, but I suppose they could divvy the regions up."

Sayu laughed. "Yeah, that does sound kind of ridiculous, doesn't it? Doesn't that mean my version is the right one? I mean, I don't like it, but at least it's not totally silly."

Light can't quite resist. "Not necessarily. But your version does make sense." He doesn't expound on what the alternative is (that it's a ploy to annoy or scare Kira into tripping up), and Sayu is easily distracted by him throwing candy and doesn't ask.

(A fourth possibility hits him, that it was purely to see Light's reaction. That feels really creepy, so he tries to forget about it and the cameras.)

In any case, L will soon be distracted and face an infuriation of his own, and Light can go buy that spectrometer he's been wanting even if he alas can no longer actually use it for what he wanted it for.

Because Light? Doesn't even need to lift a finger to kill right now.

---

In Russia, criminals from purely Russian sources of news start dying. Ditto China. Many of them apparently corrupt officials who were taking bribes, threatening political instability.
It's a nightmare of a headache for L.

That said, of all the recordings of different reactions to the video, Light's was the most intriguing. And the boy fit the profile. Could these killings occurring right as so many go under watch be a taunt? Or had Kira really gotten spooked and left the country? Or had it just been poor timing and Kira had planned all along to spread his power?
He'd have to recruit extra help in those countries. L could do a lot of things, but he couldn't be in two places at once. On the upside, if this was going from individual to organization, that meant far more chances to catch someone making a mistake. This could be the break he needed.

It wasn't.

Mello's team actually managed to pin down one of the Kiras in Russia, only for the Kira to up and die on them, willingly setting his entire house on fire and running into the flame.

"I fucking hate this guy," Mello complained. "He can control people now?"

"Perhaps the apparent victim here is simply a fanatic." L doesn't actually believe that himself, but it is a possibility like any other. 

"He was a fuckin' criminal, I really fuckin' doubt it, L." He puffed a cigarette.

"Unfortunately, fantacism and another Kira in the region needs to be the official story. The last thing we want is Russia or China declaring war on Japan so they can capture Kira and a hypothetical superweapon." Truly, a massive headache.

"You get the shithole in Japan so that I haven't completely wasted my time, you hear?"

"I will," L promised, but he's not actually sure he'll live to see that through. This would not be the first time L has lied though, and it certainly won't be the last.

He's going to do something very risky. Though, not really so different from his plan to taunt Kira on TV to kill him sight unseen, which was also risky. He still didn't know for absolute certainty Kira couldn't kill him with limited information if Kira really wanted to, and the apparent reliance on both a name and face just a lure to get him to slip up or a mirage of the data.

---

Light had to admit, he had not ordered or expected so many corrupt officials to die as a result of his new 'Kiras', which necessarily had acted independently from him. For that, he was genuinely grateful to L for lying.

Because according to the internal Japanese databases, that was the story: that L was lying for them to avoid possible wider political trouble, but still strongly suspected a Japanese Kira in control of it all. It showed L wasn't completely oblivious to the wider world beyond catching criminals or absolutely relentless and heartless in the pursuit of justice like he pretended; he was no Inspector Javert but someone more complicated and underhanded.

Although, Light had known that already from the very moment it became apparent the power outages were a deliberate pattern targeting large swathes of region by region.

"You seem really tired, tou-san." It is basic politeness to show interest in his father's health, but he is also genuinely curious if a mere nudge will get him some information.

"This case is a hard one. And my coworker, the person in charge, isn't the easiest to get along with."

"I don't think killings are an appropriate topic for the dinner table," Mom said uneasily.

"Ah, he's just griping about coworkers Mom," Sayu said, bored and apparently even more eager than Light to get some dirt.

"You can tell us, we won't gossip around: is L a nice person and as smart in person as his reputation?" He wanted to ask 'is L a giant jerk?' but he knew that phrasing wouldn't go over as well.

"He is absolutely brilliant, even more than I had imagined," his father confessed. "But he is also absolutely infur-" Father paused, seeming to remember the cameras. "I really shouldn't be saying this." He seemed to lose all of his appetite, taking his plate to the sink.

"It must bother you the timings could point to a student," Light said, trying to be comforting. "But a little kid probably couldn't pull something like this off, right? So it's probably a teacher or someone with a similarly timed job."

It doesn't seem to work, because his father looks at him with raw, even rather dismayed surprise.

Light gives him a disgruntled look in return. "What? I thought it was obvious! I've been making a list of possible Kira killings and times, and I'm not even the only person to bring it up. People on the internet have been talking about it." Which thankfully is quite true.

This seems to mollify his father. "I just suppose I'm surprised by how fast you're growing up. You sounded just like L to me, for a moment."

Light smiled. "The guy who is giving you a hard time? I hope not."

"I didn't mean it like that."

"Light's teasing you, Dad," Sayu piped up. "Come on, Light! I noticed you got some new video games, you gotta play with me!"

"Okay Sayu," Light said with a short laugh, and moved to scrape off his plate first. "Just give me a minute to clean up."

"By the way Light, I got you a watch as a graduation gift."

"Really? Nice! I had been really wanting another one of those after my old one broke." Even with all the pressure he was under, his Dad still remembered he existed. That was... genuinely nice.

Gods, his family would be so heartbroken if they ever knew the truth.

It is unnerving to enter his room, knowing instantly from the door handle that someone had come in to his room and had enough care to replace the paper slip that always falls out from the side of the door on opening but hadn't noticed he'd used the door handle to try to tell if someone had come in. He's grateful, because otherwise he would have been entirely reliant on Ryuk's warning to guess something was amiss, but it's frustrating nonetheless to know a total stranger has been in. Sayu would never bother to replace the paper slip, nor his mom.

It's creepy and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it.

The scheme of buying a mini tv, killing with one hand and doing homework with another, then gloriously taking a potato chip and eating it, does come to mind. But it's stupid to take an added risk when he can just have the other Kiras do all the killing.

He does not kill Raye Penbar. (He does not even learn the man's name, nor would he care to know.)

That death would be by the pissed off Russians, who hijacked his bus and kidnapped him.

Chapter Text

Raye stands up to defend him and gets gunned down by the Russian agents almost immediately, though he does manage to shoot one of them down in return despite being heavily outnumbered.

The *only* 'good' thing about it all was that as far as he could tell from the other struggling bodies, he was not the only victim chosen for kidnapping. Other Kira suspects are here too in the warehouse they've been dragged to.

Small, small mercies.

"Light-o. We can make a deal. Half your lifespan for shinigami eyes."

Light considers it very seriously. If he won't make it out alive otherwise, it may be a good deal. Half a life is better than no life. "I'll give some time for a rescue," he says very quietly. He works to try to get his hands free. When they patted him down for a weapon, they took his pen but not his paper. He had carefully tailored another layer in his pocket to tuck that into, so they didn't even touch it, and had a small needle for drawing blood. If he could just reach it, he could kill some of them. But that would require knowing their names. And unfortunately, not all of the men took off their masks when they arrived at their chosen location.

A sobbing woman, no, teenager beside him over-hears him and quiets a little. "You think so?"

If L is any good at his job and actually cares about tracking his suspects down rather than just having Kira shot on dark suspicions, yes. But they might not have that much time, because he has the distinct feeling the Russians don't care about not shooting someone based on vague suspicions.

He hears a scream and he realizes, oh joy.

They're going to be tortured first for information.

Well, at least he likely won't have to use the needle to draw blood...

---

The torture is... fun. Not.

They start with waterboarding, which does not, in fact, draw blood. It's far more horrible than it sounds, unless you've experienced the sensation of drowning before and know exactly how terrible that feels, how your mind rebels against itself and causes you to thrash in a way that would potentially even drown your own rescuer.

It is the loss of control that Light actually hates most, even more than the fear which he has intellectually resigned himself to feeling involuntarily despite the fact he is quite likely to live through the treatment.

He carefully watches for any moments of his captors being less than careful with their masks and their names, but they all use codes for each other and Light's Russian is rusty and not fluent, not like Light's English. He is far better at reading it than speaking it.

"I would really like to give one of my favorite books' pages now," he says in a wistful tone. "The passage that gets repeated so much. I think it was authored by a Ryuk and dedicated to a Dmitri Terrance, who moved to Canada." He mouthed an address.

Ryuk gets the not so hidden message and shakes his head.

"I won't act to save you."

"It won't save me, but it would be comforting." He still has some wiggle time before his other Kiras die out.

"I'd like my favorite book too," the teen beside him says, before coughing. He thinks she's caught pneumonia from all the waterboarding and shitty treatment in this damp warehouse. It's chilly.

When they lay down, they can chew on each other's ropes. It's horrible on their teeth and not the most effective, but... it does give some hope.

They remove some of his nails.

Dear fucking god.

At least he has blood now, he laughs and laughs until they tell him to shut the fuck up.

He's never felt pain like this before.

He doesn't understand why they think it would make him talk when it just makes him hate them even more. He's almost rabid enough to start wiggling across the floor and biting ankles. Almost. He tells them, "Kira kills by..."

"Yes?" 

"Kira kills... with a magical pineapple."

They don't appreciate his humor.

"If we don't learn what we want to by the end of the month, all of you are going to die."

Remember the plan.

The plan?

Was waiting really working?

Where was L?

They throw him into solitary for awhile. Must have found evidence of the chewed on ropes. Or maybe they just want to observe him.

The lack of stimulation is pretty maddening. He thinks he might actually prefer the nails getting ripped off, but he's not sure: it's a close thing. On one hand, the nails really fucking hurt.

On the other, at least it was something to think about. Hours and hours of nothing happening.

L l l L LL l L where are you, aren't you a detective? L L L L L. Ryuk. Ryuk, I change my mind, come back. Dad.

It is when they bring in Sayu that he really breaks. He can hear her voice.

Those fuckers are going to die, he thinks.

"I want to make a deal," he says to Ryuk the moment he returns.

"Don't we all? They won't take money," another hostage says, some old man.

"Gotcha, Raito."

Except he blinks and Ryuk disappears, and at that moment he realizes Ryuk was actually a hallucination. Of course: he sent the shinigami to a completely different country, there's no way he'd be back soon.

There is one Russian who is much nicer than the others. He gives them food and water when the others aren't looking.

It sucks, but, he's actually the only one Light can kill right now. Maybe. He'd overheard him getting scolded.

He tells himself the gifting food might just be a tactic to play 'nice cop, bad cop'. Especially when the man, Smirnov, whispers "You can tell me if you know anything about Kira's organization, right? And then it'll all be over, I promise. No more pain. Who do you work for?"

"Can I know your name, friend?" At the wary look, Light adds, "I'm Light. If we just give first names, Kira can't kill you, you know. I don't even know how you'd spell these names in Russian." Except, if it's common enough, he totally does.

"It's Ivan," the man says literately one of the most common Russian names of all time.

"Thank you, Ivan. You've made a terrible time a lot more tolerable."

He tries the name at the first opportunity. It doesn't work. Second try, he guesses the Russians have a bit more professionalism and didn't actually call the man by his real last name. He can't take too many tries or he'll make the man immune to the death note, but one more try won't hurt. He makes small talk before asking,"Is it really Ivan, or Ivanov?"

Ivan looks really dismayed and startled, and he thinks, yup, that's it.

"You have a kind of Roman look to you. That nose," he says idly, and from the neutral reaction he assumes the first name is not Roman. "Alexander," no reaction, "the Great wasn't Roman, was he?" Was he being too obvious if he asked something random again? Or was this actually a scheme to get him to kill one of them and give himself away, with them unaware he could control people because who the fuck would expect that. "Vladimir, what do you think?" That gets alarm.

"You mean Putin, right?" A nod from Light gets a relieved expression. "He's dead."

Well, shit. He'd been debating offing him, but it looks like maybe the Russian Kira did it first and Russia had kept it quiet. No wonder the Russians were out for blood. Their country was quite possibly going to go into civil war shortly, all because of Kira.

The sweet, sweet irony is that he has just finished penning down the one agent's name in blood with the command 'helps captives, shoots to disable russians, dies by bullet' in the most horrible handwriting he's ever had (mouthwriting? hahahahahaha) and as compact and tiny as he can make it which isn't a great combo, and he makes sure no cameras would have a good angle to see it, then rolls over on his face and eats it off the ground,

hahaha.

heh.

When L.

Sweet annoying prick.

Motherfucker.

Or Dad. Tousan. Father.

Finally shows up, with the cavalry. No actual horses, of course of course. The police.

Sayu had a tracker, you see.

SAYU HAD A TRACKER. L USED HER AS FUCKING BAIT.

Calm down, Light. Calm down.

Someone might think you were emotionally affected by all the torture. Someone Russian. Or someone who thinks you're Kira and deserves everything and is taking delight in your pain. How could you give them the satisfaction?

Oh, they're all dead. The Russians, that is. When did that happen?

Good.

You still don't want to cry and it takes you a moment to remember why and it's all because that's something you don't try to do, it's not you, you're no herbivore man (even if you secretly don't like sex, nobody can know that not even you, shhh Light keep it a secret from Light okay?)

God he was off his rocker right now. His thoughts were so inane. Have you ever had intrusive thoughts of the most inane bullshit just pop into your head? Light had a whole book about it but never did he think it would happen to fucking him, unless you count all those thoughts about fucking ennui and fucking L.

No not that way, shut up brain. He didn't even know what L looked like.

It is many hours before Light feels completely composed again, and honestly everything that happened was kind of a blur.

He knows he must have got medical attention, because he ended up in a hospital.

He tells them he doesn't want any pain killers and they don't believe him. He's afraid of getting too loopy and suggestable when he knows he's already loopy and possibly suggestable.

"You have a visitor."

"I want to be left alone right now."

Thankfully, the nurses seem to have enough sway to insist he needs rest, not interrogation. That means he isn't immediately the number one suspect or they would have interrogated him anyway. Or at least not solidly number one.

Freaking out over Sayu has to look bad, though. But the timing... that could be a good thing actually.

Because it could seem like Kira learned the location the exact same moment L's team did. That he was either a very good hacker, very good at paying attention to moving GPS signals (even if encrypted, sending off a signal to indicate your location is still sending off a signal that indicates, well, your location), or he had insider information. Maybe even L himself.

He can't really make any excuse to refuse to see his dad the next day. His anger at him for not coming sooner is completely and utterly irrational, and he won't embarrass them both by bringing it up. Instead Light smiles and says, "It's good to see you, Tou-san."

"I'm glad you're doing better, Light. But we need to speak to you about what happened. Is that okay?"

Light nods. Nodded. Noddy.

He's still not really himself, but at least he's not medicated right now. His nonexistent nails hurt too much like a bitch for that.

Watari walks in holding a laptop and props it open on one of those little wheelie tables the nurses like to put terrible hospital food on. A great gothic looking L is on the gray colored screen.

"Light Yagami."

"Lind L. Tailor," he cracks a joke that nobody else knows is a joke and grins like the name is funny, which is probably not something he should be doing but he's too loopy to stop himself. He doesn't remember if anyone else knows yet L isn't actually Lind L. Tailor. His brain feels like mush. Right now he can't even remember if he killed Tailor after an appropriate time period for him to 'discover' Tailor was really a criminal. He doesn't think he did.

"That's not my actual name. That was a criminal I used to test the hypothesis Kira can kill from a distance quickly."

"I can't remember if I saw that second broadcast or not," Light says idly, thinking it may be beneficial to claim his brain is mush because, well, it's true, and two, it'll let him fuck up a bit and he can just say he isn't sure and they'll have to leave him be, he just went through a horrific experience so he has the perfect excuse after all.

He sees Ryuk come in through the window and the sad thing is he can't tell if he's hallucinating again or not or if it is really Ryuk.

"What makes you think there was a broadcast if you can't remember seeing one?" L asks.

Light shrugged. "To try to taunt Kira into killing him one last time? To better see if it was lack of aggression or lack of ability?" Belatedly in his brain fog he realizes he probably shouldn't have revealed he's clever enough to think of that. He should have just gone with he didn't know. How is it possible to be smart-stupid?

"Interesting." L's distorted voice is harder to interpret, but Light thinks he does sound genuinely interested. Actually, a bit like a cat with a canary. "You know, I've asked several other of the kidnapping victims. Do you know what they had in common?"

Kira suspects being tailed? Light shakes his head in the negative. "The Russians all thought we might know something about the Kira organization, wanted to know who we were working for."

"They were all flagged as suspects. We had 24 agents tagging along 24 families, including yours. One kidnapping victim was an old school teacher, some were part time workers, and several were students. They were all individuals whose schedules matched the first Kira and had ties to the police or legal system. Not one of them besides you hinted they could figure out right away on their own the first broadcast was supposed to be bait to get Lind. L. Tailor killed."

His father Soichiro looks extremely uncomfortable at that statement. And why wouldn't he? It's horribly unethical. Or maybe he's uncomfortable at the suggestion his son might be a murderer. Or both.

"So what you're saying is none of them were a moron," Light said half-jokingly, nodding. "I may have brain damage right now, so cut me a break okay?" He points at the bruise he doesn't recall getting but which uglifies a good quarter of his face. (Later, he would kick himself for not simply saying he did not hint it, L outright told him the criminal was bait, his loopy grin from before was just his tired brain finding the name funny for no reason.)

To his surprise, this does get L to give a short surprised laugh. "Yes, well, I'm afraid I have to accuse you of one more stupidity. The agent that was killed was the one following you."

"Now that's just insulting," Light said, actually slightly miffed at the notion L may be even half serious here. "You really think if someone were Kira they'd go 'oh yeah, I will kill the one guy following me and nobody else, that will not paint a giant neon sign saying I am guilty'? And you really think if I were freaking Kira, I'd volunteer to get tortured as part of some nefarious plan to, what, get this one dude killed?" Light shook his head. "That makes no sense. Why did you even focus on people with possible ties to the investigation if you were going to go ahead and assume Kira has no investigative ability?"

"My apologies. I merely had to bring it up," L said, sounding completely unapologetic, "Actually, several of the FBI agents were killed."

"You mean CIA." That had to be deliberate. "So you were literately just messing with me right now," Light is starting to get annoyed. "Wonderful."

"I wanted to see if you would panic," L said simply. "Do you know why I focused on those with ties to the investigation?"

Light shrugged. "I am quite curious naturally, but since I'm not part of the investigation, I can't ask you to tell me. I presume Kira showed some knowledge he or she shouldn't have, like by killing someone he couldn't otherwise have known about, but in that case you'd expect Tailor would have died immediately." Light paused, curiosity niggling at him too much. "Speaking of Tailor, what did they do to get their arrest covered up? Were they a whistleblower? That wouldn't ordinarily get the death penalty, but, he clearly wasn't from Japan." Nobody said every single country had an ethical system.

L paused, and when they spoke again, sounded quite intrigued. "You know, it would explain a lot about Kira if Kira felt uncomfortable killing Tailor only on the knowledge that he was a criminal, but not for exactly what crime and on what evidence."

Light groaned. "Forget I even asked." He closes his eyes, exhausted, and almost falls asleep despite the stakes.

"Light?" his father says.

Light jerks awake. "I'm here. You know, I was in solitary confinement and tortured by Russians. I assume killings by Kira continued, right?"

His father nodded.

"So doesn't that basically prove my innocence?" Light says, exasperated. "I mean, what more do you want from me?"

"Did any of the kidnappees reveal anything about Kira?"

"They tried to make stuff up, as you'd expect from the desperate under torture. One guy tried to claim the Australian President was Kira, and the killing weapon was a supersonic weapon developed in secret that they stole from the Chinese government. It was really quite elaborate, I almost believed it myself until he started talking about cloned alien space reptiles," Light mused. L goes silent, and alas through the screen Light cannot read his expression.

He starts to close his eyes again, but his father takes his hand. "There's one more thing we really need to know, Light."

"Mm?"

"How did one of the Russian men start firing on his own people when we arrived? Was it Kira?"

Light blinks. "I'm not sure that was Kira. He was one of the nicer ones there." Now for some bullshit. "I tried to coax him to turn on his fellow Russians."

"You were the one who got him to fire on his own men?" his father says, a bit incredulous, maybe a touch dismayed, because they had been thinking Kira did it and here was Light saying 'lol it was me'. Not in those words, but still.

"Yeah. I um," he bit his lip. Super total bullshit time. "I kissed him." He had not done any such thing.

"You what?!" Now his father is outraged and stressed, but he's no longer thinking anything about Light being Kira, which is good. Mission accomplished. He wanted this. Right?

"I had no choice!" Light shouted. "Would you rather I were dead?"

That, apparently, brings the nurse in, who scolds them for disturbing the patient so much.

"Of course not, Light, I'm just worried about... Did he force you?"

And Light doesn't know how to answer that. Did his Dad want the answer to be a 'yes'? Was he hoping for a no? "It didn't go all the way. It was just a kiss. Can we not talk about this anymore?"

"About the kiss, yes. About the Kira investigation? I may like to ask you more questions later. But I can let you rest for now," L states.

If some part of him were hoping for a 'I would love you no matter what' next, he doesn't get it here. Instead his father stares at him like Light is a stranger.

"I don't normally like to manipulate people's feelings like that. It's despicable. But they were going after Sayu, Dad," he starts to take on a begging tone, "Sayu. You have to know I'd do anything for her." Don't hate me just for implying I'm prison-gay, let alone normal gay.

"I know, Light," his father says, and something about this seems to give the man a touch of relief. "I know."

---

"What do you make of Light?" Yagami Soichiro asks L, when they are in the hotel room and not in Light's hospital room.

"He seems quite brilliant, though clearly not at his best right now. It's one thing to read about test scores, it's another to see someone in person respond to adversity." L does not think this line will actually bring the man any comfort, so he moves on. "I really want to hear his opinion about all the pieces of the Kira case. What he thinks of Kira's motivations."

"But he must be innocent by now," the older Yagami protests.

"Of course," not. "But I find his opinion illuminating for the possibilities of what Kira might be thinking, and it's comforting to have a second opinion come to the same conclusions I do. There is also the problem that of all those we've looked at so far, Light is the one who best fits the profile."

"Then perhaps it was made to frame him."

"Unlikely, but I suppose anything is possible. I suppose the real question is: can Kira control his victims?" Did he make the Russian Kira douse himself in oil and light himself on fire, or did raw charisma do that, even though the man was originally a criminal? If the latter... it didn't actually look better for Light, who had just shown he was willing to drive men to suicidal causes.

"It's possible Light thought his manipulations," that seems to give the man some pain to say, "were working, but in reality, Kira only knew the location when we found it."

"It does seem quite a coincidence, doesn't it?" L pops a strawberry into his mouth. "Yet, coincidences do occur. Like one of the few agents to die being Raye Penbar, who followed Yagami Light. Chief Kitamura's family (who were also being followed by him) doesn't really fit the profile, their kids are too young."

---

"I'm sorry ma'am, nobody is here," said the receptionist.

When Misora Naomi tried to contact the Kira investigators to ask if she could be part of it, Light didn't try to stop her.

 He just looked sad when she said, "I'm convinced Kira killed my spouse. I don't have any evidence, but, he was following a Kira suspect... I really need to contact L."

"Ah. I'm really sorry for your loss," Light interrupted, holding an ice pack to his face.

"Why? You didn't kill him, did you?"

"No. But I was the suspect. Look, I'll call my dad for you, okay? He's in direct contact with L." He put down the pack and got out his phone.

"You?" Her fist clenched. "You look like you've been put through a grinder. Just some kid. But if I find out you're Kira, I'll kill you myself."

"Ah, hey Dad, there's someone who wants to speak to you." He ignored her threat and handed the phone to her. She took it awkwardly. 

"I have a theory that Kira can control his victims, and kill by methods other than a heart attack," Misora said. A pause. "L already suspects that? I see," she said, sounding a little demoralized. "So I was no help at all." Another pause. "That does make me feel a little better, yes."

Light tuned himself out of the conversation. It's not his business, after all: he has no plans on tracking L down and murdering his face in. Though it is nice to know L's suspicions, seeming too interested and trying to push himself into the investigation when he is a suspect would just bring suspicion.

---

Being stared at is really unappealing right now. He wants to crawl under his own bed and not come out for days.

When he does come out, he makes sure to do so at irregular times and scan for danger first. Except for Sayu. He always goes out when Sayu does.

"Light, you're being really over-protective. It was scary but I was totally fine!"

That's right. She didn't get tortured.

But she could have. Would have.

She could have.

sHe cOuLd.

When no one is watching, he slaps himself. Get it together, Yagami! Then he remembers the cameras. He just made himself look really stupid, didn't he?

Well, he may as well bite the bullet and take advantage of the fact he's lost his mind. He looks at Ryuk and says, "Are you a hallucination?"

"Of course not, Light!"

"That's just what a hallucination would say," he teases.

"The cameras are gone, Light."

Light blinks, and double checks for himself the bathroom one. Ryuk is right: it is gone. "So you really aren't a hallucination. I'm glad. I was starting to worry the torture had broken my mind."

"You seem to be tougher stuff than most humans, Light-o."

Then why did he feel like he was on the verge of a breakdown?

...some people stare at him during his exams. He should be used to it by now, he knows he's pretty faced, and he can't get away with wearing sunglasses and a medical mask on an indoor test. Ryuk is laughing at something or someone, but he doesn't know what.

Except he's not actually pretty right now, his face is bruised up horribly.

Some other guy (part Japanese?) gets stared at too, and called out by a supervisor "Sit correctly!" to stop putting his feet on his own seat. Light feels a sort of odd sympathy for him. He really doesn't think sitting strangely is all that disruptive, the shouting was far more so.

When he finishes early, somehow, despite his head still not being quite as calm and cooperative with him as it used to be, he checks things over twice. It is horrible, not quite trusting yourself. Worse, he catches a dumb mistake he ordinarily never would have made.

But Light is still certain he did pretty well and passed.

He looks around and sees the other guy, the weird sitting black haired one with... no shoes? No-shoes has finished early. Ryuk laughs again. Is it really that funny?

Uncharacteristically perhaps, he decides to approach him. It might be nice to talk to an equal, if those even exist. Light is probably brain damaged enough to have equals now, he's sure. (That's not arrogant at allll. Intrusive thoughts.)

"I'm sorry about how the examiner treated you, that was uncalled for. I see you also finished early. Would you like to get a coffee or something?" Light asks.

The stare is so flat and those dark black eyes so expressionless Light actually starts to feel uncomfortable as the silence drags on. It would be easier if the other had just gotten flustered or angry, but no apparent reaction at all?

"Yes," the other finally answers, the weirdo, and Light is beginning to maybe regret his decision. "What do you want to talk about?"

Light shrugs. "We could make the generic small talk everyone does. Your intentions in coming here and dreams for the future, yadda ya. Or we could talk about society or philosophy, or politics. Tell me, what have you craved talking most about with other people?"

"Hm," the stranger tilts his head, examining him like a raven would. "The Kira case."

"Really?" A part of him is a little disappointed because, after recent events, a tiny part of him wants a break. But another part is genuinely curious about what other genuinely intelligent people think about. He hopes this isn't the kind of guy to do well on paper but in real life act purely on emotions. The flat expressions give him a strong impression that he won't be. "Well, alright. Shall I pick the place or you? I know a really nice little place."

"Does it have sweets?"

"Yes. Many coffee shops do, I think." Not that Light is some coffee shop surveyor. "Ah, my name is Light, by the way. Since we're talking about Kira, let's not give each other last names. Although I do find the idea of killing with just a name rather silly, I admit before Kira I wouldn't think anyone could kill from such a distance either."

There is a flicker of amusement there. "You can call me Ryuuzaki. Please lead the way."

"But that's not your real name? Mm, you must take the case, or at least the internet rumors, very seriously," Light says as he starts to move, amused until it occurs to him that this weirdo might actually be an investigator. But... no. Light approached him! The odds of that would be just... What would anyone even gain from staring at him doing a test, anyway?! No, this was clearly just some random guy. "You must be really into it."

"You could call it my favorite hobby right now, I suppose."

"Well, then let's hear your favorite deductions. Or I could regale you with some of the theories I've heard. Did you know some people think Kira is Elvis from beyond the grave? Or that it's Jewish Space Lasers?"

Ryuuzaki shudders at the sheer stupidity of that statement. "Please... don't torture me, Light-kun."

"Okay, I relent. But you have to contribute something to this conversation too, you know," Light prods.

"Very well. I think Kira is very adaptable, clever, altruistic, and has a strong sense of justice. He - and statistically, it is most likely a he - has a fair deal of restraint and patience, and desires to be merciful even to his enemies. I suspect he is a kind person to others in his day to day life."

Light hopes he isn't blushing because that would be a horrible give away. He focuses on his curiosity instead to keep that unwanted emotion away. "Wow, it sounds almost like you like him." He can't help but expect for the other penny to drop though. And does he really want this to be a fan? Call it hypocritical, but the thought of a copycat disturbed him. Someone gleeful over the impure being punished might decide Light was impure. There's no immediate 'yes' or 'no', so he continues on, "So you think Kira didn't go after Lind L. Tailor on purpose? Out of kindness?"

"Why, do you think otherwise?" It feels like there's some sort of trap there.

"Maybe, I just think it's possible Kira merely didn't attack because it was clearly a trap. Tailor was trying to goad Kira on as much as possible, which made it sort of obvious to anyone with ears," Light says, then amends in case Ryuuzaki didn't get it at the time so that he was not insulting the man, "Well, in hindsight anyway, perhaps at the time it would be easy to get caught up in the excitement. That brings up another possibility. If Kira has a god complex but isn't actually all powerful, maybe he just couldn't kill Tailor on such short notice."

"That doesn't really fit with the nursery hostage case, Kira's likely first kill."

"True. So I guess that gives two good possibilities. One, Kira just isn't that aggressive, or two, Kira dislikes giving in to being baited into acting and potentially giving information away."

"Three, both are true at the same time," Ryuuzaki says.

Light, actually being Kira, knows this but pretends otherwise. He nods. "Ah, yes. I suppose that is the option you prefer, since you think Kira is intelligent. It could be he just wasn't paying attention to the media, either." Is this a Kira fan, just one subdued enough not to scream it at first opportunity? That feels weird. A self flagellating part of Light might actually be more comfortable with condemnation. The part with a sense of self preservation (which is not as large as it should be these days) tells him he shouldn't associate with a Kira supporter at all. He might slip and seem less than neutral about it. But then, might total aversion be suspicious in and of itself, if he seemed too perfect? Maybe there was no way to win if someone was suspicious of him enough. Ugh.

...did Ryuuzaki just stare blankly at him while Light internally monologued? Huh.

"We're here," Light gestures at the shop, then opens the door for Ryuuzaki. The bell gives a pleasant jingle. He leads them to his favorite little secluded spot where few people will be able to stare at them. "One black coffee please, and?" he glanced at Ryuuzaki.

"One coffee with milk, extra sugar, and one strawberry cheesecake with extra cream."

So this guy was a bit of a sugar fiend. Some people in Japan would call that effeminate, but Light thought that was stupid. Your eating habits didn't say anything about your sexuality.

"Does Light-kun think Kira is intelligent?" Kun? So he was older than Light.

Light puts his hand to his chin. "I think that's very possible. But Kira could have a friend who does all the thinking for him, or he could just be very lucky. It's doubtful a single person really came up with a new way to commit mass murder-"

"Serial killings," Ryuuzaki corrects. Interesting. One point toward being an investigator, unfortunately.

"-at a distance," Light finishes without missing a beat. "I think at this point we can conclude it's at a distance, anyway, unless Kira can turn invisible and teleport across the world. Or is an organization, which, hm, does seem very possible after the killings in Russia and China and the fact new technology usually requires multiple people to develop. But sometimes accidental discoveries occur, and that could have been shared or the accident independently repeated."

"You think they were by different actors?"

"They were a bit different," Light said. "Wasn't it shocking when one of them offed a leader of an entire country? Kira hadn't done anything like that before."

"It was, but not entirely out of character. The man was reputedly a dictator, and was the sort you'd fully expect to eventually invade another country."

"Your freshly ground coffee is done!" The waitress arrived and set down a plate for Ryuuzaki and two cups for them both.

"I think that would give a pretty strong incentive for countries sharing a border or different political interests from Russia to have a secret Kira program. If it were China, that would explain why they'd frame Japan for it, as there aren't exactly strong friendly memories between the two countries," Light mused, enjoying the intellectual exercise. It didn't seem to be quite what Ryuuzaki was looking for, though, because he looked almost bored. Hmm. "The criminals may have just been experiments and a distraction from the real goal. If the killing pattern continues as-is that wouldn't support that very well, though." He seemed to maybe find that comment more interesting, but he was hard to read with that flat stare.

"What if I told you I had important information on the Kira case? Would you keep it a secret?" ...this weirdly enough put points both into 'Kira case fan' and 'investigator', as he could see both saying that.

"Do you mean keep it a secret from the public, or keep it secret from the investigation?" Light decides to ask outright, with his eyebrows furrowed together. "Because if you do have information, I suggest taking it to my father instead. He's actually a police chief, a senior officer of the national police."

"But you wouldn't want to hear it yourself?" Ryuuzaki asks. He did not answer the question.

"I don't know if I should tell you this, you might be the crazy stalker type for all I know," Light says jokingly, "But I was and may still be a suspect. I was actually kidnapped awhile back over it." He showed his still-bandaged right hand. "It would be pretty unprofessional to give me information, no matter how curious I may be."

"Mm, well, it was just a hypothetical." He has a strong feeling it wasn't. There's something strangely familiar about how infuriating he is starting to be. And the lack of interest in the kidnapping is bizarre, even for someone lacking social etiquette.

It's Light's turn to disconcertingly stare at Ryuuzaki, but Ryuuzaki seems completely unfrazzled, opting to take a bite of cheesecake.

"This information isn't a secret, and I'm sure your father already knows it. Kira's killing or lack thereof reveals a lot about himself. He didn't kill Tailor, but he also didn't kill another high profile criminal who on paper looked very guilty; it recently came out that they were really innocent. You know who Kira did kill before that reveal, which spooked a lot of police?"

"The corrupt cops who I presume deliberately didn't bring the evidence into court?" Light phrased it as a question.

"Bingo. It felt like a warning, as much as a demonstration of his moral code. But it indicates Kira may have access to information the public does not. But was it a warning he can kill police who offend him by thwarting his will, or was it a warning he would root out corruption even if politically uncomfortable?"

"A possible 'both' situation again, Ryuuzaki-san," Light says.

"Light-kun is very polite," Ryuuzaki says. "I did say you could call me Ryuuzaki, Light-kun." For some reason, he puts his thumb in his mouth.

That... is a bit much. They did just meet. On the other hand, did Ryuuzaki interpret this as a date? Did Light just ask someone out without realizing it? God, he did, didn't he? No, no, talking about a criminal case was a friend thing, not a typical date thing.

Well, hopefully his Dad will never, ever know either way.

"I take it you want to meet again?" he says, feeling perhaps the most awkward he's ever felt in his entire life.

"I would like that very much. How about a game of tennis?"

Tennis? How on Earth did he know Light played? Could that really just be coincidence? This was beginning to get unnerving again. Another point for 'investigator'. But for some reason, Light wanted to pretend for a little while longer. This had been nice. Ish.

"Alright, but I may be a bit rusty," Light agreed. "So where are you from?"

"England. But it won't let you deduce my identity." Light just rolls his eyes at that.

"Why do you sit like that?"

"It helps with my deductive skills. If I do not, they are reduced by 40%."

Light's eyebrows raise at the sudden percentage, which sounded made up. "You made a data chart and plotted the probability of you getting something correct based on how you sit? Did you take two different tests or something?"

"I took multiple tests." He was serious? Wow. Except... Light had done the same thing once.

"My deductive abilities drop slightly when I'm sufficiently bored," Light confessed. "By 10 IQ points." Since Ryuuzaki was surely over 100 IQ, was he really saying he dropped over 40 IQ points just by changing his posture? That sounded a bit ridiculous and over the top to him, but then again, Light didn't have sensory issues or back pain.

"IQ tests aren't the greatest revealer of true ability. There is a strong socioeconomic aspect to it as well."

"Says the guy who took multiple tests, presumably some of which resembled or were IQ tests," Light poked. Alright, now he was calling it. "You just pulled that percentage out of your ass, didn't you?" His father would scrub his mouth out if he heard him swear like that.

Ryuuzaki sipped his coffee and said nothing. Light gave an undignified snort.

Alright, so the man was a troll. A total troll. But he was kind of fun? Light hadn't really been challenged by anyone in a really long time, so this was actually surprisingly enjoyable.

"One last question: if you were Kira, would you kill investigators to save your own life?"

Light didn't have to fake being aghast. "Of course not! One of them is my own father, Ryuuzaki!" He forced himself to calm, as he realized he may have answered that wrong. "Ah, I suppose I should have asked for clarification: do you mean if Kira had my personality, or do you mean what I would do if I were Kira and had Kira's personality?"

"Why not both?"

"Ah... I really couldn't say what Kira would do. The fact he or she killed police does make it rather ambiguous, so I would be reluctant to leap to any sort of conclusion."

"I had the same thought."

"Since you've finished your cake, I think it's a good time to let you go. I'm sure you've got other things to do with your life. See you next time." Light stands up to go pay.

"What do you make of the Russian Kira going quiet?" Ryuuzaki asks suddenly.

"Ah, if the First Kira killed the Russian Kira for displaying too much individuality in his kills, then he is truly despicable for doing that to a loyal follower," Light said, and then, not wanting to drag out the conversation any longer, he pulled out his wallet. Hopefully they could pick a safer conversation topic next time?

Only to find Ryuuzaki moving to pay instead, leaving him a bit flustered.

"I have more cash than I know what to do with," Ryuuzaki says to his surprise. If Light had guessed, he would have thought Ryuuzaki was a destitute student who couldn't afford shoes. Maybe Light shouldn't make wild ass guesses. Clearly, Ryuuzaki just didn't like the tactile sensation of most shoes (or possibly socks against shoes?) very much.

"I'll pay next time," Light said firmly.

There was, in fact, a broadcast revealing Lind L. Tailor isn't L awhile back. He supposed L couldn't have everyone believing a criminal was really him for very long, huh? Light isn't sure how he missed it, but he has been pretty busy and he isn't all knowing. He'd stopped paying attention to the exact message of the broadcasts goading Kira by Tailor after the first one.

They play tennis and it's nice. Light's bruises have mostly healed but he is a little stiff and sore still, he's avoiding use of one of his hands entirely (normally he's happy to do a quick swap), so he's not surprised when he loses.

"Good game," he says cheerfully. "When I'm feeling better, I'd like a rematch sometime."

"I suspected you would."

Light's response had been completely normal, right? There was nothing that screamed 'I am Kira' about it? He hated he was even double guessing himself like that.

It's a very, very pleasant surprise to find he got top scores. He has always been good at memorization, but still. He'd been worried because his time in the hospital, except for the horrible moment where he told his dad he kissed a guy when he hadn't (why did he do that? ugh) was a massive blur. He literately couldn't remember arriving or leaving there, which wasn't like him at all.

Then he learns he has to make a speech with Ryuuzaki at the To-oh Ceremony and he's not sure what to think about it. This feels... too coincidental. Then again, he did finish early. Light is reading too much into it.

Clearly.

"Would you like my number so we can contact each other later if you like?" Ryuuzaki asks.

He gets Ryuuzaki's number scrawled on his hand when he says he doesn't have any spare paper. (Well, he does, but it's murder paper in his pocket...) Light tries not to blush, but he's pretty sure Ryuuzaki noticed. As well as a gawking onlooker.

Ryuzaaki's speech is ridiculous and Light smothers a laugh. "I encourage you all to apathetically march toward a future of boring conventional expectations."

L had of course poured on the flattery about Kira just to see his reaction. There had been a bit of a flustered reaction, but that could have been from complimenting Kira and didn't by itself spell guilt. He was careful to avoid saying he was a Kira supporter, as that would give Light a reason to stop the conversation.

Light was a honest surprise. He'd never expected the young man would approach him like that. He had only been there to observe. But he knew an opportunity when it came knocking.

He was very, very much like Kira. Cautious, aware of multiple possibilities at once, and more laid back than one would initially expect. His suspicions were aroused.

There was a small flicker of worry, of course. What if Kira had other supernatural abilities and had approached him because of that, and already knew his identity? But, if that was case, he clearly hadn't killed him over it. Thus, for now he'd operate under the assumption Light was oblivious. Or mostly oblivious. He was sure L's line of questioning had made Light slightly suspicious to nearly certain that L was really an investigator. L's strangeness worked as an advantage here: his dodge of the question of whether he was a supporter could be taken as part of his lack of social tact, rather than a deliberate move.

For the first time during this case, he was feeling more confident and less anxious about a complete inability to solve it, more like a normal case. Perhaps irrationally because he still didn't have enough information, he was a bit less afraid for his life too, as he suspected Kira would only retaliate under fairly severe provocation like torture. In fact...

L had decided to recommend decreasing information flow of criminal names and faces. Hopefully, Kira would react positively, or at least not aggressively, going along with his profile so far.

Chapter Text

Light baked an apple and rose flavored cake, and a buttery maple syrup apple crumble.

Or more precisely, he helped Ryuk bake a cake, as part of his mission to keep Ryuk from getting bored and murder-y. He spent a moment thinking about what it would be like to be a shinigami, and concluded that if he were to live a really long time, he'd want to try a bunch of different things at least once. So he asked Ryuk if he'd ever cooked before. Unsurprisingly, the shinigami said no.

Ryuk tried a warm slice of both with a side of vanilla ice cream. "That's not bad. I'm still perfectly happy with normal apples, mind you... But the baked apples are delightful."

"And there's something nice about eating something warm you made with your own hands, right?" Light inquired.

"It doesn't feel like a very shinigami thing to do, but, I guess food is technically already dead."

"Heating it up is like making it even deader. Or just plain dead. If there was plant material like a seed that got baked, it's completely useless for growing now."

"Well, I don't care for the cake very much, so you can have the rest of it. I'll take the crumble, though."

Now what was Light going to do with all this cake? Oh! He had the perfect idea.

"Hey Ryuuzaki," he dials the man up on their landline phone. Ryuk hovers very close so he can eavesdrop on both sides of the conversation. It's a bit disconcerting, actually, having the shinigami inches from his face.

"Light-kun, this is a surprise. But good timing, I had something I wanted to tell you."

"I baked you a cake! You like sweets, right?"

"You..." Ryuuzaki sounds flustered, which is delightful because it's so hard to get him to emote. "I see. Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet, you don't even know if you like it. So what was it you wanted to talk to me about?"

"I was wondering if you'd seen the news yet."

"No?" Light's gut feels like it drops, despite the physical impossibility. He'd been busy baking today, was he going to regret that? Someone more official than a fellow student would have told him if his dad had died, he reassured himself. "Did something bad happen? Are the police okay?"

"Nothing like that, Light, it's good news," Ryuuzaki reassures. "I'd prefer to talk about it in person. See you later with your cake?"

"Sure," Light said, perking up. Turning off the phone, he looks to Ryuk and can't help a little wistful shyness. It's not like Ryuk is going to tell on him. "Do you think he likes me?"

For some reason, that sets Ryuk into peals of laughter. Ass.

Light had made him cake? That... why? They barely knew each other. Could Light somehow suspect? Had L made an error in showing a weakness for sweet things to a potential enemy?

L would have to have Watari inspect it for poison.

"This is all pretty bad news for you, huh Light? First investigators on your tail who know you have police ties, now they're cutting off all names from the TV, or if it is unavoidable then removing the faces. Might be a good time to take the eye deal," Ryuk suggests once they are in the privacy of his room and Light has researched what this mystery news could be.

"Actually, I view it semi-positively."

"Eh?"

"First, the investigators will be uneasy with each other now if they think there is a mole within the police. Most of the police probably aren't very keen on being investigated by L. If some of them are dirty, this could be a good chance for them to get caught," Light said brightly, then dulled, "provided L cares if he finds their dirty laundry. He might feel, like many allied with the police, a united front is more important than actual justice," he grumbled. "But I think Dad would say something if he knew about it, so there's that."

"And what about the information?"

"Well, I wasn't really relying on the TV much anyway except for breaking hostage situations and the like. I'll regret not being able to do anything about those, but, I think if someone got desperate enough they'd shout the name before it got bleeped out on live TV, you know?" Light said mischievously. "And there's a good chance the police databases would still get updated, although they may be moving on to a policy of having more information on paper. It's problematic that I had to reveal I have ties to the police, but... since I can just control a corrupt cop to be a Kira, it doesn't actually reveal that much in the end, does it? A different version of me would have gotten the information in the end regardless. All I have to do is demonstrate that, and L will be forced to widen back up his suspect pool again to potentially thousands if not millions of people."

"And if they move all of it to paper? You gonna use the hypothetical corrupt cop to get at the data?"

"Maybe a couple times to reduce suspicion. Then... I guess the narrative is that the world cared enough about even those lowest on the totem pole enough to protect them. That's actually not a bad end and one of the best 'defeats' for Kira I can think of, the other possible defeats all ending, well, in my death or in prison." Light paused. "If the apparent 'victory' and the rush of that could be used to push for further reforms, like focusing on prevention and experimenting with what's most effective for rehabilitation and low recidivism, then it could be pretty good. But there's a chance people will just take it as an opportunity to say 'See? We care about society!' and then just band aid over everything and not really change the system at all."

"And then you would start killing more again? The fact you can just get around their information blocks, and their attempts to pin your location down better, doesn't that mean you've won?" Ryuk asked.

"There's a chance, yeah, but I'd have to be really careful about it. My victory here isn't as strong as you might think. It's closer to a tie." Not for the first time, Light wondered if maybe he'd chosen the wrong targets and should have gone after more high status people than he had, especially as his initial avoiding of them hadn't worked when one of his Kiras had just offed some of them anyway. He was watching the situation in Russia pretty carefully, wondering if it would end in disaster or something better for the people there. It looked pretty chaotic, but there were a few old faces that were coming out as likely successors and they all seemed pretty corrupt. It wasn't looking too hopeful. Was neither direction enough to nudge genuine change? Maybe he just wasn't being strategic enough.

Maybe he needed to send an actual message, despite his distaste for it. Just killing people was sort of vague, wasn't it? He'd have to experiment to see with what he could get people to write so he could maybe do an evidence-free version. He was pretty sure there were limits to how people could act, as he'd already tried out unrealistic deaths and they'd just ended up in heart attacks. So secret knowledge of what Kira really wanted was probably out, but an intuitive impression and sense of doom was within human behavior.

"If I do just a couple kills of the worst of the worst, it'll make it clear I could get around their sanction attempts, but am choosing not to. That would be a good ending message. L 'wins', but in the most annoying possible way for L to win. He'd hate it immensely," Light added, and enjoyed Ryuk's glee, but then the shinigami shook his head.

"That'd be a bit confusing, don't you think? Saying you respect the law now but not before and not enough to not kill anybody? They'd wonder what you really meant."

"That people should make up their minds on whether they really value criminal lives or not," Light said. "I want a safer world, and I guess I don't really care whether you kill criminals or save them from themselves to do it. But... you're right, that probably is too ambiguous for most people. Most people really aren't critical thinkers. They don't look at the system and go, hold on, there are clearly parts that can be improved. Maybe they get a sense that something is wrong, like maybe our Japanese system shouldn't have a 99% percent conviction rate, but they often don't know what the real problem is or what kind of law would help fix it. They get ideas like 'people are inherently good' or 'people are inherently bad' or 'the police are always right' and get rigid and inflexible about it and can't dream of experimenting with anything else that might violate their worldview."

"So this is all an experiment to you."

"Isn't it to you?" Light gestured toward him with a sweep of his hand. "This whole game?"

Ryuk laughed. "Yeah, I suppose you could say that. I didn't think you saw it the same way, though. You seemed a bit too concerned."

"I am concerned," Light said. "But how am I supposed to learn how the world really works if I don't experiment, instead of just making assumptions?"

"I guess that's the difference between a human and a shinigami. We don't really experiment with anything all that often. Or do much at all except gamble. It's why it's so boring there in our decaying world."

"Do you think they're gambling on me right now?" Light said.

"You can bet your life on it."

Light didn't find that statement terribly comforting. What if some shinigami killed him in order to cheat?

Light shook his head and put his mind off it. "Let me tell you what I meant by a tie..."

This, this was his lucky break. Kira was controlling corrupt police, and the pattern of kills made L suspect that Kira might actually be using some of them as Kiras - one kill was before the information was even in the database.

He quickly set up a watch around some remaining local suspected corrupt police and cameras, and also reached out internationally to have some internationally-known corrupt cops get watched (there were unfortunately some pretty famous cases of cops going to court and getting off with a slap on the wrist). He was even prepared to send agents in immediately if a possible Kira appeared to talk to and (somehow?) mind control the police at their homes, though he doubted that was how Kira actually did it it didn't hurt to be prepared.

But then...

They simply didn't die, or do anything abnormal.

Kira had done the one thing L hated most from more clever criminals:

He had figured out how to stop while ahead.

Damn.

"...so you see, the issue is if I want to make others Kiras, I have to be really careful about not choosing targets that were predicted to be targets. The death note can't do impossible things. I might order them to destroy all evidence successfully, but if there comes a tipping point where that's physically impossible, it's not going to happen. If L is really, really over-prepared for a given target, he could learn they seem to be obsessed with scribbling on paper and flushing it down the toilet or the like."

"And that would be bad for you," Ryuk said.

"That would be very bad for me, because by bad luck L is focused on me as someone who fits his profile even if he's got zero concrete evidence, and he'd have zero compunctions about going over every piece of paper I own with a fine toothed nail if he was certain that was where the big clue was. So it's actually really not something I can repeat once there's been enough time for L to assemble teams internationally to bug every inch of suspected targets' houses. Fortunately or unfortunately, there are a lot of corrupt cops in the world, so he can't watch all of them and by their very nature they'd all not agree to be watched if they could help it. Indeed, there's a good chance that by random chance I could just keep doing this strategy safely by focusing on switching up which international targets I pick, and by figuring out what cops are corrupt but aren't known by the wider world to be so. However, he only has to get lucky once, and then bam," Light made a shooting gun motion at his own head. "I'm dead."

"So L is winning right now after all."

"Yeah, but, he's winning in a way where he'll feel like he's losing... So is that really a win?" Light said with a shit eating grin. "And I can keep thinking about other ways to get information, or wait for the heat to die down - he can't justify bugging all of their houses forever, can he?"

"You're a real tease, Light. I'm glad to be saddled with a human with a sense of humor."

Well, while that rankled, L was very much looking forward to talking to Light and getting his reaction to the cut off of information, which surely couldn't be very happy -

"Breaking news, L. You need to watch Sakura TV right now," Watari informed him.

Oh.

He had a bad feeling about this. Of course there was no way the world was reacting to his random thoughts, but there were only so many options about what it could be, and he doubted Watari would call him because someone was suffering from an entirely natural disaster like a hurricane... could Kira kill by hurricane? Hm.

When he changed the channel and finally started to hear what had Watari so interested, his first thought was: This doesn't fit the profile.

"Please understand, we are hostages and this is not a hoax!"

Light is watching Sakura TV only because Sayu was bored and interested in it, and he has time to kill before he's set to go meet up with Ryuuzaki and deliver the cake. He's not expecting, well...

Kira, who is supposed to be him and thus very much not interested in making TV appearances even in the form of gothic letters and an ominous distorted voice.

This is clearly an imposter. But if they are trying to support him and have their own note, they could have the eyes.

"I am Kira. To prove my identity, the imposter-L has been killed. I disapprove of the removal of all criminal names and faces from the media, and I demand the police and public cooperate to make a better world, starting by rescinding that action, and disallowing public questioning of my actions. Together, we can make a world free from crime. If you doubt my abilities, then please switch to Taiya TV right now, provided this is aired at the time that I asked. The anchor, Mr. Kazuhiko Hibima will die of a heart attack at exactly 6 o'clock, April 18." Sayu switched, and it was exactly as said. "I trust you believe now that I am Kira. Please don't misunderstand me. I hate evil, and love justice. I consider police my allies, and not my enemy. I intend to create a world without evil. If no one tries to catch me, the innocent will not die. Even if you do not agree with me... Keep your sentiments to yourself. Do not broadcast it. And I will let you live. Please be patient as I work. I will create a world with only kind people in it."

"I need to go," he says abruptly. He grabs first some old posterboard and a small erasable whiteboard he had from ages ago, some years ago as a child when he made some forgettable school project and had some left over. Then he looks up the location of the station and directions to it, which wasn't something he'd cared to know before (why would he?).

He scrawls 'KIRA. Have mercy on the cops please!' very quickly. It's not a terribly long or elegant message, but he can't afford one of those right now.

Then he bikes out, wearing a medical mask and a bicycle helmet on his face.

"Ryuk, can I assume the shinigami won't tattle that you are there?"

"I wouldn't. But we don't have a code about it."

"I appreciate you respecting my privacy," Light looks on the bright side of this, even if it might get him killed, at least his family won't get dragged through the mud. Ryuk would just take the book back and the other Kira would be none the wiser.

He's too late. Ukita is there. Light tries to block the sight of Ukita by holding up the sign but since he doesn't know where Kira might be looking from, he finds himself turning awkwardly and scanning, and Ukita giving him a baffled look.

"Light, what on earth are you doing here? Well, I don't have time for this, I need to-"

Ukita stills.

Light was too late.

Light frantically scrawls a message on the whiteboard.

'KIRA, REMEMBER YOUR MERCY for TAILOR BEFORE.' Damnit, he's out of space. He erases with his bare hands, then writes again, 'YOU CANNOT BLAME THE COPS FOR BEING USED TO OLD RULES.'

Damn it, he's on national television now isn't he? And he only has a medical mask on, that's hardly much protection. The whole public may end up knowing who he is shortly.

Oddly, he's not really worried about the other Kira killing him. One, he hasn't tried to enter, and he's begging like a good little worshipper. Two, Ryuk is at his side: they'll probably at least pause when their shinigami suddenly laughs about it, maybe want to interrogate him first before killing him to learn his story or something, or gloat that they're taking over, or something.

They seem very childish, which is embarrassing. Is that kind of Kira really how he came across?

Maybe he really should rethink everything he is doing. This is just humiliating.

He spots a small truck barreling right toward the station, and hastily pedals out of the way, hoping this isn't some weird Kira murder attempt.

It's not: it's his dad! What the heck?

Thankfully, his dad is wearing a coat over his head. No worries about immediate tou-san death here.

"Light, get in the car."

"It's covered in sharp glass and if Kira decides they want me dead, it's already too late tou-san." He paused. "Unless my medical mask and bike helmet is enough, but I doubt it. That only covers a little bit of my face, you can clearly still tell who I am."

His father sighs and brushes the glass away from the vehicle door and passenger seat with a heavy glove. Then his father goes in and confiscates all the tapes while Light simply waits outside. Two police arrive and to his dismay aren't wearing any helmets to obscure their faces, but then, why would they? This is such a strange situation.

Light writes one final message. 'PLEASE.'

Kira does not kill the police. Maybe it's mercy, maybe he or she actually didn't have the eyes and had looked up Ukita's name before - it used to be public information after all. They walk right by to check on the body, blissfully unaware of how close they were to death. Light drops the board in relief. He can't quite bring himself to write thanks.

"Light, what you just did was incredibly reckless," his father scolds him when he comes out. "Come with me. I feel like I can't let you out of my sight without you somehow getting involved with danger." Light winces at that. He's not wrong, but Light doesn't like being talked about like a misbehaving child.

His father drives him all the way to the task force.

"I'll wait in the lobby," Light remarks, and sits down on a plush chair for a long wait. The idea doesn't bother him too much: he could use time to unwind.

"Actually... I'd like it if Light came in," a familiar voice interrupts his reverie.

Light looks up, and responds, "L?" It isn't that unreasonable a guess at this point, but the other could have just as easily been another investigator. Still... not just anyone would talk like that to his father, and Light recognizes most of the police who have worked closely with his father.

"Yes. But you can call me Ryuuga Hideki."

"Amazing! How did you know he was L with a single glance?" Matsuda is standing right by a very familiar dark haired, slouched foreigner, holding a stack of papers and photos.

Light scrunches up his nose. Like the idol? How fake. Does he hate the celebrity? "I'm not calling you that, Ryuuzaki...-San," he adds belatedly. "We've met before." Though L hadn't confessed his identity, Light left that out.

"We are all going by code names. I suppose Ryuuzaki would be acceptable. Your father is going by Asahi," L said.

"Which would make me Light Asahi, I suppose," he said dryly. "I guess I'll just go by Lucifer."

"Light!" his father scolds. Right, his dad is here, that means he has to be a polite golden boy. Who definitely does not swear or engage in dark humor.

Light bows slightly in apology. "Forgive my manners, it's been a trying time for me. As a suspect, I think it would be best if I am not involved. I don't want to be unprofessional."

"You are no longer a suspect, Light," his father tells him gently. Bullshit. He wants to give L the stink-eye, but he can't, so he just plasters on an expressionless face and nods.

"That's good."

"So now you have no excuse," L says, the little shit. "Come, I want you to watch the other tapes with us and give me your conclusion about it all."

Light resists a sigh. He knows he's not getting out of this now.

As they go up, L moves close to his side quietly and says, "Light-kun is quite a performer, especially when his father is around."

"It's called basic social expectations. You should try applying it sometime."

From the glance his father gives him, he hasn't been quite quiet enough and his father knows he said something. Thankfully, they've reached another room with Watari and Aizawa, so his dad is distracted from asking him anything about it or scolding him again for being sharp tongued. Matsuda puts down the papers: from what Light can make out from a quick glance it looks like it's just a bunch of info about Sakura TV and various news anchors and anyone who might be considered their enemy. There's another box with a few video tapes, and a TV.

They play a video, looking very expectantly at him - clearly they've talked about this and expect some sort of reaction. No suspicions his ass.

It's a tape by Kira, and it lays out simple terms:

If the police accept, L and police leadership must show themselves. If they don't accept, 'Kira' wants L to appear to face his retribution, or others will suffer for it. It's... ominous and disturbing, honestly.

"They want L to show his face so they can kill him?" Light said, baffled. "I guess maybe the original Kira was aggressive after all."

"Only maybe?" L says, expectant.

"Well, we know there may be multiple Kiras." Or not, considering their startled look. How stupid were they? Damn, no wonder L was desperate enough to drag him in here. "Perhaps this one went rogue. Maybe they even killed the first Kira already for being too soft."

"No, that doesn't fit with them deciding to spare you and the police. But I agree there is a second Kira."

"So this was a test?" he doesn't believe this enough to say it with any heat, the other possibility weighing too much on his mind. Or well, not just a test.

"No," at this Light nods before L can explain any further, getting it. L closes his mouth with a keen stare fixed on Light. In fact, Light feels a weird urge to apologize for having to deal with the others, but they're still in the room so he can't. Not without getting grounded for a month, anyway.

"We only really had Ukita's death and L's conclusion based on Kira's past behavior," Matsuda seemed to feel the urge to explain, plugging up the silence. Perhaps he thought L had been rude rather than efficient, missing the silent exchange and confusing Light's nod for simple agreeability or not noticing it in the first place from looking at L instead.

"It's really remarkable you came to the exact same conclusion," Aizawa said.

"Exact same?" Light backpedals. "L disagreed with me immediately. I'm just good at coming up with different possibilities, that's all."

"So it really could just be one Kira?"

"Maybe, but," should he really throw L a bone when the guy was probably trying to manipulate him for the sake of eventually killing him? These guys are so frustrating though. He can do that and annoy L at the same time. "It would be kind of elaborate, pretending to be multiple Kiras. "

"But he is not incapable of being elaborate," L says, and for some reason the idea of L not getting it bothers him, though he knows L is probably just picking up on him using the wrong reasoning for the right conclusion that there were at least two Kiras. Is it just not wanting the other Kira to take credit for him? For his name getting tarnished? It's already pretty smoulderingly bad, Kira is a bastardization of killer after all. But he thinks what really bothers him is the idea of L also being an idiot, so for once, he hopes L is just mentally fucking with him. "But that actually works against this. This Kira seems a bit stupider than the other one. The logo looks a bit poorly done, for instance. I feel like the original Kira would have put more effort into it and would have made a higher quality video."

Flattering, he supposed? "Oh, you're right, that does look a bit shoddy, good catch," he said to excuse his involuntary slight smile. "The first Kira seemed pretty careful about not leaving evidence, and if they were capable of killing with just a face, they were clearly trying to hide it, perhaps so their enemies would slip up," he gives a very quick flash of a wolfish smile to L who similarly fails to entirely control his own emotional reaction, a jolt of fear. "Though if that had happened by now, I'd expect we'd see more deaths," he placates, still looking at L. "Killing just one person just seems kind of a sad payoff. No offense." 

Somehow, this conversation goes completely over everyone else's heads, so Light's smile returns, though not quite as intense. 'Friendly'. This wolfishness gives a different note to his placation. Ryuk's laughter in the background gives another.

Light has basically implied he can kill L at any time and is choosing not to, for now. If it had been more mildly said, it would have had more of a tone 'cannot actually do so' or 'will never do so'. Implying to the wider room that Kira would have killed multiple by now, while implying to L that maybe the reason the deaths hadn't happened yet was Kira was waiting to see how many faces would line up ever so nicely for the slaughter.

Is it true he could off them? Well, sort of. It isn't like he even needs the Death Note to kill, though that would be rather brash. And he could make the eye deal at any time. He just has to stop giving enough of a fuck. Another round of torture might do that, he hates to admit. But, probably not as long as it's just him being tortured and he has some hope of getting out at the end, he supposes. He withstood hell before, he can do it again. If L gets cowed by this threat, though, he won't mind. More likely he'd take it as permission to keep going with knowledge that Kira wasn't aiming to kill him at all, or was at least pretending not to aim to kill him.

"Light-kun must be mad at me," L says, and now Light is feeling disarmed. Mad at him? When he was the most challenge and amusement he'd had in a long time?

"I... Well, maybe a tiny bit," he admits. Seeing the others looking confused, he added some context, "We played tennis together and he pretended to be a completely normal student the whole time." That was the excuse answer. Of course he couldn't give the real answer that L wanted to capture and then likely execute him, and had tried his hardest to be very annoying at every opportunity. The black outs had miffed him a bit, he had to admit. And he still wondered if L had deliberately let Sayu get captured, or if it was an 'accident' and simply happy precaution she got tagged.

"Ryuuzaki, were you stalking my son?" His dad also apparently refused to call him Ryuuga Hideki, good ol' Dad, standing up to his shitty boss. Ish. Standing up-ish. Light was doubting there would be any real repercussions if L had been stalking him, which was a wee bit demoralizing. He'd likely threaten to leave and do his own investigation solo if L kept acting too outrageously, though, so you might call that a consequence.

"I actually intended to reveal myself," was that a fib? "but Light insisted he didn't want to know my name or much about the investigation. I wasn't exactly pretending to be a normal student, though," and here L looks back at him again, one brow slightly raised, "something tells me you already knew. You certainly knew to guess right away I was L when you saw me today. Which is certainly intriguing. May I ask how you knew?"

"I-" Light has walked right into that one. "I didn't know you knew I likely knew about you. That's different. Besides, you might have just been a Kira supporter instead, that was a perfectly valid alternative possibility for you being so fascinated by the case. But your lack of reaction to my injury was the moment that made me suspicious that you were L specifically." This is getting convoluted for outside listeners who don't have the original context, he guesses.

"Because he already knew about it?" Matsuda guesses.

Because 'both' versions of him knew about it and didn't really care, Light thought but didn't say.

Oddly, L seems willing to drop it here, even though Light hinted he had suspicions before that moment. "Light-kun is not used to being around someone on his level or above. I understand."

Rolling it over, he thinks about how what he was really irritated about was L seeming willing to play with his feelings. But maybe L never seriously considered it as a date or friendship attempt and thought of it as Light trying to play with L's feelings, perhaps mistakenly thinking Light had guessed all the way back from catching L staring at him? In any case, this questioning and response is not the answer the team probably thinks it is. Or not just.

L gauged or guessed Light would cool down with some soothing, or at least could be mildly ruffled and made to look secretive and dishonest himself, so it was a win-win unless he miscalculated and Light really did have the power to kill him then and there and the inclination if further irritated, in which case, it was probably better to know that now surrounded by everyone rather than later. It was a good move.

"Light, would you be willing to help us compose a response video from the 'original Kira' telling them to stand down?"

"Sure, Ryuuzaki-san," he is back to being polite and calm, and he spends more time looking at everyone here equally instead of looking at just L like he was the only one in the room that mattered. He finds himself wanting some coffee or tea to sip, and is glad to notice a coffee machine in the corner.

"I'll stand by what I said before: you may just call me Ryuuzaki." Is this for appearances among the task force, emotional manipulation, teasing, or - no, let's not kid, it's clearly all of the above. But it does have the nice side effect that if he feels L is being enough of a shit, he can be rude and drop the honorific he doesn't deserve.

"Ryuuzaki." Light feels no desire whatsoever to blush this time. It just rings hollow, honestly, thinking of the emotional manipulation aspect. "Do you want some coffee with extra sugar?" He just feels tired, all of a sudden. Only a day ago he would have enjoyed getting Ryuuzaki coffee, but now it feels even more like a facade. Even though he knew it was likely a facade? Is he really just miffed that he didn't know L suspected he already knew L might be L? Possibly from the way Light reacted cautiously to his Kira questions? Shinigami, that was a sentence. Maybe he's just unhappy he can't live in denial any longer. That seems about right. He'd liked Ryuuzaki, but he's not sure if he likes the dubiously ethical L.

"Yes please."

He remembers exactly the absurd amount L took last time. Apparently he has not lost all his empathy despite his annoyance, because he does like the look of enjoyment that briefly crosses L's face when he tastes it.

"I think you could just release a tape saying whatever you want Kira to say, and they'd buy it." It belatedly occurs to Light he's made the mistake of basically confirming to L that if Light is Kira, then there isn't an organization led by him keen on controlling all of the Kiras, because he just confirmed he doesn't care about this other Kira very much. Whoops. Of course, it would be very inconvenient if they actually caught the other, but since they've so nicely dragged him in to the case (...was the Task Force really that stupid L got desperate, or was L that desperate for a slip up from Light specifically that he wouldn't be satisfied by unraveling the whole case by catching a dimmer Kira? Both?), he can keep an eye on them.

"I think Light could spend a little more effort on making Kira sound authentic than just 'Do not let L die'," Ryuuzaki jokes, but in a very flat tone.

"Alright, are we going with an aggressive Kira who murdered other Kiras before and will do it again? Because I think that would just spook them badly and there's no telling what they'd do then if they feel their own idol hates them. Or if it turns out it's the first Kira after all, pretending there are multiple..."

"That gives me a headache," Matsuda complains.

L ignores him. "I think I would like to go with the hypothesis of a less aggressive first Kira, who pretended there were other Kiras before or had them under control, but this new one is legitimately independent. The Second Kira."

It is a little scary how close to the truth he got, but then, it isn't that hard to guess, if and only if you think Kira has some method of controlling people, be it emotional or some kind of psychic power to make them die however Kira wants, and that this second Kira goes against their MO to the point they wouldn't even pretend to be them.

"Sounds like you should write it, Ryuuzaki," Light says jokingly, mood a bit better. "But I'll do as you ask. It'll be nice to help contribute to the case in some small way, I guess!"

Light makes several versions with different drafts, each with a somewhat different 'voice' and personality for Kira.

It's a fun puzzle, if he turns off half of his brain and pretends he doesn't know anything, there's no reason for him to come to only one conclusion too quickly, is there? But then he realizes that this actually sort of fits original Kira's style, to make multiple versions of himself, and he scraps the extras.

"May I see those, Light-kun?" L asks.

"Uh... sure. They're just drafts," he says.

He really needs to remember not to enjoy himself too much. L really wouldn't think anything of manipulating him and killing him, most likely. The man hadn't shown the strongest sense of morals, oddly enough for someone trying to enforce the law, so he doubted L cared about hypocrisy in that killing Light for being a criminal would be a rather Kira-like thing to do.

Although to be honest, Light was just going to let his kill rate dwindle with the news cutting off the flow of information. This escalation had not been his idea at all, but maybe L was still suspicious this could be an elaborate scheme to make the first Kira look 'good and merciful' while the second took the blame for all the escalation. This prodding to make a certain sort of Kira is to prod about how Light perceives himself, if he really is Kira.

"'This is the real Kira. I do not appreciate your threat of killing innocents. Despite our differences, I quite appreciate the police and have only the greatest respect for L. I ask you to turn yourself in,'" L intones.

"I discarded that one because I thought it was laying it on a bit too thick. They might idolize Kira, but that doesn't mean they'll turn themselves in for him or her."

"'This is the one true Kira. I am outraged that this imposter would pretend to be me, and I demand the imposter cease at once. You will no longer kill anyone, except to save a life that is about to die right in front of you, or face consequences.'" L looks at him expectantly.

"Too aggressive for what we're aiming for, right?" Light said. "Plus, it doesn't actually benefit you if the Second Kira stops all activity, as it might make it harder to catch him or her. Although, they might have left enough evidence on the tape," Light concluded. "So we could risk that one, which is why I wrote it as a draft at all."

L doesn't give anything away. "Perhaps. I think you're right about too much aggression." He unfurls the next draft. "'This is the Kira organization. While your actions go too far, we forgive you. Come seek us out, next Kira.'"

"Ah, it's obvious why Light discarded that one," Matsuda inputs. "Because we're not considering an organization right now, right?"

"But then why did he write it at all?" said Aizawa irritably.

"I got caught up in the task," Light says sheepishly.

"Or if Light-kun were Kira, writing different drafts would obscure which one is the most authentic to him."

"Hey, you're the one who chose to read them. I was just going to throw them out!" Light stabs a finger in L's direction.

"He has a point, L," his father defends him. Good ol' dad, completely and utterly wrong.

"Nonetheless, I am raising his percentage back to 1%."

At that Light really does have to resist rolling his eyes, only not doing so because at that moment his father is looking right at him. He settles for a minute raising of his eyebrow for half a moment at L, as if to say, 'Really? Made up percentages again?'

This entire thing is such a farce.

L reads the next draft, but instead of reading it aloud he just widens his eyes slightly. "Really, Light-kun? I had no idea you thought this way."

Matsuda peers over his shoulder, and has to choke back a laugh. "This is the woman Kira Kira! Sparkles to all! You can't kill L, because I am in love with him!" 

"I thought that might annoy the real Kira into showing his face," Light 'explained' shamelessly.

"Yeah! Let's do it. No way a real man could take that!" Aizawa said, fist raised.

Light gives a carefully blank expression, trying not to laugh or get angry at the sexism, an odd contradicting mixture of emotions which helps with flattening things out. L's eyes flick to him and then Aizawa before he responded. "No, the original Kira isn't that easily baited."

"Ah, yeah, you taunted him really hard with Tailor, didn't you?" Matsuda said. "But it ended up being this other Kira that ended up biting instead."

"I'm not sure how comfortable I feel playing with lives in that way," his father said.

"And Light-kun feels the same way?"

Like he could possibly answer in any way but one while his father was right there, "Yes, of course."

"Interesting." He can practically feel his arbitrary Kira percentage go up. Dick. Like it wouldn't be horrible if he had answered any other way. L is just doing this to prod him.

"Let's just go with my final effort, okay?" Light holds up the final, uncrumpled paper. "A simple logo saying KIRA appears on screen in a different style from the first, then the words:

The previous tapes were by an imposter. Their actions are understandable, since we share the same goals, however, killing innocents is not acceptable and the imposter should not act so rashly. You may continue to kill minor criminals, but if you go after law enforcement, I will be forced to act," he finishes reading and adds, "We might want to add a location for them to 'meet', to lure the other Kira. Or not, up to you. We might also instead of 'minor criminals' specify an allowed time span each day for killing, so that their killing can be mostly separated in the data from the original's, making analysis easier, though this doesn't prevent the original from potentially killing during those times as well."

This would be convenient for him since in the unlikely event of simultaneity, the criminal would be rendered immune to the Death Note. However, his explanation for why it would be desirable to the task force was entirely true. On the other hand, if they refused, Light could stop and start and the Second Kira would muddle that data, which was also beneficial for Light. So it was a win-win for him either way, really.

"And is that what Light-kun would write if they were Kira?" L asks, not even making any effort to hide what he really wanted.

"No. I would leave the last line about killing criminals out. Or, I guess if I were Kira, I'd have to be a lover of murder, so anyone 'if they were Kira' might include it?" Light suggests, twisting the original question into ambiguity. He knows it's bullshit: the original Kira's patterns say nothing about a keenness to go after minor criminals, unless you count corrupt cops as minor, or spousal abuse. (While 'minor' in many people's eyes, domestic violence is actually one of the number one predictors of whether someone will be willing to commit more widespread violence such as a mass shooting. Many killer and abusers start with 'undesirables' society will be more likely to turn a blind eye to, and that includes poorer women and animals. He knows this pattern will raise the odds he might be a 'woman', but actually he's just being logical disproportionately going after them, as society often lets off such actors lightly despite their propensity for reoffenses later.)

"But you have to include it in order to manipulate the Second Kira into giving more evidence," L concluded. "And yet, Light says he disapproves of using Tailor?"

"L!" his father protested.

"No, he's right to call me out." Light hung his head so his face was semi-obscured. "I don't like it, but I don't see what else to do to help you. I'm sorry. I'm just a student."

"Nonetheless, I'll have to raise your percentage again."

Light closes his eyes for a moment, only slightly frustrated, before raising his resigned frame. Thinking of it from L's perspective, he's pretty sure this is actually a lie. If that raises Light's percentage, it has to raise everyone else's here too. Rather, L suspects him of other things, but knows this is the reasoning the task force will accept. It's entirely a play for their benefit alone.

And L accused him of being an actor in front of his father? What a hypocrite.

And yet they probably all perceived L as very 'genuine', unfearing to engage in weirdness. It was funny how shallow they all were.

"Ah, cheer up Light, it's still really small!" Matsuda tries to play peacemaker. How sweet of him.

"Would Light be alright with Kira," whyyy did he feel like there was a lack of quotation marks on Kira, no don't answer that, "suggesting a total blackout of information be kept?" L said, hunting for tidbits. "We'd sacrifice the extra information we'd get, but have the potential to shut all Kira killings down entirely."

"Of course! I forgot to ask, did the rest of you want cups of coffee too?" Light says. If L was hoping Light would give dismay, he wasn't going to get it. "Oh, but for the killings, you'd be risking the Second Kira spree-killing innocents. They've already killed innocent people." From the way L twitched, L already knew that and was simply hoping Light didn't.

"Ah, sure," Matsuda says, blinking. "Usually I'm the one who has to go get coffee! This is nice."

"Alright," Aizawa says stiffly.

His father shakes his head. "My heart has been racing enough as it is lately. I had felt so relieved when you had been cleared of all suspicion, and now my heart is tense again..." Ouch.

"Let's take a break then, okay?" Light finishes filling up their coffees and gives it to them. "I think I've given you all you need from me, anyway."

"Ah... Can I have another?" L asks, finger by his mouth again.

"Sure." He dumps even more sugar in it this time in morbid curiosity if L will drop dead from diabetes.

L does not, thankfully.

"I will head home now, if that's alright."

"Ah, Light-kun, one last thing: please don't tell anyone that you're on the Kira investigation."

Light looks right at him while standing in the door way, and says bluntly, "I'm going to tell Sayu."

"Light!" his father says, aghast.

"She got kidnapped once before because of all this sh - stuff behind her back," he almost swears. "She deserves to know."

"That's exactly why you shouldn't tell her again, and risk someone going after her for the information she might know."

Light rolled his eyes. "Because our watchers are psychic and wouldn't just do that anyway? Sure."

"Sayu might babble it out to her school peers," his father protests one more time.

"Really?" Light fixes a flat look at him. "How well do you know your own daughter, Dad?"

And with that he closes the door, or tries to - L follows him out, and says to the task force, "Please look over the tapes one last time and see if there is anything we might be missing. Enjoy your coffee." Light seriously doubts they'll find anything new.

It's nicer, being alone with just L in the room. Less stifling. It's also rather weird, being in a position of social inferiority (he's the youngest one there) yet having everyone look up to you. He's helped solve cases before, but now he's 'the guy who sees the same things on the same level as the famous L', a very different status from 'helpful student and dutiful son'.

He feels the urge to say something, like 'Sorry about them'. Will L play back the tapes of all their interactions to everyone? He hopes not.

For some reason, his earlier wolfishness comes to mind, too, and the way L clearly goaded him again to try to kill him. 

"You probably said something like 'if I die in the next few days, Yagami Light is the killer', right?" Light breaks the silence dryly.

"Astounding. That's exactly right." He is getting tired of the exaggerated compliments from people. Well, maybe only L was exaggerating them. Or... maybe he meant it despite the flat tone of voice, but Light couldn't let himself think that right now or he'd blush.

Light waits until he is outside to continue, a bit surprised L is still following him, though L does stop at the doorway. "That's really reckless," he turns and scolds. "If you really had to drag me in for help, do you really think they aren't so thick that you could say that, and I couldn't just kill you anyway and wriggle right out of it?"

L jolts, and there is a flicker of genuine fear in his eyes, like that really hadn't occurred to him. Damn.

For some reason, when he'd pictured saying this, it had been more teasing, a continuation of their earlier dance. Instead it had just come out genuinely angry.

L stares at him, expression smoothing toward emotionlessness again, but it's not quite convincing. For one, he's no longer slouching like usual. "Is Light-kun confessing to being Kira?"

"I thought we'd established the answer to this already. Like I thought we established the percentages were bullshit," he calls him out. With awareness to the camera positions inside and at the door, he gives a small mischievous smile and a pause to favor one context before saying something to favor the other: "Are you really going to make me prove or proclaim my innocence over and over?"

It's frustrating, being in a room full of people, alone as usual, and then feeling seen for the first time, only to have that potentially yanked away. He shouldn't crave it, he shouldn't want it, he's a trickster that doesn't know solitude, he's always been content alone before. Now he wants to talk in double meanings and be heard, which is... fantastically stupid, actually. Thankfully, the first statement is really ambiguous. Is he referring to 'you know I know you know', is he referring to his name previously being cleared? He can safely pretend it's the latter. But it could be interpreted as a strange sort of confession for L's ears only.

L seems intrigued and not quite sure what to make of him, but it doesn't seem like he failed to get the message. Light is content to give him time to internally monologue. It's only polite.

"Can I ask Light-kun to be stupid on purpose again?" Confusing, but after a moment he remembers that unfortunately hazy day in the hospital. It's clearly referring both to their old conversation, where Light called himself that for making deductions he shouldn't, but also perhaps to the way he bothered to engage with the investigation at all despite knowing it could trip him up. Unlikely, also, to be referring to him playing dumb in front of the investigators, but he had went along with L's games instead of calling him out for the stupid deduction with the fake percentages. So perhaps a bit of that as well.

Light laughs. "I really shouldn't." Implications: People shouldn't act stupid / I'm Kira, you know I know, and you're just out to hurt me, it's not in my self interest to self sabotage. "Only if you agree to stop being stupid in return. Don't show your face in public while a killer who can kill with only a face is out and about." Read: The Task Force might be stupid, but on the off chance they actually do their jobs, Kira would rather not be blamed again for the actions of the Second Kira just because you wanted to use your life as bait. Could also be interpreted as concern, if they were normal people.

"The Second Kira seems to worship the first Kira. They will be distracted finding their idol and have no reason to care about me."

"Maybe," Light acknowledges. He notes L says nothing about not hurting him, and feels a little melancholy.

'I see you, I respect your wit, but I do not like you THAT much, Kira. I do not reciprocate your probably false displays of care. I will take advantage of the Second Kira slipping up to fuck with you if I can.' he interprets the lack of response to that particular display. It's a sensible reaction, so he tries to not be offended.

"I find it interesting Kira's killing changed so much. In fact there were none last night. And the targets have changed too. The majority of the last batch were spousal and child abusers. Would you consider these victims of the Second Kira?"

"Because you think the Second Kira has a slightly higher probability of being a woman?" Light guesses. "No, I don't think we can conclude that. If the First Kira has shown any pattern, it's that they don't like leaving too much of a pattern and are prone to abruptly changing their behavior. Having an episode of no killing is pretty on brand for them, especially in response to a media blackout in Japan. They might just not have access to the information." Amusingly, Light actually had been killing more spousal abusers than before, just in time to get his pattern confused with the Second Kira, because the information he'd come across about them being more likely to go on to commit mass killings than other people was fairly recent news to him, though he guessed someone like L had probably known it for a long time.

"That seems unlikely. Did you know Kira has access to police databases?" Is this an attempt to get him to confess to not knowing something he *should* know, from an over-cautious Kira pretending not to know anything?

Light blinked. "If you told me that on the hospital bed, it slipped my mind. I was in a pretty good haze most of the time I was in there." Which is actually true. And actually not that uncommon. "Actually I've been really exhausted in general lately with all the hectic news." Also true.

"We did have a conversation about it," L said gently. "Try to remember."

"Ah..." It niggles at his mind. "The cafe." He'd had that mentally labeled as 'Ryuuzaki' instead of L. Is it weird if he feels a sense of loss over the maybe-student-Ryuuzaki in his head not being a real person? "Corrupt cops. So you think Kira is just messing with people?" He's abandoned the double meanings for the moment, but it does still make sense the other way, he supposes: it's not like he can forget L thinks he is Kira.

"This is not the first time his targets have changed. Initially, when he killed Americans, he ended up disproportionately killing Black Americans. But an article came out asking if Kira was racist, declaring and providing evidence for the innocence of several of them, and he amended his behavior."

Light does not try to defend himself, just nods as if listening to an interesting deduction about something unrelated to him. He couldn't allow himself to feel anything right now, it was too dangerous.

"Considering the United States justice system disproportionately arrests the poor and along racial lines, and that Kira is likely from Japan which is much more racially homogeneous and thus he would not have been thinking about racism quite so much, it is likely Kira did not intentionally mean to perpetuate its bias but the result was simply similar to what would happen if Kira killed 'suspects' at random, trusting that the underlying system was honest," L continued.

"Which it was not," Light can't help a little bitterness come out there. It doesn't condemn him, so it's alright. It had definitely been embarrassing to realize he had fans among redneck skinheads who would have happily advocated for the murder of Japanese like him, though. "Well, while I must condemn Kira's actions," because he would get in trouble if he didn't, "I am glad he amended his behavior."

"So am I."

"I want you to know I really don't want you dead, okay?" Light felt the urge to add. "I was just miffed at you before, like you yourself noted. I'm a teenager, we say stupid shit, and in any case I think a person could be forgiven for not fully thinking through secondary implications and their consequences."

"Somehow, Light, I doubt you are the typical sort of teenager." Message rejected. He shouldn't have added the last line.

"Light," his father comes outside holding his keys. "Let me drive you home."

As they drive home, his father doesn't look at him, too dedicated to keeping an eye on the road, but he does speak to him:

"Light, I am proud of you. I don't have words for how proud. But I hope you know that today was terrifying for me."

Light winces.

"I know... that you probably feel unhappy sometimes. That you look down on me for not being on your or L's level."

"I don't-" Light tries to deny before he even thinks about it, an old reflex. It stings like a bright light flashed in his eye or a hammer struck against his leg, too.

"It's true I'm not. But that doesn't make me completely oblivious or incapable of thinking entirely. I've been pondering for awhile now, and I've come to conclude that what is really evil about Kira is the capacity to kill itself. It is a misfortune upon anyone given that power. Almost anyone would be tempted to use it, maybe even feel like it was a waste or a deep wrong if they didn't act when they had the power to do something," his father said. "I've always told you that inaction is a form of evil. But now I am wondering if I should have tempered that, if I should not have given my words more nuance. That's my fault as a parent."

Light fidgeted. That... actually hit pretty close.

"I know," his father seemed to have swallowed a lemon, having difficulty speaking for a few moments, "that I am perhaps not expressive enough. That I am not there often enough. I'm sorry, Light. I," his father steeled himself, "I love you, Light."

Light was stunned. He had a hard time remembering the last time his dad had said that to him. His eyes were a bit wet. Ryuk was oddly quiet.

"I love you too," Light said awkwardly, unsure if it was even true. If he really loved him, would he be disobeying him like this? He felt guilty, taking an affection he didn't deserve.

When he returned inside, L picked up one last draft that didn't get read out. Light had been keeping it under the unused notepaper.

'First, I have some words for my impersonator. If you are on my side and wish to become my spokesperson, I will forgive your imitation. If you are truly on my side and wish to help me, then do not act so brashly. If you do not heed my warning, I will punish you without hesitation. However, killing innocent policemen to cover your tracks is unacceptable. Such actions will only create panic and destroy my reputation. Feel free to kill L.'

Well. Light certainly had a dark sense of humor, didn't he? But which of the drafts was the 'real' one?

None, perhaps. Light might have not bothered to respond at all unless nudged in order to avoid attention, although he did think the disdain for hurting innocents was quite real. Perhaps a curt, quick message delivered by a criminal, telling the offender to stop attacking innocents and stop generating evidence.

The more Light reads, the more it bothers him how many issues are systemic. It is actually very vexing the Second Kira showed up now: having nations declare even their criminals were worth protecting, and removing their names, could have had a number of beneficial effects. For instance, it was suspected that some mass murderers, the type who simply opened fire on crowds or schools, were motivated by fame and expected to die at the end. Having their names removed from the media would thus strongly disincentivize them in a way Kira judging them wouldn't.

Instead, a lot of places were backpedaling on the planned blackout of names, like a bunch of cowards. It was pretty frustrating, but he hoped the response 'Original Kira' tape being aired would cause more of them to show their tiny poorly developed spines.

A part of him had even been thinking about quitting. L could just stew in his own pettiness and misery.
A part of him still worries the other Kira is going to show up, decide they don't like him after all, and murder him.
A part of him thinks an even bigger worry is that this Kira will lead L right to him, and L will kill him then.
A part of him thinks, if he's going to die soon, he can at least do something about some of the systemic issues he was too afraid to touch before.

He writes down the name of North Korea's dictator.

While he still doesn't know if the civil war in Russia will just end up with a worse dictator, he knows North Korea has some of the most horrible treatment of its people in the world, and that the people there literately think their leader is a god even as he starves them: North Korean men are far shorter than their South Korean counterparts on average despite having once been just one country. Killing him via lightning strike, in full view of a massive crowd, on TV? Along with his immediate preferred successors who might also try to claim godhood via descending from him?

Is a pretty resounding message. And there is a decent chance that South Korea will try to help them through their grief and transition to new leadership, and that they could end up one country again. It's worth a try.

The lightning strike will sow doubt it is really Kira and not simply an act of nature. It will buy him a little breather room from retaliation, although not that much. Because this? Going after other countries' leaders not once but twice? Is going to make a lot of countries really antsy. Kira is no longer some weird historical footnote and statistically insignificant cause of death (there are literately billions of people in the world), he is actively influencing the fate of nations.

"L, the higher ups are authorizing you to do anything necessary to catch Kira and deliver his superweapon to the Japanese government," an annoyance greets him via phone.

L doesn't want to cause too much offense, but, "I work for Interpol, not Japan alone," he reminds. And he is feeling more than a little sore that the national law enforcement agency agreed to have L appear in four days to sacrifice himself if Kira did not take back their threat, rather than Director Kitamura. Japan is not exactly his favorite country right now, even if he understands their actions.

"Yes, but it was Japanese Law he violated first, and whatever he owns belongs to Japan," the courier of annoying news informs him. "Rest assured we will not use it against allied nations, but we cannot risk that Kira might be captured by some other party. Either take the main suspects in, even if there are several hundred of them, or we will. His latest escalation has made too many parties uncomfortable or far too interested in our country."

"Understood," L said curtly, and hung up the phone. He felt a foul temper coming on and needed an infusion of chocolate, and quickly, lest he die of annoyance overdose.

He needs to use Kira One-to-multiple as bait for independent Kira Two. This is terrible timing, but L has never been great at following orders. It should be alright to delay a little bit: he has already set Mogi to watch Light, he'll be alerted immediately if anything happens.

Speaking of Light... he can't help but think about their conversation.

The way Light practically flaunted at him: 'I am Kira, so what? I could kill you right now.'

It was actually so brash compared to the First Kira's overall behavior that L doubted himself for a moment, before recalling that First Kira did have the audacity to start all of this from the beginning, and was still ultimately rather human in the way they responded, despite the many ignored baits. It had been rather interesting to watch Light's attitude transform to the situation in real time, from 'This has to be a test, they cannot be that stupid right?' to 'Fuck it, let us all be dumb now, even me. I may have suffered waterboarding without blinking an eye but suffering such stupidity is a torture too far, even for me.'

The weirdest part of it is he gets the impression that Light likes him, the whole berating him for offering his life up was hard to forget, but that makes no rational sense. It is probably a ploy, but for what? He isn't trying to lower suspicion of him. And he can't be hoping L would join him. Could it really just be involuntary infatuation? Kira had always seemed relatively composed.

"L," Watari calls him.

"I hope this is better news."

"It is. The Second Kira has responded."

Now that is good news! "Bring the task force in, and then after Light, and play it."

"Forensics is my specialty," Aizawa says. "I can analyze these just like the other tapes. Look for fingerprints, background lighting reflecting objects, saliva if the envelope was licked, information from the store they were sold, that sort of thing."

"It's weird and doesn't make much sense. Why would he mail when Kira can control people?" Matsuda shakes his head. "Unless he can't after all, or it was purely an ability of the First Kira?"

"This Kira doesn't seem as bright," was all L had to say. "The original 'no cooperation' response tape threatened to execute not just the police, but the media as well. 'Either the police director or L, as punishment for not cooperating for a peaceful world, please choose one in four days. In the event it is L, they must appear and give a speech to convince they are the real L. In the event I decide it is not L, I will use various police agencies and media companies around the world for compensation. Please do not lie, for I do not wish to kill those without sin.' This behavior does not make much sense, as the original Kira had plenty of opportunities to kill Kitamura, as his face and name is publicly known, and the original Kira never tried to kill Tailor."

Another thought that crosses his mind is that if Kira wanted to commit an effective coup, there were better ways with the power and they'd completely forgotten that other leadership besides the police force mattered, such as the military and its civilian chiefs. Going after the media is a good move essential for any coup, but anyone who has studied coups knows that once you start, you can't half-do it. It's success or death. But perhaps anonymity made Kira feel they could half-ass it. Or more likely, they'd never studied history.

"That's what made me think it was the original changing his mind," said Matsuda. "But with this response tape... It's clear you were right, L. And Light!"

L stifles the urge to give an annoyed look at Matsuda. Of course he was right. Why did Light have more trust than him?

"Alright, let's call in Light soon and get his response to all this. Mogi and Misora, like usual, I would like you to leave so that if Kira suddenly kills the task force while we are with Light, you two will have a greater chance to be survivors."

"Again with suspecting Light?" Matsuda says in frustration.

"He might already know my name and face," Misora says. "But better safe than sorry, I agree."

"I'll see if this tape has a fingerprint too like the original did," said Aizawa. "See you a little later, this shouldn't take too long. I'll probably be back in time for Light to arrive."

"I was hoping Light could rest at home a little longer," Soichiro said wistfully. "I think he's studying right now despite my admonishments to take it easy, so perhaps he'll be happy for a break."

The broadcast began:

"Kira-san! Thanks for replying! I apologize for my deception, but it was the only way I could think of to get your attention. I'll do everything Kira-san said. I really want to meet. You could set it up so we don't get caught by the police, or I could go to you. I think you don't have the eyes, but don't worry! I won't kill Kira-san no matter what!"

Light definitely looks minutely less happy at that, though he is doing a fairly decent poker face. The eyes? The power to see names, perhaps?

"We can show our shinigami to each other to prove our identities."

"No... It couldn't be." L is afraid, genuinely. Since he can't cover it up, he exaggerates it so it looks feigned, throwing up his arms and toppling out of his chair.

To his surprise, hands move around him and hoist him up off the ground, and he glances back.

Light has taken the opportunity to get close to him, it seems, and is smiling wolfishly again. "Relax, Ryuuzaki. Shinigami aren't real. It's probably just a codeword for killing power. Death Gods as a concept show strong Western influence from the Grim Reaper legend, not what you would expect from independent forces of nature that have supposedly always lived in Japan rather than being a relatively recent cultural amalgam."

"Perhaps..." L can't bring himself to really believe it.

He thinks Light might have said something else, his face inches away from his, but the young man's eyes flicker to Aizawa and Soichiro and he closes off, emotions disappearing behind a mask of bland politeness, and steps away from him to a socially acceptable distance.

Not for the first time, L wonders if to some degree he may have miscalculated with the task force. He knew they wouldn't be as bright as himself, but Light's words haunted him: could they really be so dim he could warn them if he died Light would certainly be the killer only to have his warning completely ignored with a few sweet words by Light? And now this, where instead of making Light comfortable to see familiar faces like he expected, Light closets himself.

It is an understandable error on his part, as he rarely interacts with other people this much, and yet it still rankles to have made it.

"How would they know what code word to use?" Light's father asks, an intelligent question.

"Perhaps they have already met up?" Aizawa said.

"And merely said that to confuse us!" said Matsuda.

"Probably not. I don't think it's the first Kira's style to generate anything that could be a source of extra evidence," Light said. Well, not unambiguous evidence, if Light was Kira there was no good reason for him to be here now, taunting L so dangerously. "They would never bother with a tape unless they absolutely had to. And if Kira is L's enemy, he would take advantage of L being killed even if he didn't want to do it himself due to a hit in reputation."

"Or appearing in person and holding up a whiteboard?" L said.

"Or that," Light 'agreed'. "That sounds far too undignified for someone with a god complex."

"Hm," L stood on his chair and stared at Light in a hunched posture. "I am not sure Kira has a god complex. He may have a godlike ability to kill without blinking if he feels it necessary, but there are more reasons to kill than just a desire to play God. If Kira is a staunch atheist, they might never think about God or Gods at all in regards to their day to day actions. I think Kira is fairly cold and rational minded, and kills because he wanted to see if the effects would be positive or negative - more like a mad scientist than a God." Most mad scientists in fiction were more like mad engineers, no experimentation involved beyond 'can I build it?'. "I would imagine most possibilities for Kira would be deeply concerned about the Second Kira generating evidence and potentially getting the First caught, but if the original is cold enough they may have decided their death was a calculated risk of the entire affair and not care that much."

"You may be right," Light said easily, giving nothing away, not even mentioning that L seemed to have contradicted himself from the more flattering description he'd given in the cafe.

"The Second Kira doesn't care that much about the original Kira's goals, and in fact may have completely misinterpreted them," L turns back toward the original subject, realizing he can't just stare at Light all day. "They seem motivated primarily by meeting Kira. Even to the point of taking actions that would potentially endanger Kira, although it's not clear that the Second Kira realizes this at all."

"So are you going to set up a point of contact and try to intercept?" Light asks.

"I think I will let the Second Kira track down the first, at least for now."

Light stiffens slightly and gives a false smile. "Makes sense."

"If no new developments occur within the next few days... Light, I would like you to stay at the task headquarters I've built."

Light seems unsure with this, but tries to hide it as teasing. "Really? You want me to move in with you?"

"You don't have to phrase it like that," L stated. "It is an extremely tall building, there is plenty of room for everyone to move in. I will be having all the old Kanto suspects moved there soon if possible."

Light seems thoughtful about that. "Including Sayu?"

"Ryuuzaki..." His father interrupts, clearly uncomfortable.

"This is for the protection of you all," L makes it clear. "You've attracted some very unwanted attention, all of you, regardless of innocence. I am well aware that only one of you can be Kira, and that the apparent police connection seems to have been debunked by Kira controlling people, including police, into doing his bidding. But outside forces may not care so much about that."

"Then... Thank you for protecting Sayu, I suppose," Light says a little tentatively, like he isn't sure this should really be categorized as protection. L finds it interesting he doesn't give thank you for himself, but then, he hadn't expected he would.

Light considered carefully what his next move should be. It was likely he wouldn't get to kill very much, although he did have one trick up his sleeve, making extra Kiras.

There was also one more he was considering:

Recycled paper.

It is possible to reuse paper. He could make pages that were half Death Note, and half normal note, and take advantage of L's habit of only picking up pages and other objects with two fingers at their ends. It would be very risky and ballsy, and... maybe completely pointless. Yeah, on second thought it would be reckless with little payoff.

To be honest, he didn't really feel like killing that much. He'd encountered an article suggesting the American shooter had been inspired by Kira and felt rather demoralized by it. He mostly found himself scheming how to do it under L's nose because he liked puzzles, and he had been considering quitting anyway. He would write down a few more worst of the worst, the ones most likely to influence the fate of countries (since he'd already kicked that wasp nest), and...

Hm. Could he control the weather? He had summoned lightning, after all.

If a country was dying of drought, or suffering from months long raging wildfires, could he kill a criminal there by flooding?

Perhaps he should control a criminal to make a genuine Kira response. Something like, 'I respect the collective decision of most countries to value even criminal life. I will mainly restrict myself from now on to influencing the weather'?

That would be a good way to get governments even more desperate to grab hold of him, though. Or having governments blame global warming on Kira instead of fossil fuels. Perhaps not.

"Light, why are you eating pieces of the death note?" Ryuk asked.

"No reason," Light admitted. He'd eaten a piece once and was curious about the long term effect on an organism, that was all. "I'm bored."

"I suppose we could play a video game again," Ryuk suggested. Before they can, though, there is a knock at the door.

"Light, someone is here to see you! Some girl who says you forgot a book!" his mother called.

Light furrowed his brow. He cannot think of a good reason for some girl to show up, as he isn't the type to forget books. He can, however, think of one very bad reason. "Shit. I really hope the Second Kira wasn't that stupid."

Ryuk peered out the window. "Heh."

"So they were that stupid. Great." Ryuk was very transparent. He wouldn't chuckle for just anything.

The first thing Light does when he opens the door is look for his newest watcher. It's late, thankfully, so they seem to have gone home, but that doesn't mean there aren't cameras somewhere outside. 

The young woman standing there is dressed very differently from the usual crowd he hangs with. And she's holding a Death Note in plain sight of everyone, but... The cover doesn't have the words 'Death Note' in English on it. Ah, that must have been something Ryuk added to ensure it would get used, along with the rules.

"Come in," Light said after touching the book to confirm it was the real deal.

"I can see her panties!" said Sayu.

"Sayu!" her mother scolded. "I'm sure that's not - oh."

...why was this his life?

When they get to his room, he closes the door and folds his arms. "How did you identify me? Did your shinigami tell you?"

"Aye, but I could have done that regardless. You didn't cover enough of your face, and I could see your name but not your lifespan, because you wield the Death Note."

Light looks to Ryuk, brow arched. "Ah, I didn't know that about the eyes."

"My name is Amane Misa! I can be your eyes. You can tell me what to do so I don't get found out."

"That's very simple," Light tells her. "Turn around, go home, and never see me again. If you hand me your book for safe keeping, they won't be able to prove anything against you except circumstantial evidence. Even better, if you give up your note, you'll lose your memories and won't be able to confess."

"You should listen to him, Misa," says her shinigami. "I can take your note and give it back to you in time, after things cool off."

"Please!" She goes on her knees. "Let me be your girlfriend! I wasn't even the one who turned in the tapes, any fingerprints or stuff like that isn't mine! I'm not a complete idiot."

Wha... "We just met?" he said, genuinely baffled.

"The moment I saw you, I knew I wanted you. You're handsome, and kind, and you killed the man who went after my parents."

Oh. He faintly remembered that case. He had been strongly worried the man would reoffend as he had only been let go because of Japan's 99% conviction rate, which meant prosecutors preferred to be absolutely confident before bringing in a case, and he had hoped the kill would spark discussion around reform.

That... hadn't happened as much as he would have hoped.

"Trust me. I'm satisfied with just being used by you."

"I don't want to use you," he says flatly.

"Light really has a strong sense of justice!" She jumps up.

"First names without honorifics already?" he said in dismay.

"Or I could call you Knight! Because you're my knight in the light!"

"On second thought, Light is fine," he said, agonized. "How could you kill innocents? How are you different from the robbers that killed your parents?"

"It was the only way you could learn of my existence! I HAD to meet you!"

"It's too dangerous for you," Light tries again. "And for me. L suspects me."

"Really? Everyone says he's an idiot." What? People were idiots.

"L could catch me at any time, so you need to stay away."

"Really? Then I'll kill him for you to protect you!" she said, fists raised.

"Uh... I mean, I'll be fine as long as you stay away," Ryuk was laughing at him, asshole. "Since he suspects me but he can't do anything if the 'Second Kira' doesn't lead him straight to me like he's hoping. He's the one who made the First Kira tapes, you know."

"Whaaat? That was him?"

"But I don't disapprove of their message," Light hastens to add.

"But Light... You won't be able to continue as Kira if they remove all the information about criminals."

"It would certainly be more difficult," Light agrees. "But not as difficult as getting executed."

"Is it some other girl?" Misa said, something unnervingly red about her eyes. "I can kill her. No woman would be as useful to you as me. I can be someone you love, just give me a chance!"

Light intakes a breath. That was... a lot. "No, there's no other woman. I'm not interested in romance or bodies, Misa. I can't be your boyfriend for that reason."

"Then... you can pretend! And I'll make you fall in love with me, you'll see."

"I'm not interested."

Why was nothing getting through to her? And why was she getting closer? Light edges away while trying to think of a response to that insanity. She was starting to scare him, and it took a lot to do that.

He bumps up against the bed, no further to run, and Misa leans against him. His heart is beating hard, and as he opens his mouth to try to argue one more time, she kisses him. He splutters. She kisses again and nips at his neck and palms at his trousers.

"I'll warn you now, Light Yagami, that if you hurt that girl, I'll kill you."

Him hurt her? Lady shinigami, you had it backwards!

He scrambles to try to get away, and she pushes herself on top of him. Fuck, somehow he made his situation worse. What can he do? He can't hit her! Now she's fondling him and trying to take off his pants, fuck.

"Okay," he blurts out. "I'll be your fake boyfriend. Please get off me."

"Yay!" she squeals, getting up and doing a little victory dance. "Misa Misa has a boyfriend! Can I see your god of death?" See his God laughing his ass off at him? Yeah, sure, why the fuck not.

Light takes out a slip of paper from his pocket and hands it to her.

"Nice to meet you!" she says.

"Nice to meet you too!"

Light just stares sullenly. Ryuk was an oblivious moron just like the humans. (To be fair, Shinigami did not reproduce. Light was not really sure Ryuk understood a single thing about what he was seeing, or if he even knew what rape was.)

"So, do you have any plans that could help with the police?"

Light sighed. "I guess... You could send another tape saying since Kira did not respond, you'll choose the location to meet. And then just don't go to any of those locations you suggest."

"Ah! I'll send a diary, saying 'on so and so date, bought clothes with a friend'!"

"...do whatever floats your boat. Just don't give away any secrets."

He couldn't wait for her to leave. There was some attempt at more talking but Light was having severe trouble focusing on it, masking all his emotions off his face in favor of hyperventilating internally. Hopefully it was nothing important.

Unfortunately, his mom seemed to have warmed up to her somehow, and was smiling when they came downstairs.

"I was feeling unsure about that sort of girl, but she really is quite cute, isn't she?"

"Uh, she's a model and can't date, so keep it a secret, okay?" Light asks, abruptly remembering that, shit, his mom would totally tell Dad if he had a new girlfriend, and that would ruin everything.

"I'll keep your secret if you give me 5000 yen!" Sayu chirps.

"Sayu!" his mom scolds.

Thanks, Sayu. You just ensured mom will do it, you little minx.

Which reminded him. "Hey, Sayu. Are you doing alright? No nightmares?"

"Nope!" she chirped. "Is this about the kidnapping? I was warned ahead of time and told I'd be rescued right away. So I wasn't too scared at all, not if it meant I could save you!"

Did someone now? His anger fought with his happiness that she cared enough to try to save him. "It's not your job to save me, Sayu," Light reminded. "I'm the older sibling. I'd rather you not risk yourself for me, okay?"

She stuck her tongue out at him. "You're just mad I had to save your butt!"

"I'm really not," he laughed. "I just worry. That's my job."

"You could worry less. You and dad are both going to an early grave."

He winced. She might be right. "It's what I want to do."

"You want to be stressed and worried? You're such a weirdo, bro," she teased and jumped away as he moved to ruffle or perhaps noogie her hair. "I don't get how nobody but me sees what a giant goofball you are. It's all 'Light is so elegant and dignified, ooh!' but they don't know the truth. They haven't seen your skin care routine."

"I only put cucumbers on my eyes as an experiment once," he said hotly.

"And I'll never let you live it down," Sayu promised. "You looked like a zombie. I feared for my life!"

If he didn't love her he'd strangle the little urchin.

He goes to the task force headquarters early, hoping it isn't too strange to wear a scarf and a jacket with a tall collar. As long as Misa doesn't know about it and he hides from her, she won't show up, right?

"Light, you look troubled."

"Um, it's nothing," he said, face carefully blank. "So where is my room? And can I bring some of my personal library?"

"You can bring all of it. We have plenty of room," L informs him.

Light showing up so soon wasn't in L's plans. He was supposed to meet up with the Second Kira. Unless they had met already? Or Light decided he didn't care about that and headed here early to try to stop L's plan? In that case...

"I think I'll make a tape to set up a meeting between Kiras after all," L said. "Since nothing has happened."

Light gives a dismayed look. "That's dangerous."

To just L, or also Light?

Oddly, Light has quickly gone back to staring vacantly at nothing while L is thinking. That's not very like him. In fact, since no one else is here right now, L had actually expected he'd open up more, not less.

"Light-kun?"

He shakes himself. "Just tired. So I take it you're going to go ahead and do it anyway?" the younger Yagami male sounds resigned. He even slouched against his seat with one hand against his head, which was quite uncharacteristic of Light-kun.

"Perhaps," L said, thinking. He reaches out and grabs Light's scarf, earning a startle. "Is that a hickey?"

Actually... That doesn't look quite right, it's too long. It looks more like teeth scraped his neck while Light was jerking away.

"Light-kun, were you assaulted?"

"It's... I'm a guy!" he protests, straightening to grab back his scarf. L lets him. He's seen the single datum he needs to make a guess, after all.

"That doesn't mean you can't be assaulted."

"It was a really grabby ex-, okay? But I managed to get away, so it's all fine," Light 'explains', but L isn't sure he believes him. Not with this timing. Still, would the Second Kira really be that pushy with their idol who can kill them? Maybe it really is an ex.

But then, that wouldn't explain Light's utter dismay when before he seemed almost indifferent (beyond stiffening a bit in anger) to Second Kira meeting First Kira, like it was just a mild annoyance to him that they might murder him. Or perhaps he had just gotten a lot worse at hiding it overnight.

"I will get Light-kun a hot chocolate with marshmallows," L decides.

"I... okay?" Light-kun just sounds baffled. But at least he isn't staring vacantly at nothing any more, so it worked out.

L makes it with extra marshmallows, which he suspects Light will not appreciate, so L will be able to steal them. He hands it to Light-kun and stands on the sofa beside him in a crouch.

"L..." Kira says dryly, staring down at the mug. No trace of the chocolate can be seen beneath the sea of white. "This..."

"I will rescue Light-kun if it is too much."

And then L cunningly plopped a marshmallow in his mouth.

Light rolls his eyes, a sign he has relaxed his guard and feels comfortable being more authentic. 

"We can watch a movie, if you like. It is the weekend. Everyone is on break." Except L, of course.

"Ah... alright?" He can see Light-kun trying to deduce if watching a movie would somehow raise his percentages of being Kira. "I like Space Odyssey and Contact, but you can pick something else. Documentaries are usually welcome, though I don't like the low quality ones much."

L can't resist the opportunity to troll. "How about Ondskan?"

"The movie called 'Evil'?" Light gives him a flat look.

"It's very you. A teenage boy goes to a boarding school where bullying of younger students is encouraged for discipline, and decides to fight back. He happily breaks another boy's arm."

"Not right now," Light decides.

"Finding Nemo?"

"A children's movie?" Light said. "Now you're just trolling me."

"Light-kun is very childish."

"I think you've confused me for you," Light says with humor.

"Osama. After the rise of the Taliban, a young girl breaks society's rules in order to find work and support her mother. I suppose you could say that makes her a criminal."

"Fine," Light says, though L gets the vibe it is only to stop arguing. "But after that Space Odyssey." Light has clearly stopped trusting L's taste and is going straight for familiar comfort food.

"We can take turns. My next pick would be Ocean's Eleven, which is about a gang of criminals. I am interested if Light-kun would demand their death."

Light groans, but does not leave.

They end up watching films all day, and at some point Light leans against him and falls asleep.

L watches him sleep.

Light wakes up, realizes L was watching him sleep, blinks, then mumbles "Fuck it," and closes his eyes again.

In the morning Light tries to make L a healthy breakfast, which is deeply offensive to L's nonexistent religion, The Church of Sugary Treats.

"...waffles with bananas, cream and chocolate?" he offers instead.

"I think you might be my very first friend," L says. It is pleasing to watch Light-kun get flustered. Is Light in love with him? That doesn't make much sense. Then again, other people's feelings rarely do. He decides, uncharacteristically, to take a little pity on him here and hint at the truth. If Light is very hormonal or just egotistical, he'll take it as compliment that Light is somehow 'special', rather than L just lied to his face. "I don't have much in the way of feelings. I don't seek out cases for justice, I seek them out because I am bored."

Light looks at him more seriously now.

"And how do you want this to end? You know, if you wanted me dead, you could have done that at any time."

"I don't simply want you dead, Light-kun. I want to defeat you. There is a difference."

"You want to defeat Kira," Light-kun says, which means the same damn thing. "But what if Kira simply kills by thinking or the like? Are you just going to wait for Second and First Kira to meet, then arrest them both on circumstantial evidence?"

"Admittedly, that would not be very satisfying. But perhaps the Second Kira will break under torture."

Light shook his head in disgust.

"I told you I don't really work for justice," L said, unsure why he felt the need to say this. "I fear a lying monster that pretends it has feelings, because I may be such a lying monster myself."

"Riiight. Are you less bored when I'm around?" Light prods.

"...yes," L admits.

"Despite the fact there's really not much mystery here to be solved? You 'know' it," Light made quotation marks with his fingers. "Or you think you do," L is certain he only added this for the cameras that Light has deduced are almost certainly in the room. Light is not wrong.

"...yes," L says, and he has to admit to himself Light does have some small point. It is more entertaining here, with Light around. "I still don't know the method of causing death, though."

"Do you really need to guess more than 'it is magic bullshit'?" Light said dryly.

"I suppose not, but it bothers me nonetheless," L responds, fidgeting. He puts his finger near his mouth.

"Then we are mostly agreed." Light delivers the promised breakfast, then flops over on the bed. "You're happier with me alive."

"I might get bored of you later," L points out. He and Light have only known each other a short time, even if it feels longer.

"You might get bored of life. Will you kill yourself?" Light challenges.

"I might. But probably not," he admitted. "I am not particularly keen to die, even if I am willing to sacrifice myself for the sake of solving a good mystery." He crouches next to Light, eating waffles.

"If you drip syrup on me, I'm going to kill you," Light threatens.

"That just makes me want to do it more, you realize?" L says. "Is that a confession, Kira?"

Light covers his own face with a pillow.

"What if I promise leniency? Just a life sentence instead of the death penalty. Quite kind compared to Light-kun's usual treatments of criminals. Is that not what you were angling for?"

Light still does not respond.

"Light-kun should not smother himself with a pillow," L says, and pettishly takes it away from him. Light just glares at him.

It is still preferable from the vacant stare from before. L supposes he would not much like to see Light dead, since the stare would be even more vacant, then. That is something to consider. A life sentence it is, then. But, wait, no. A supernatural weapon would fuck up the court system. If Light was that weapon himself, that would be even more chaotic. Nations could go to war to try to get it. The simplest solution was Light's death. After L solved the puzzle, of course.

"It was already not like Light-kun could just go home without a guard, anyway. There were multiple groups who might kidnap him on the slightest suspicion of Kira-hood. I captured a potential assassin just this week."

"I know," he said tiredly. "You know I know you know, and all that rot. Well, not the assassin part, but the rest. Let me nap, Ryuuzaki."

"No."

"Why not?"

L considers this. "On further thought, we do not really have a friendship. We have a trollship."

"...you might be right," Light admitted. "But I would prefer a friendship." Was that sincere?

"Light is my very first trolend. I must annoy him."

"That's not even a word."

"It is now. Or do you prefer froll? Troiend?"

Light smacks him with a pillow and it is war.

Light has a nightmare about being touched and vomits into the sink.

He dreamed L merely watched and did nothing but scribble in a notebook full of Light's sins. It dripped with blood until it flooded the basement, then grew into an ocean that drowned the whole world but for a mountain L stood atop upon, gazing dispassionately as long as he could solve his little puzzle.

He realizes he has completely forgotten about the cake.

Chapter Text

After Light left, with L clarifying that by 'if no new events happen in several days', he did in fact mean 'in several days', not 'move in immediately'. He hadn't thought that would be something that would need clarification, because there should have been no way Kira would have been eager to be in enemy territory much less cuddle with him.

Light's voice haunts his thoughts.

'L?' Despite the question, it seemed like instant recognition. There had been no pause before the question on hearing L's voice, on looking over to see L's face. It didn't seem annoyed at all, which contrasted strongly with his later reactions.

'If they were capable of killing with just a face, they were clearly trying to hide it, perhaps so their enemies would slip up'
'But your lack of reaction to my injury was the moment that made me suspicious that you were L specifically.'

Light noticed his fixation on the Kira topic was suspicious, and perhaps L's staring at Light suspicious all the way back at their first encounter, but either thought him a normal investigator who he had caught staring at him and decided to ask out, or, and this seemed improbable, he somehow found L attractive enough to instantly zero in on him despite (according to L's thorough background check) having literately had a dozen potential suitors in high-school, some of them men of greater conventional attractiveness than L himself.

That made the previous line, that it was just a scheme to make L reveal himself, seem more plausible despite going against Kira's usual MO, as someone so patient was clearly capable of faking that as well. But it just didn't all quite fit together. Why tell him? Why the 'almost confession' designed to irritate L? Was it a way to see if L could perhaps be intimidated into a stalemate or even cave completely? That would fit with trying to get L to talk about what he'd do with Kira when he caught him (or didn't catch, an endless merry go round of Kiras), although the latter could also just be genuine curiosity.

Fortunately, he had a convenient excuse for why non-Kira Light might be angry at L. It might even be the real reason. So he could just ask outright about the deception and potentially make Light look bad in the process for noticing and not saying anything.

Light side-stepped that effortlessly. He was going to be honest: even without knowing if Light was really Kira, Light was rather impressive. Light had reacted like he didn't think identifying L was that special, but L had met so many people who doubted who L was even when introduced to him that, frankly, being identified without even a proper introduction was a mixture of satisfying, almost magical, and absolutely terrifying. People weren't supposed to know he was L without him telling them. That was the entire point!

But maybe he was letting the hype, the desire for Kira to be the most fearsome opponent he'd ever faced not just in raw power but as a proper intellectual equal, was coloring L's reactions. The way L had talked to his father had been a rather big give away, after all. But considering Ryuuzaki didn't radiate 'obedience to norms', and one wouldn't expect L to be a 'mere' student, he would have thought that would buy him at least a little pause. But that latter part may have actually explained part of the swiftness of it, unknown even to Light himself.

Light also craved a peer. Light was a teenager, and craved a peer so deeply he did stupid things for them. That was frankly the only explanation that made some of his behavior fully sensical: it hadn't been. Light was probably just confusing desire for a peer with a desire for romance when he did things that had hints of that sort of interest, or he simply cared so little for social norms when his mask was off he didn't care if he was giving mixed messages. Very mixed messages, since people don't usually threaten to murder their crush for the lulz before they've even been rejected. (Actually, did Light think he had been rejected by default? That could explain some of the anger. Although, it also seemed like Light might just have a really bad sense of humor.)

And so he asked Light to be stupid, and Light, self aware but still not with the self control of a fully developed brain, found himself leaning toward agreement despite his better judgment. It was a bit cute, if one could say that about someone who had committed killings on a massive scale, and not hard to see why so many people fell for him. He wondered how much more of a threat Yagami would have been if he'd been allowed to actually grow to full adulthood (mentally, physically Light was probably his full height or within an inch of it, provided he didn't suddenly develop a tumor).

If L had known before that Light could kill with his 'shinigami' with only a face and was charismatic enough to wiggle out of most consequences - assuming that wasn't a bluff just to punish L for annoying Light or to intimidate him into a stalemate or truce - he likely wouldn't have shown up in person, because Light was clearly capable of being patient enough to wait for a moment where it would be far less suspicious, and if L died, he'd prefer it to have a strong payoff and dying a year or three after meeting Light Yagami wasn't the clear and unambiguous message he'd prefer. This Second Kira, though, was a lot less riskier to be killed by (in the sense of L's death having a payoff, not in the sense of dying, which was higher) if Light wasn't cooperating with them...

Speaking of, he needed to talk to Mogi immediately. L had made a regrettable error. He should have sent two people, not one, to watch Light. Mogi couldn't be expected to stay awake 24/7, and Light's habits were well established at this point so it shouldn't have mattered. Yet, it clearly had.

"Neh, so you and L are friends now?" Ryuk asked.

"Nope," Light said, swerving to avoid an obstacle Ryuk's video game car driver had set up for him.

"But you seemed really friendly with each other, and he can't do much if Misa doesn't confess."

"I guess under very low standards, we're friends," Light amends. "But he still wants to catch me and he's not displaying any strong signals he cares about my health." Was the cup of hot chocolate something he should read into? Was it all fake? "Caring if someone is hurt is considered an important part of friendship among humans, so right now I'm kind of his friend, but he's not mine in return." Light is distracted just enough by this to miss making a quick enough turn, so Ryuk speeds ahead and wins, chuckling at Light's cartoon fate. Fiend.

"So kill him, then," Ryuk said, after a celebratory swig of apple cider.

"He's like a lemming. He wants me to kill him and he's willing to take the entire bloody task force with him in his recklessness, including my dad," Light said with genuine annoyance.

"Oh, right. I guess he has other investigators waiting? They did have that big fake sounding announcement awhile back."

"And they had to have other people doing the investigating of the bonus Kiras like Russian Kira," Light said. "But that's really easy to deal with, honestly. It's not like my not knowing their faces is an obstacle if I'm capable of getting to L."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, I'd just make L kill them if I really wanted to off L and all the investigators. Like I said: fucking reckless." Light is frustrated with L's lemming status. "I have to give him credit, though: he knows that behavior doesn't fit my MO."

"MO?"

"Mode of operations. My motive, my usual style of killing, that sort of thing. Although he may be recalculating that after I essentially threatened him," Light frowned.

"That was hilarious," said Ryuk. "If I hadn't seen you smile, I'd have thought you were comforting him."

"I tried to angle it so it would be hard to see for anyone but L, and hopefully hard for any cameras too." Which had only worked because unconsciously Light had drifted quite close to him. He kept doing that multiple times and correcting himself, somehow more afraid of the other people in the room than L himself. "It was still pretty stupid of me to do that," he admitted.

"Yeah, now he's never going to stop chasing you."

"I think that was true before. I mean, he was practically goading me to kill him again."

"Yeah, that's one thing I don't fully get, why you think that he was going to fixate on you. Like, yeah, Penbar made you look guilty by random circumstance, but the guy was just unlucky. And what do you mean again this time?"

"I-" Light paused. "Shit, you know, this is the problem with having conversations with double meanings. Sometimes you may see a double meaning that was never really there. I thought he confirmed it when he said he told the others to suspect me if he died right after the reveal, but that's just a basic precaution isn't it?" He rubbed his eyes. "That contributed to how angry I was, and it maybe wasn't even real! I am so stupid. What if he'd actually dismissed me as Kira entirely and I opened it back up for no reason? It wouldn't have been 'reckless' if he really thought there were 0 odds I was really Kira and therefore there was no chance of killing the whole team off from his decision making... but, no, I don't like that idea," Light frowned. "It would mean he'd been stalking me and hanging out with me for no reason. Sure, I'm pretty, but he's a lead investigator, he's got better things to do right now."

"And you not liking it has nothing to do with you wanting him to know," Ryuk said smugly. "You said it yourself: it was dissatisfying to win in one move, and it would be dissatisfying to have won so easily then too."

"Yeah, well, satisfying isn't always a good reason to do things," the teenager lamented. "I keep wanting to hit on him."

"'Wanting'? Way I see it, you have been, not that I'm an expert on human dating. You seemed pretty cuddly, you exchanged numbers, and you give him sweets. Isn't that classical courting behavior?"

"You're right, it is," Light groaned and decided to bury his head in a pillow. If no one could see his humiliation, it didn't exist. 

L decided he wants Light 'free' for at least a week so he can observe. It made it a touch inconvenient Light seemed interested in potentially leaving home so soon, but thankfully Light had at least not brought over all his stuff when he impulse (L was fairly sure it was impulse) crashed at L's place, and after calming down he didn't seem to rush to do it.

Mogi confirms there is a strange woman occasionally lurking by Light's house at odd hours, and gives an apology for not watching Light 24/7 before. "He seemed to be a creature of habit, and I needed sleep. I'll tag-team with Misora now, even though having a car parked out in front of their house with people in it all the time will make it transparently obvious what we're doing to them and the neighbors."

"You likely won't need to do that for more than a few days, as he's coming to stay here. Actually, I'd like you to switch to watching the strange woman, though it will be far more risky. Since men are more frightening, have Misora do the bulk of the watch."

Mogi nodded, not even complaining that this meant he was the one that got the all-nighters past midnight. The man was far more professional in his attitude than Matsuda, who L could easily imagine griping.

"Any Kira suspects we aren't taking in right away, honestly, need body guards right now, so a car parked out in front will happen regardless." L pinched his nose at the massive headache. "Which reminds me... Do you think the Korean situation was really caused by Kira?"

Misora thinks it over. "I think it's very possible but we simply don't have enough evidence. It doesn't completely make sense, though. If he can really control lightning, why would he be stopped by something like an electrical blackout?"

"I fear that whatever rule-set Kira is operating by, it is highly arbitrary," L agreed. "It may be that all of his powers revolve around death alone, which would be very unfortunate but would also explain a lot of the strangeness of his behavior."

Interviews of other people about Light were, frankly, infuriating. Everyone agreed that Light was a nice, intelligent, and amazing person who did things like help people with their homework or volunteer for charity work. He had literately dozens of positive character references, and many of those people were the ones who, if this had been a normal Japanese crime, would have hypothetically been involved in any bringing of a case against him.

Was L the only damn person *not* in love with Light Yagami?

Hell, he watched in real time Light make someone L was fairly certain Light was actually deeply and incredibly uncomfortable with, more comfortable and trusting of Light so that Light in turn could feel a little safer:

Aizawa comes in, stressed and haggard and with a maritally inflicted wound on him. His wife struck him on the face with a thrown object, apparently, and he just sort of stress-laughs it off and pretends it is no big deal. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it really was just a freak accident in a rare moment of rage. But Aizawa's constant avoidance of home and his utter dismay at the thought of his family coming to live with them in the tower tells a different story.

Light offers to babysit Aizawa's kid, right after delivering some home made barbeque chicken wings for lunch for the Task Force.

"You're a delight, Light," Aizawa says with relief. 

"It's really hard to imagine you as Kira," Matsuda adds. "Can you imagine Kira volunteering to change nappies?" He laughs, but L doesn't find it funny in the slightest.

"I know this true story," L interrupts their stupid. "This woman's husband disappeared, and everyone thought he'd cheated on her and left, because she was a sweet old lady. She cracked jokes, confessing in front of everyone that she'd beaned him over the head with her green frog statue. When she died, the inheritor of the property discovered a man's skull buried on the property with a dent that matched the confession perfectly."

"Wow, that's really scary," Matsuda said, eyes wide. L feels some relief, finally some sense was sinking- "I'm so glad that would never happen here. I mean, I think we'd notice if Light said something like 'haha, I totally kill people and am Kira, nah just joking'."

What.

He could really strangle them right now.

Light sent L the most infuriating grin over a mug, holding it up to help cover his reaction and trying not to choke on his own drink laughing, which L is pretty sure Light is only pretending to sip right now. L is certain if the mug wasn't there, or if he'd taken a sip at the wrong moment, Light would have been caught then and there, before he remembers that a snort of laughter is technically not a confession, just a sign of a terrible sense of humor.

Fortunately, their leader isn't quite so dim, just in hard denial, as Light's father looks troubled. "This is why I told you not to make joking comments about 'if I were Kira', Light. They aren't funny." (Apparently, according to the man's venting, Sayu had started a very immature 'if I was Kira' game at breakfast this morning, with nonsensical lines like 'if I was Kira, I would use my powers to force god to bake a pie'.)

That dampens Light's spirits, or at least appears to. "Sorry. Since I fear I won't be much help then, I'll just go babysit now while I'm still allowed to leave the building, I guess."

"Hm, maybe I'll go with you."

Light looks at him like he's a giant joker. "...do you even know how to babysit?"

He's looked after Near a few times, how much trouble could a normal child be?

...a lot. The answer was a lot. There was so much screaming. "Why isn't my daddy the one looking after me? Why, why?"

The baby screamed too, possibly for the same reason, but due to its nonverbal nature the world would never know.

Light's face had taken on distinct discomfort, but L suspected it was different from L's because it looked sympathetic. L, being an orphan, found it hard to care about having your father ignore you on occasion while still feeding and watering you regularly.

Perhaps Light's father could be an interesting angle to press Light with? How best to do it? The man had been the one to show the greatest discomfort with the Kira 'jokes'. L had mostly thought for those conversations about how infuriatingly simple it would be for Light to go 'hah, you think my not killing L somehow makes me guilty, and getting angry at him trying to kill himself makes me guilty? you are nuts' and twist the entire conversation into something completely useless for any sort of proof, but maybe he didn't need to use it for a proof. Maybe he just needed it as a wedge.

When Mr. Yagami came to pick Light up (something he often insisted on doing these days, he wanted to drive him anywhere he wanted to go even if it was in short walking distance, admittedly understandable for an anxious father) L decided to use the opportunity.

"Soichiro-san, what do you think of Light-kun admitting to me that part of our earlier conversation could be construed as him being Kira and having the ability to kill me at any time even with only knowing my face?"

Light glared, knowing that wasn't exactly what he said, but also knowing if he retorted that, L would say that was what Light meant.

"Light, I am disappointed in you. I told you not to make those kinds of jokes, and that was very cruel. What possessed you?"

Light looked down in shame. "I was mad at L. You remember L outright asking me if I was, yeah? And I said a bit, but looking back I realized I was actually really angry the entire time and hadn't realized it because it seemed like such an overblown reaction. Especially when L revealed it wasn't primarily some kind of weird sick 'are you Kira' test after I explicitly said I did NOT want to be part of the investigation, but I had to because you guys apparently really needed my second opinion," he shook his head like was still bewildered by that, which, Light. L knew he was young, and that there was a human tendency to assume people are smarter than they really are and at least as competent as themselves, such that there are jokes about human stupidity always being underestimated. But he'd have thought Light wouldn't have been quite so surprised considering he knew these people before. Maybe he'd still hero worshiped his father a touch. He was the right age for that kind of behavior. And, ah, both he and Light had gotten lost in thought for a minute.

"I see," Light's father said patiently. "Sometimes our anger about something doesn't fade right away, and you had other things to be angry about besides the suspicion, right? Plus, Ryuzaki went and rose the percentage back up again. That couldn't have felt very good, after the relief of it gone."

Light nodded, which L suspected wasn't entirely sincere (L bet Light never lost the impression L suspected him, and he definitely didn't respect the percentages in the slightest) but not done so much out of a desire to lie as a desire to 'socially conform' to moving a conversation along at a decent speed, which, unfortunately, society accepted as often giving room for white lies like that as a necessary sacrifice to avoid 'awkward pauses as people come up with what to say' also known as 'thinking', which, really, explains a lot about society when stupidity and lies are so deeply encoded into it simply for convenience.

L really hated people sometimes. And yet, he didn't find himself hating Light for this potentially almost-thoughtless gesture, though he was sure Light had quickly grasped the matter faster than it would take to say or think verbally, just like L's thoughts just now hadn't taken up a full verbal paragraph because for much of it he'd simply mentally referenced an old thought he'd already had and didn't actually need to think out in full, because he'd done that before. If a mind reader had come along and heard only his verbal thoughts, they'd have heard something like the first few words after 'Light nodded', then 'socially conform with white lies'. And then, with no further context, they'd hear L think that he didn't hate Light for it, tinged with curiosity because he did need more time to puzzle that part out...

Or maybe not, seeing the way he stared at his father. There was some sincere desire to please there, and it had worked out somewhat to L's benefit as well. He'd be blind not to notice that Light was often non-confrontational with him. Which made that incident all the more intriguing.

"He's putting all of you at risk," Light said, looking embarrassed.

"Oh, Light," his father said, soft, and damn it, this was not how L had hoped it would go at all. His nudge had only made them grow *closer*, with very little information to go with it! But not none, he supposed.

His experiments were fairly clear. In a game of manipulating the task force's emotions, if that's what it came down to, L would usually lose. He had to avoid playing on Light's favored terrain, while still keeping in mind that the 'logical' approach for them would still be emotionally laden and potentially fallacious. If he wanted to use emotional manipulation as a tool, it was better to aim it at Light himself, oddly enough.

The day was not a total waste. He'd had the opportunity during nap-time to ask Light some questions:

"Is there a story between you and Aizawa?"

Light tensed before he could completely control his reaction to seeming perfect ease. It was interesting, the things he was and wasn't afraid of, and it was a bit strange that Aizawa of all people seemed to be one of them. It was also interesting that Light's masking was so fast it probably wasn't actually fully conscious. The fact Light decided to answer him honestly a second later, which made such masking entirely pointless, and yet L strongly suspected he continued to mask, confirmed that.

"Not much of a story. Just a bunch of little remarks that add up over time. Though I'll always remember the first time he made me uncomfortable," Light mused. "It was stupid of me, honestly, and not exactly riveting telling."

"I really doubt that, Light," L said, which made Light twitch and give a more genuine expression.

"Well... I was helping solve a case, and I was tired. I was about 14, and was just starting a big growth spurt. I pointed at a line of evidence, said 'This should make things obvious.' and I turned to focus on other things, because, well, I trusted him to have it in hand, and he did. I meant it as a compliment, but he didn't take it that way at all. Even after he solved the rest of the problem as I thought he would."

L felt a flash of sympathy. "He thought you were taking him for granted, treating him like a grunt, and thought your work was more important than his."

"Yeah," Light said, looking over the room and checking on the sleeping kids. "Double meanings are a funny thing." He was showing amusement now, but also a touch of tiredness, so it seemed L's reaction had relaxed him a bit and he was now remembering their previous conversations. "Society is full of them, but seems oblivious to it. They just assume one of the two, and don't ask. I guess it would be exhausting asking all the time, so it makes sense. But I was 14 and having a grown man angry with me, no, not even that precisely," he paused for words. "That I could hurt someone without even meaning to bothered me, the grown man part was just an unwelcome bonus. It's easy for me to start overthinking things and fixate on a single interaction for days," he admitted. "And it was obvious that wasn't desirable and I needed to compensate for that."

Light definitely wasn't psychopathic, but then, L had already figured that. He was engaging in some kind of compartmentalization, which was extremely common.

"So you started thinking about social scripts, maybe certain words you should treat as forbidden like the words 'obvious', and taking extra care to be polite if requesting anything of anyone, and how to seem perfect without being so much it was threatening, or being a braggart about it, or anything like that which could get you into trouble."

Light blinked, meeting L's eyes briefly before looking away and flushing slightly. "Yeah, I know you probably think it somehow raises my Kira percentage or something but..."

"Actually, I do not."

"You don't?" Light said with relieved surprise, meeting his eyes again.

"It's... actually perfectly normal behavior," L reassured him. "I also mask from time to time as needed. It's a survival mechanism, so what this really makes me raise your percentage of is your chances of non-neurotypicality." At Light's confusion, he clarified, "Conditions like autism and ADHD, though I'd argue simply being highly gifted alone should also be considered not neurotypical either, with its own associated challenges. Tell me, do you occasionally find yourself paying awareness to things like how much eye contact is being made in these social scripts?"

"Well, yeah...?" Light said. "I'm not autistic, I just made eye contact with you twice in a row. I'm highly expressive to people, I'm charming, I don't have sensory challenges. I'm capable of sitting still, I'm not hyperactive."

"And yet, as you've grown more comfortable with me, you've made less eye contact overall, preferring to stare off at nothing or simply my general direction and think," L noted. "A behavior often shared between autistic gifted people and simply gifted people, not making it the best diagnostic all by itself in isolation. But you know exactly how many times you've looked me in the eye, and you don't mind my endless staring which other people find creepy when I don't mask it off."

Alright, Light really didn't have a good explanation for the last one, he just found it easy to tune out. Provided it wasn't done three inches away from his face, or something like that. Ryuk didn't even blink and was always hovering, it was basically the same thing.

"It is a spectrum," L told him. "You don't have to perfectly fit on it. But I think you should strongly consider if your masking is a huge source of unhappiness for you."

Light frowned. "I can't not 'mask'. Honestly, I've behaved this way so long I'm not sure there's anything 'there' under there, which is what I was trying to tell you. It's not like I secretly want to displease people, I don't."

That was actually rather sad, since it was very obvious there was so much more. If Light weren't a murderer wanted internationally and likely to be a target of terrorist attacks (or 'rescues') were his location to become broadly known, L would seriously consider kidnapping him and taking him to Whammy house.

Unfortunately, just as they were getting somewhere, that was the moment the actual children decided to wake up and start screaming.

Light glanced at a clock after it was time to leave and decided yet again to stay over at L's place, which should have meant an opportunity for more conversation, except Light decided to go investigate possible rooms to live in and locked the door of one to sleep in.

One of the first things Light did on getting the note and realizing it wasn't his immediate doom, was indulge his curiosity.

"Ryuk, can you go to the shinigami world, open this bottle and blow on it, plug it and then come back? And can you get some dirt? Ooh, and a spare scrap of shinigami cloth would be great. Provided it isn't too forbidden to visit the shinigami world for a second? And take this gas detector with you."

"That's a strange request, Light-o. Kinda breaking the rules a bit."

"Then let me give up the note temporarily and then give it back, easy peasy. I'm just curious and I want to do chemical analysis eventually, when I have the chance."

That chance was now, maybe.

He had to go back to his house to get his books, so he snuck over in the night, hoping if he did it late enough there would be no Misa there. Thankfully there was not, to his huge relief, and L just gave him a look when at 3 am he said he was going to his house and told Light in a firm voice that he had a mandatory bodyguard, which made Light almost think L cared for a second. He probably had a few days before she'd show up... Probably. He'd told her just once every two weeks meetings, after all. The bodyguard wore a mask, so they likely weren't there for Light's benefit so much as the inconvenience L would suffer if Light died too soon, as the Second Kira should have had no reason to go stalk non-Kira Light unless they thought any suspect might be First Kira, in which case Light still wouldn't have been under threat from them unless they managed to be the same person as Light's ex. Which, okay, maybe L would cared about the latter small scenario a little bit, Light could hope even if he was pretty sure it was just self interest.

When Ryuk came back with the dirt, Light did a very simple test: he dropped a lit match into the bottle very quickly and plugged it up.

"Huh. It seems to be normal oxygen and nitrogen. The flame wasn't instantly extinguished, nor did it get larger. Maybe dimmed a tiny bit."

"The shinigami world has portals to the human world, so that makes sense."

"Did the carbon monoxide warning fire?"

"No," Ryuk said with a shake of his head.

"Then the dip might just be lower oxygen levels... no plants there, so that makes sense, but no organisms to breathe the oxygen either."

"What did you want with the dirt and cloth?"

"Did you know cloth and paper are closely related? Cotton paper is one of the higher quality kinds of paper. I want to see two things: can I get anything to grow in shinigami soil, like say," he glanced to Ryuk knowingly, "an apple tree or cotton plant? And two, can I hypothetically make my own note if-"

"Light, stop speaking," Ryuk spoke with the most seriousness he'd ever seen from the trickster.

"What's wrong?"

"Only the Shinigami King knows how to make Death Notes. *Only* the King. He controls everything, including reproduction and the lack of growth in our ever-decaying land. If a shinigami knew how to make their own note... They could overthrow him."

"Oh." In his enthusiasm for something to occupy his mind, Light had uncovered the equivalent of Shinigami Realm state secrets. Whoops.

"Thankfully, I don't know the last time I saw him actually watching the human realm," Ryuk confessed. "But if you're thinking about having me take an apple seed back, though I don't really know how that would work with a lack of sunlight-"

"Sun lamp," Light suggested. "Easy."

"There's a good chance that would get me killed by the King, for bringing new life into that world. Creating new life or acting to preserve it is the one thing a shinigami must never, ever do. So while no one ever explicitly told me 'Do not grow plants'... I suspect it is a rule just as firm as 'do not try to kiss another shinigami'. Although, I don't really know what happens if you violate a rule..." Ryuk mused. "Maybe if I made sure the King wasn't watching, I could get away with it?"

"I hate to say it, but you should probably talk to Rem to see if she knows anything about Gods of Death that break the rules," Light suggested. He'd been far too anxious at the time to focus on it, but she had implied saving Misa would kill her, so clearly, some rules had a death penalty. Re-death penalty, if they were already dead and just didn't remember their past lives? "Anyway, thankfully for you I am not a shinigami, so I should be able to make a Death Note and grow something. Maybe."

"But what do you get out of it, Light?"

"A relief to my boredom, mostly, but, also..." Light crossed his arms. "If these materials are similar to Earth, and you guys are also composed of materials from that realm, I might be able to find a way to turn myself invisible to those who haven't touched my note. That would be really convenient, don't you think? Although it could also backfire if there was no way to turn it off."

"Light-o is really smart," Ryuk said, amazed. "And here I was just going to treat you as an amusing pet."

"Does that mean I can barter with you to be a tiny bit more cooperative with me? I'm not saying 'save my life', I know that's against your purpose in life, but maybe don't make me bargain every single time I want something?"

Ryuk considered this. "...alright. But then you don't mess around with my apple supply."

"Alright. I can't guarantee I'll be able to safely give you apples regularly, but..." Light thought about it. "If I 'bite' an apple and you move through me to bite it at the same time, that might work, especially if there aren't too many cameras in a given room."

So Light is having a really good time playing with chemistry and paper making (yeah, he might never use custom made death paper, and it might not even work, but it's FUN and Ryuk-seeing-free which is a huge upgrade over normal deathy paper?) from a scrap of shinigami world cotton cloth Ryuk stole (apparently uncommon, but ruined scraps of things in general not so much, including many bones, and Light genuinely finds himself wondering if a Death Shamanic Bone Etching was once the popular thing in the shinigami world before the invention of notebooks), when, alas, it is interrupted by life in the living world.

"Light, there's another tape and a new development. I'd like you to come watch it with us," is the first thing his dad has said to him in several days, though there have been plenty of awkward glances and searching for the right words.

"Okay," Light says, his previous excited energy somehow vanishing.

At the headquarters, L wastes no time: "The Second Kira also sent us a journal, in addition to this tape." He hits the play button.

"Kira. Since you did not respond, I'll set the meeting, okay? You'll know it when you see it."

"Of the locations and dates, one entry says 'Saw a shinigami at the dome.' which obviously applies to the game. We'll have to shut it down."

"Yes, it's so obvious, it's stupid," L said, and started to chew on a nail. "In fact it's so stupid, I don't think that's what it is about at all. I think... They may have already met?"

Light wishes he could be more surprised, since everyone else is, but he had a bad feeling the scarf would come to haunt him. "Really?" He is curious what reasoning L will offer, since he apparently decided before not to mention the scarf, which... Light appreciates, truly.

"The Second Kira said they would come if Kira offered no suggestions of where and how to meet. That sounded to me like Second Kira already knew how to reach Kira, meaning this tape actually means the First Kira has told them to throw off the scent and make it seem like they couldn't find each other." L pauses. "Or maybe I just want it to be true because the alternative seems so incredibly dim, I can't believe it... Though, this isn't quite up to First Kira's usual standards." Light hates the way L chooses that exact moment to look at Light right in the eyes, having been fiddling with his nails beforehand.

"No, I think your logic is right," Matsuda says. "They have to know we'd shut down the dome and there's no way they'd still show up after that."

"Just to be sure, we should still go to these locations on those days," his father suggests.

"Yes," L agrees. "Better overly careful than sorry."

"Do you want me to go?" he asks Matsuda. "I can't say I'm super keen on it..." A part of him has nightmares of her showing up anyway despite being told not to. On the other hand, if she obeys, these are locations she is guaranteed not to be, which means Light wants to be there.

"It would be helpful to blend in... It's really scary going in knowing this Kira can kill with just a face."

"Yes, I'd suggest you not go," L says to Light's father. "Your face radiates justice."

...did it? It just looked like a grown man's face to Light. In fact, he was pretty sure you weren't supposed to judge a person's morality by their looks, that had been debunked ages ago. But it did scream 'does not belong in trendy teen hang out spots', so there was that. This was probably just another example of L being a shit and knowing it would go straight over most of the task force's heads. The real question was if Light would get irritated by L being a little shit saying inaccurate things on purpose, or if he'd let it wash over him like background noise. Frankly, he had bigger concerns right now - not that his inner rambling was doing a good job of focusing on that after L threw him off. (The real reason? He didn't want Light to think?)

"Actually, on second thought, I shouldn't go," Light remembers. "Even though she - or he - didn't see his face, she or he did probably see me that day talking to him like a relative, and they may not be happy with me. So the Second Kira would know I'm associated with the police, and it would potentially blow your cover." Except Second Kira may not have realized he was a policeman, and mistook him for just some random man instead. Not a big difference, since the 'random man' was still an 'adversary' in that scenario.

"Jeeze!" Matsuda says, shivering. "So close to death... Good thing Light remembered!"

"Yes," L says, and Light looks at him sharply.

"Were you really not going to say anything?"

"I hadn't expected it to slip Light-kun's mind," L says shamelessly.

If his dad weren't there he'd give L the finger.

"This also raises Light-kun's chances of being Kira, since many 'possible' Kiras would demand L or other law enforcement die on TV. But I don't think Light would try to have me killed if he were Kira, and the First Kira has made no moves to demand L's death." Ach, this sounded almost identical to a hypothetical mental conversation Light had had with an imaginary L attacking him, only very slimmed down to almost a parody of itself.

"What kind of statement is that? He won't kill you or Matsuda so you think he's Kira?" Aizawa states, his expression flabbergasted.

"He's right, L, that sounds crazy," Matsuda says.

"L's wrong for a different reason," Light says suddenly, frustrated, and is a little unnerved by a gleam of triumph in L's eyes. Did he just get manipulated? "Though you're right that's wrong in its own way, as there are plenty of possible reasons for Kira to not make demands, chief among them is letting other Kira or Kiras do it."

"Oh?" L said.

"I think your personality is fairly obvious to anyone who watched the Lind. L. Tailor broadcasts. You'll avoid appearing in person, even if the risk is lowered from absolute certainty of death from a relatively 'merciful' Kira. So more intelligent Kiras wouldn't demand L appear. I know I wouldn't." Though that had more to do with Light not actually wanting L dead. "If Ryuuzaki is really L, then he has that character too." Except, was that really true? Even as he said it, he couldn't help but think about the fact L had actually appeared in person in front of him. Was he projecting his own impulse, which would be to avoid such an appearance himself because it was so obviously what the opposition wanted as a game over and there was a good chance there would be no follow up fight if all the leaders were perceived as having submitted?

"...you're right," L confesses after a moment. ((Light later reflected: The sad thing was L was such a liar, so this statement was meaningless except for concluding L was shameless enough to say that to the task force, which did put points toward it being the truth, but not that much because losing reputation with them wasn't as costly as losing his life (or just his dignity and sense of freedom) from going 'nah, Kira could totally threaten me into going on to TV, you should totes do that, guy I know is Kira'. Honestly, there was almost no way L would have said anything different from what he just said, which made Light regret saying it. A different version of him that cared about bragging points would have liked how it made him look 'smart', and an opportunity to make L look cowardly, but that was absolutely the only thing he earned from defending L here, as it wasn't like L was going to reciprocate any time soon except in the 'I will also do something that is half complimentary and half insult' sense.))

"Light! I would ask you not talk about being Kira," his dad interrupted the beginnings of said reflection quite quickly, to be completed later.

"Sorry, Dad," Light gives him an apologetic glance, then closes his eyes and lowers his head. Not actually sorry. "I just wanted to help Ryuuzaki, and get this case out of all our hair. But you worry too much. Hypotheticals don't turn me into Kira."

"Aye, Light-kun shouldn't be Kira. But if he were, I would be in turmoil, because..." Oh, this again? But in front of an audience. "Light is my first ever troend!"

"For the last time, Ryuuzaki, that's not a word!" Light shouts, irritated by his abuse of language and dragging that stupidity in the open in front of others. Heaven forbid they learn Light had been... silly, the other day. It would completely ruin his reputation!

"Did you know the other day..."

"Don't you dare," Light threatens. He wasn't sure what he feared more, the scarf or the pillows. Actually no, it was hands down the scarf. Had L really delayed bringing it up for so long just to torment him when his guard was down?

"Light-kun got into a pillow fight with me?"

"Ryuuzaki!" Light protests, though it is a protest weirdly mangled by relief, and moves over to give him a much deserved noogie. L is surpisingly agile for someone who seems the type to never leave his bedroom, and darts out of the way every time.

He wonders why L is inviting this game right now, and then, on seeing everyone's faces, decides it may be as simple as manipulation. L knows he needs to be a minimum level of likeable even if he can't beat Light in that department. These sorts of antics relieve stress and make him seem trustworthy, and he needs to be sure they won't trust Light over him. Just like the comparison to L got Light treated more seriously, a kind of reverse holds true as well: L can piggyback on Light's good reputation. It is one thing to respect a person's smarts, it is another to think of them as friend or trustworthy.

The irony that he is doing this so he can destroy Light's reputation later is not lost on him.

"Light, you aren't three! Stop biting Ryuuzaki!" Light's father scolds as the wrestling somehow devolves even further. Light has to admit, it's a good tension release in multiple ways. A part of him had felt a little stifled behaving perfectly all the time, and he actually felt a bit more at ease now around his dad. Which was weird, because Light was suspected of murder, and that tended to put a damper on relationships, not improve them.

But then, it isn't hard to improve a relationship that doesn't exist because you're rarely there.

Chapter Text

"Light, do you want to help with the cleaning?"

"Hah, what are you talking about mom? The house is always spotless!" Light teased his mother.

"Yeah, spotless!" Sayu agreed, his favorite mischief weasel.

"Really?" His mother frowned, confused and holding up the vacuum.

"I'm just kidding, mom, of course I'll help you," said Light. "I'll do the kitchen."

His plans to be helpful didn't last very long. Light saw a flash of blond hair while cleaning off the kamidana and dove under the kitchen table, not caring if he looked stupid. The kitchen table covers draped all the way down to the floor so nothing of him could be seen, and he immediately felt a lot better.

"Eh, Light-o, don't you think you're taking it a bit far? Why are you scared of a lil' girl like Amane and not L? She doesn't even want to kill you, and he potentially does."

"I just... need to clean under the table," Light half-lied to himself, and started scrubbing. He poured all his frustrations into it. When he was done, this damn kitchen would be spotless.

"That blonde wasn't even Amane."

If he pulled down the window curtains together, well, they had simply needed dusting, that was all.

"You must be really mad she mentioned shinigami and the eyes."

"Mhm," Light makes a polite noise to pretend he's capable of conversation.

"Light, you're acting really weird," Ryuk complains again.

"My apologies," Light masks, sending an effortless smile. For some reason, Ryuk looks a little unnerved. "Do you need more apples? I should get apples." He starts to move, remembers getting apples requires going outside, and stops. "Later." He'll see if he can look up a typical model's schedule and go out only on those times they'd be busy or asleep. If he went out at 4-5am, would anywhere even be open close by that had apples? And the bodyguard that had been frequently showing up to follow him around lately probably wouldn't be happy.

"You must be at least a little mad about the evidence. I don't like you not responding to me, Light-o. I'm not a lamp."

His survival oriented portion of the brain auto-pilot responds, "She was probably thinking it didn't count as evidence. If L gets to the point he actually gets to see a shinigami, things are probably close to game over already."

He went back to what he was cleaning before. Kamidana are mini altars placed high up to enshrine a Shinto god. The shintai (often a mirror or jewel) housed a chosen kami to give it a physical form for direct worship. As New Years approached, his family typically got a new ofuda charm made out of paper or cloth and placed it in the miniature shrine above eye level in the kitchen. Light also often got a bunch of gift cards from people at that time, especially girls.

If Light were virtuous enough, he could ascend to living Godhood with full cultural acceptance by his society. Godhood chasing would entertain Ryuk, and hypothetically keep him alive for longer. But Light didn't believe in any of that. He wished he could, in that moment, because it would be awfully nice to be able to pray and be answered.

But in that moment he didn't even know what he'd pray for. Swift punishment so he could get it over with? A clear message that what he was doing was right? His father was unhappy with him, hell even Sayu was unhappy with him, she'd made a comment about how annoying Kira was disrupting their life. He'd kind of privately hoped she'd approve, considering she was the person who'd made the comment that had actually spurred him into becoming Kira in the first place.

She'd remarked she wanted a hostage taker on TV to drop dead, so of course Light immediately thought about that metaphorically shiny strange new book he had. Self defense of others is perfectly justified, so even if turned out to be real and not a joke, it'd be alright, yes?

And then, holy shit, it had worked! He'd saved all those people being held hostage. It felt really heady. If he could do this once, wasn't he obligated to do it again? Inaction, after all, was evil. His dad had always taught him that. If you see someone suffering - act!

But then his father disapproved.

Morality was largely public opinion. Kira was enjoying a lot of popularity.

And yet, his father disapproved.

Even Matsuda had made a noise about how it was great South Korea had an opportunity to try to reunite with North Korea, then had to backpedal that of course he didn't approve of Kira, just that it was a good thing, was all.

And yet, his father disapproved. His sister disapproved. His mother disapproved.

(L disapproved.)

Disapproved.

It niggled at him hard.

(A politician he'd always hated approved. A rascist skinhead approved. A nutjob stalker approved.

A copycat murder-suicide killer approved, poisoning people into giving them heartattacks.

A news case had come out of prison guards murdering over 100 prisoners in America and trying to cover it up.**

Approved by all sorts of terrible people.

Approved.)

Morality was... largely opinion, but that was not all it was. Some things genuinely helped or genuinely hurt. He could care just about that. He could use more data.

He could use an independent analysis.

He'd made it sound to Ryuk before like he had long term plans, but ever since he realized that the black out of criminal names might be one of the better possible effects of Kira, truthfully he'd found himself struggling to imagine living past the next four years. He couldn't imagine graduation. Yeah, he'd clear out some more dictators probably, but that didn't need him to be alive for 4 years much less 10 or 20. He couldn't imagine Ryuk staying entertained that long, either, but maybe he could distract him into going off and causing some sort of shinigami rebellion.

If L killed him... he wasn't sure he cared anymore.

His mood perked up when he switched chores and started taking care of his new plants. Dirt just wasn't as fun if you didn't grow anything with it. His home lab microscope wasn't exactly very good quality, but he could also set up little petri dishes and see if there were any signs of growth or larger micro-organisms settling in, or if death world dirt was, well, deadly.

Something definitely grew!

While shinigami might not often take much back to the shinigami world, a single dropped Death Note was bound to get covered in micro-organisms, and the death world portals offered a tiny amount of sunlight, so there was actually a good chance that the growth he was seeing were of species entirely new to science that had evolved in isolation in a decaying world. He saw a tiny tardigrade that looked a little bit like Ryuk, all spiky. Maybe he'd create a psuedonym and send it off to a professor? That might be a bit risky, as death world microflora and fauna had probably infested Light's house and could be kind of a give away if anyone ever made the connection to their true origins.

He sterilized a few dirt samples and gave them some fauna he was confident was entirely Earth originated, with some help from biotic yoghurt in one sample, some normal soil and a raindrop for another. The probiotic yoghurt bacterium didn't mind the strange dirt as long as he fed them, and merrily made dirt flavored yoghurt, yummmm.

He was sort of tempted to get termites and feed them death note paper, but was pretty sure his mother and father would NOT be pleased with Light bringing termites into their house or anyone else's house, and would be even less pleased if he tried to make infinite termites from infinite paper even if he said it cured world hunger. So that plan was out.

His extremely cursory analysis of the composition seemed to have several familiar real world elements, the cloth and paper acted chemically an awful lot like normal cloth and paper, but there was also traces of something very heavy. That was... actually a bit disturbing, because really heavy elements tend to be highly radioactive and unstable. Light didn't want to have to wear heavy shielding every time he walked by the death note, that would be sort of incredibly noticeable. Thankfully, none of his bacterial and mold films seemed to be acting like mere proximity was inhibiting them from growth.

It occurred to him the heavy substance might not even be an 'element' composed of the usual quarks and electrons, but made of dark matter and operating by some kind of dark force or purely by the weak force (though that didn't make much sense since it shouldn't be able to be bound in that case, if you were throwing out much of physics then you could not take much for granted). If that wasn't the case, then there was potentially a really simple test: see if it could react by normal interactions in any way, say by setting it on fire and seeing it react to oxygen as fuel or the like. This was obviously a bit dangerous because he had absolutely no idea how flammable this was, but, Ryuk had already confirmed burning the Death Note wouldn't cause an explosion. So if he kept the elements in whatever compound form they were hypothetically in and didn't isolate them to full purity, it should be pretty safe. It was essentially the difference between isolating water from a mixture like salt water, and actually breaking water down into its elements. If they were already present pure, then they could be like a noble gas, or they could be in a super stable compound form if not, and thus in both scenarios be not super reactive chemically even though they were perfectly normal elements, so it wasn't a foolproof test.

He made sure to wear decent safety gear: gloves, full sleeved coat and a gas mask with eye protection. Without knowing what kind of chemical reaction he might get, not all gloves were hypothetically safe (nitrile gloves are flammable and are not a good mix with nitric acid! and rubber and plastic can be eaten by things like gasoline), so he went for thick leather and planned to simply throw them off if something went very wrong before it could try to burn through his skin or start melting the glove to his own hand.

His end conclusion? It was probably a heavy element. Like, unnaturally heavy. Elements above the hypothetical Feynmanium element 137 aren't supposed to be able to exist even briefly (though some thought you could go all the way up to 170s), but in any case a very heavy element should just decay very fast. This could go some way to explain why Ryuk could float and be invisible despite looking massed: whatever was going on, it likely was able to manipulate the fine structure 'constant' (which even conventionally wasn't a constant) that decided the strength of electromagnetism. If you can control how a force works, you can just turn off all light going from your body, and you could probably use some sort of modified magnetism that repulsed from both positive and negatives to float (good luck not imploding yourself if you do that though), or just modify yet another constant and alter gravity. That... might be kind of lethal for Light, his thoughts being composed of electrical signals aka EM waves aka light. Light would die without light, who'da thought. But Ryuk seemed to do it selectively depending on who was looking at him, and... Light struggled for any sort of traditional science-y explanation for that, honestly. It was just as magic bullshitty as names and faces killing people. So it was probably better go back to square one on the science attempts and simply not assume anything about modern physics applying.

He'd try to see if a special feeding regime did anything to Mr. Spiky Tardigrade, or if Mr. Spiky Tardigrade needed a microscopic death note before that happened. Although, considering how tiny they were, how would Light even know if they vanished or he just lost track of them? That could be a bit of a pain.

He actually briefly wondered if the death note was some kind of sentient or computer program-like entity, but his dissection failed to find anything that resembled hidden instructions in the pages. Admittedly, he didn't have a high enough quality microscope to read it if the instructions were atomic level.

Light had done some experimenting on prisoners previously, though it wasn't incredibly kind of him it was just too potentially useful. He'd tried to make one prisoner die of a stable micro-wormhole to another habitable planet, but they'd simply died of a heart attack. He'd tried to make another prisoner, who was pretty sure wasn't a very smart mathematician, prove or disprove the Riemann hypothesis without flaw, and write out digits of Pi. The digits had come out, but only as many as Light himself had remembered, and in a scrambled form, a nonsense story that involved numbers of things, and there had been no other information. It suggested that not only could prisoners not learn of something they didn't and couldn't learn personally, but that the death note couldn't be used to magically gift him information that wasn't known to humanity (or perhaps just either the user or the victim, he doubted it would reveal him L's name in scrambled form either) in general, which was a shame but probably for the best as Light wouldn't have been able to resist no matter how wrong it was. He'd also tried events of extremely low probability but technically not impossible: on writing death via partially quantum tunneling halfway out of their cell and getting impaled on a wall, the poor subject had just died of a heart attack; he also tried to make someone into a superposition of both dead and alive, by writing that the victim entered a superposition between an early death and a later death. If it had worked, Light was only able to see the earlier dead version.

He also tried to see if metaphorical death would work, by writing 'X changes their name in all ways that matter, causing death of X'. It... did not.

The Death Note also struggled with more complex instructions, like 'if the value of y in the above equation is 5, they die by bus, if is 2 they die by electrocution', unless Light bothered to solve the equation himself first, or something vague like 'dies in an ironic and karmic manner' if Light had nothing mentally pictured. So. The fucking thing was literately reading his mind. Which made sense because how else would it work for all languages or by him picturing a face? Somehow, it seemed it was piggybacking on his own sentience, but on an unconscious level so Light couldn't manipulate its bounds very well just by thinking about it. It might be hypersensitive to electromagnetic signals while somehow not frying from more intense ones?

A test with a Faraday cage confirmed this. If Light pictured a name and face while completely covered in metal with no gaps from head to toe, and wrote a name, it didn't work. This was probably totally useless information, but Light liked knowing for the sake of knowing, and it was truly comforting to know the book wasn't sapient. It also went with what Ryuk had said to him once: humans didn't have souls, they didn't go to Heaven or Hell.

(Well, what he'd really said was "if you use this, you will go to Mu/nothingness when you die" and Light said "So does that imply those afterlives exist for normal people, or does that not exist for everyone?" "Hah! You're pretty smart. I was hoping to mentally torment you a bit more, but you're completely unruffled. There's nothing after you die." Ryuk was such a dick.)

The experiments motivated Light to be a bit more generous with some of his victims, writing they 'created the greatest and/or most beautiful thing they are capable of creating within 23 days' for their deaths, because what if he had chosen a prisoner capable of creating a great math proof at one point and had squandered that potential?

He wondered if any mathematicians or scientists would take the dark bargain of sacrificing their life to improve the possibility that they'd be able to solve a given problem from say 10% to 100%, had they known it was an option. The death note seemed perfectly happy with things that were slightly implausible as long as it wasn't too much.

He was actually in a killing lull at the moment, anticipating that things might become more difficult for him in the future so it'd be better if the killings didn't stop the exact moment he started living in L's skyscraper as a prison, but he did set some deaths into the future so as to obscure the pattern.

Also, wtf, how rich was L?

Was there any chance he owned an electron microscope for fun and Light could borrow it?

"Ryuk, is there any chance there's a portal to the shinigami world in the house?"

"No. They're usually very high up." Interesting. Light had been about to ask if he could get Ryuk to go with a long rope tied to him, so he could see what would happen if Ryuk entered the other world with a tether to the other side, but it sounded like that wasn't feasible without access to a much taller building, and those would have security cameras.

"Do the portals have a 1 to 1 relationship to a fixed place in Earth's sky?"

"Nope," said Ryuk, and damn, there went a lot of potential geometries Light had in mind. "There was this one shinigami who watched some girl all day... Might have been Misa Amane come to think of it. But he just sat in front of this one portal like a lump most of the time, he didn't have to go constantly hunting for random portals that might show her face. That might have been almost interesting of him, and nobody actually does anything interesting in the shinigami world."

"So portals can follow a given person's fate?" Light's eyebrows rose. That really... didn't go well with Light's physics oriented brain, but apparently fate was a real thing even if souls weren't. Some kind of nasty form of determinism? If you could tie someone's death to the resolution of a halting problem, could you solve a calculation before it physically happened and had the time to process by ordinary physical means, utilizing lifespan numbers? That would mean killing someone without a Death Note, which Light wasn't very interested in trying at the moment even if he could avoid getting caught (though he struggled to explain to himself why, as there was no moral difference*). If trying that caused the person to die of a heart attack even without the death note, that would indicate it wasn't the death note itself that was responsible for that rule, but something about fate itself and forbidden information.

He set I Don't Want To Set The World On Fire playing, and tried to nerve himself up to leaving the house. It was easy after he reminded himself it would be easy for Amane to come knocking and find him there.

---

L's mood was poor after receiving an angry email scolding L for saying it was 'relatively safe' to reduce names, even after he patiently explained this was Second Kira's doing and not First-to-multiple. His reputation had definitely taken a hit among the public, and among officials who knew the response tape wasn't even from First Kira. The more cowardly were convinced First Kira might give a backlash at any time and wanted to cave in preemptively.

In these kinds of cases, there was always the possibility they'd get calls from mentally ill people who thought they had godlike powers, and he'd had to waste his time pouring over several 'confessions', which had soured his mood as well.

"If I die soon, remember it means Light is Kira and has contacted Second Kira, so please act accordingly," L tells the force.

What Light said about them being idiots who would just let him die and do nothing in response eats at him deeply, but he is mostly certain that it was just Light fucking with his mind.

...mostly.

Okay, not really at all. He is understanding Light's earlier disbelief in their stupidity much better now.

To be sure, he adds, "I have told Watari and other 'L's to prosecute as well." He can't help but feel a prickle of unease that this might not be enough; Light is probably perfectly aware there are others, and yet he still seemed so utterly confident he could get away with killing L if he wanted. Relying on Light to be forgetful didn't seem like a great strategy, though it was true Light could be forgetful, that seemed to have mostly happened around the time-frame of an extremely traumatic event where Light had been hit in the head and tortured, which wasn't exactly a time a person could be expected to act normally. He was unlikely to behave the same during an event he'd had plenty of time to prep for.

"Be honest, Ryuuzaki! How much do you really suspect Light?" Matsuda bursts out. "You said he had been cleared of all charges not too long ago, and yet now it seems you take every opportunity to accuse him!"

This would be the perfect moment for him to say 'Light said I thought we established that' when L asked about him being Kira, for Light to get dragged in and give an aggravated noise of 'I meant I thought we established that NEGATIVELY', and for them all to proceed to pity L for getting annoyed over something that 'was not even a joke, just a tired tortured teenager mangling words' and also annoyed at him for 'making bullshit percentages'. He skips all that, because he knows he won't win that encounter without damaging Light's reputation a lot more first, but it is so, so tempting. But it is better to wait for the right moment. He can pull it out after Second Kira gives them all the evidence they need, like a cherry on top, and eviscerate Light for his sheer audacity and stupidity in trusting L with anything.

"It's not that high, it's just that I don't have any other suspects, and he is one of the only people to have seen my face and to hear that I am L. If you would like to add yourselves as suspects instead in the scenario that I drop dead, then by all means, be my guests."

That earns him a satisfying silence.

His mind, against his own will, immediately ruins his own satisfaction by wandering to thinking of Light's wolfish smile, first given when he said something with a bit of the truth, but misleading in its own way, and how he'd said it when talking about shinigami. That was probably just his mischief face, but why give it for saying something wasn't real unless it was? And how would they know, as was asked, what code word to use?

Fuck. But no, shinigami just didn't make sense... It was better to just not think about it for now. L didn't know how to put chains on a ghost or diety. Maybe if he asked Light about how he was so confident it was 'magic bullshit' he'd feel better... even if that conversation seemed very predictable. He hated how conversations with others could seem so pointless because he often knew what they'd say before they'd say it. Though, Light didn't feel like that.

It would hurt L's pride if he had to resort to pity-confessions because he couldn't solve it any other way.

*Should* he mention the scarf? It would break Light's confidence in him completely (never mind that Light should not have seen him as a source of comfort in the first place) to do it right now, and Light-kun unfortunately might defend that it wasn't that farfetched someone could have spotted him on TV and developed a psychosis on the spot, because people did that more often than they developed psychic powers. There was simply no good payoff for it right this instant, and plenty to lose from it.

His mind drifts to Ukita's death. It was truly regrettable. A precious life, lost so senselessly. While he did not view the First Kira as a good person, it was easy to argue the Second Kira was worse. If she appeared as a cute young woman, it might be hard to convince others of that though - in fact, one of them had brought up the idea of potentially offering a plea deal to Second Kira to get the First taken down and they hadn't even seen her yet. They both needed to be taken down. Arguably, First Kira held some blame for the Second, who would never have acted without being inspired by him.

"L, I would like a word with you," Soichiro said.

"Alright," L agreed.

"I think you may be bad influence on Light. I have never seen him act out as much as he has since he met you," Soichiro fretted. "Or at least, not since he was small and Sayu somehow convinced him to take the blame for her stealing the entire cookie jar."

"I will give you this strawberry as compensation," L said solemnly.

(He actually wasn't sorry at all. He had been so disappointed when he realized Kira might not be childish. Dragging Light down to L's level was one of L's greatest accomplishments-

Okay, he mentally paused as he recalled he had lot of accomplishments, and that probably shouldn't even be on the top ten, but nobody needed to know how L ranked things. If he wanted to rank annoying Light-kun above stopping nuclear war, that was entirely his business.)

Soichiro took it awkwardly, and put it in his pocket. "Thank... you? But I do not think this is really enough."

"You are right. It should be at least two strawberries." Then, more seriously, L said, "Mr. Yagami, it is not my job to parent Light. That is yours, though as he is reaching adulthood perhaps that too should not be, nor anyone's, and Light should be left to take responsibility for his own actions." Soichiro flinched slightly like he had been struck. "But perhaps we should arrange to have you take some time off soon to spend time with your son," L reluctantly appeased. "From what I have gathered from speaking to Light... He was very unhappy before."

"Light was? Why wouldn't he tell me?" He seemed very upset, which was not the desired response. L had said *before*. Although of course Light was likely very unhappy now too.

"It can be extremely difficult to tell a distant parent these things, or so I've read." L wouldn't know personally.

"Then, thank you to speaking to Light for me to comfort him." Somehow, L doubted he would be so thankful if he knew why L had been speaking to him, and that the primary goal certainly hadn't been his comfort. Or maybe he would. 'L, thank you for trying to get my son arrested, at least we know the truth now' didn't sound like something a human being would say, but L had encountered some pretty strange human beings in his time.

"I do have a question of my own. Does Light have a dark sense of humor?"

"Oh? Yes, him and Sayu both. Actually, Light has always basically done whatever Sayu wants, so maybe it's more accurate to call it Sayu's sense of humor," Soichiro mused, looking fond. "There have been a number of times where he's been torn between leading a good example and simply caving in to her mischief. So he'll do strange things, like tease their mother into giving them no chores as she often doesn't understand their humor, but then helping her with them anyway. Or doing her homework and then telling us that he 'helped'."

"Thank you, that was very illuminating." If their mother had problems with humor and was autistic herself, that actually put another point in the 'on the non-neurotypical spectrum' scale, as that sort of thing tended to be partially genetic. But there were many kinds of masks and what kind Light had ultimately wasn't too important, as long as it wasn't the psychopathic or zealot kind.

"Did that help with lowering his percentages at all?"

"It did," L isn't entirely lying this time. It's just that it's such a small dip it doesn't really matter. He'll keep looking for other suspects on the notion it might all just be a teenager's bad sense of humor, but he's not too hopeful on that front. Especially not when he's fairly sure Light is trying to avoid Second Kira.

"I'm absolutely sure Sayu isn't Kira," Soichiro said. "I think she'd kill someone, then cry about it."

"But you don't share that certainty about Light," L noted.

"Light is intensely idealistic and he's hard working. When he was very little, the very first time one of us accidentally broke a glass in front of him, we had to scold him not to pick up the sharp pieces and put them in the trash. I also..." he hesitated. "What he did was immensely brave, but it bothers me he leaped so quickly to assume Kira might kill police and rushed out there to ask for mercy. It's true many of the police were publicly known, and he wouldn't have forgotten that fact, but... I worry Light is the kind of person to kill himself for someone else. He gets that trait from me, I fear."

"Yes, I too noticed his reaction seemed a bit fast."

"He may have just been very worried for me," he said. "And Light is very clever. He may well have predicted I was going to go there myself, and had his mind go to the worst possibilities. And 'Kira' was acting very out of character, he would have noticed that. Did notice that, in fact." And yet, L thought, he merely hinted at the possibility first instead of leaping to it right away, clearly thinking about it but not wanting to seem like he knew it for certain. Though, of course, if he really were innocent, he'd be motivated to do the same out of a desire not to seem a suspect simply from having too high deductive ability. L (mostly) hadn't been lying about that little bit not being a test for Light. It really was quite useless when both your guilty and innocent scenarios were likely to act the same way. It was mostly useful for making Light angry, which was always a bonus.

"It is possible," L said, popping a cherry into his mouth, hoping to escape having to offer up any more comfort. "Excuse me, I need more snacks."

Speaking of, he spotted Light hanging out in the building on the cameras, looking a little stressed and glancing over his shoulder anxiously behind him to make sure he wasn't followed in by anyone besides the bodyguard. (His father would not be too happy Light didn't wait to let his father drive him over. If L told him.) If he wanted to catch Second Kira and him interacting, he needed to coax Light to leave again. Which meant he needed to make Light feel either a bit less anxious, or annoyed at him. Or tattle on him, but L didn't feel like doing that.

When L had been younger, he'd absolutely loathed hugs and thought the first time he received one that it was some sort of attack. However, some people found them comforting. Therefore, he concluded no matter Light's feelings about them, it would be a win-win scenario. Perhaps it would turn into a wrestle fight and L could win that too.

He went down via the elevator and headed to Light's room. Light looked drowsy and a bit dreadful. Again, L found himself experiencing a flicker of unease. If Light, who was fairly intelligent and usually pretty composed even in the face of severe consequences, was afraid of Second Kira, did there exist a second factor that Light knew about to be frightened of but L didn't? Or was he just anxious because unlike all the other times, he knew there was a good chance that evidence gathered would be completely beyond his control? It was one thing to lose to something you decided it was an acceptable risk, it was another to have a complete unknown suddenly fly in completely beyond your control and to lose to something you couldn't really have planned for. Some people reacted poorly to that.

Light gave him a bedraggled look and did not get up from his seat. His posture was uncharacteristically rather like L's usual, with his feet and legs tucked up together on the bench, but with the difference that he was in fact actually sitting not crouching.

"You like me, right Light?" The look turned to one of adject confusion and a little distrust about where L was going with this.

"...yes?" Light said slowly. "Although sometimes I have my doubts because, let's face it, you can be an ass."

L gave him a hug from behind, wrapping him so Light couldn't move his arms to retaliate very well. Light twitched his arm, like he wanted to reciprocate the hug, or just slide a hand out, but then stopped for the moment when he realized L had done this on purpose. He gave L a very confused, but not upset, expression. "You seemed like you needed one."

"Oh. Okay," Light said, still seeming perplexed, craning his head to look up at L from his seat.

It wasn't unpleasant, perhaps because L was doing the hugging. However, it occurred to him belatedly that he did not actually know how long a hug was supposed to last for, and Light seemed to have no inclination to tell him. L felt he'd probably crossed the line of usual length, but Light wasn't reacting negatively. He let go anyway, feeling uncharacteristically awkward.

"Do you want to sit on my lap?" Light asked, already unfurling one of his legs even though his tone was teasing.

"Definitely not." He didn't miss Light's flash of hurt, and decided this blunt a response was a miscalculation, as he hadn't been aiming for that at all. "I'll sit next to you." This somehow translated into Light trying to lean against him. He wasn't quite sure what to make of Light's apparent propensity for cuddling, even if just in the form of leaning shoulder to shoulder or resting a head against him. Maybe he was just that tired. Maybe L had made a mistake letting it happen last time, hoping emotional attachment would give him an advantage. There was certainly something a little unsettling about having a killer so close, Light was like a friendly tiger burning bright.

Light's gaze flickered to something invisible for a moment, suddenly seeming a bit more awake and unhappy. Then he did a pained close of his eyes and looked like he wanted to drift off to sleep, but seeming too unsettled to actually do so. L gave an experimental quick squeeze, which seemed to relieve some tension.

It certainly seemed like there were some genuine feelings there, but L still hadn't quite gotten over his raw disbelief of that. Maybe it was just exaggerated on purpose from the mildness of the real thing, or the cuddling was a trauma response. L wasn't the most emotionally available figure, clearly, but he was very unjudgmental about human pecularities and Light was lacking in other figures who provided that. He did recall a study that said humans could confuse arousal from fear for finding another person arousing, which was why horror movies were so popular as date nights; that could be another possibility. He wasn't acting terribly afraid, though. At least not of L, anyway.

Then one of L's worst nightmares occurred. Light sniffled. It was very faint, and he buried his head against his own leg so L couldn't see him cry, but it was very obvious. It was a bit gobsmacking. L had mentally built him up as this kind of leviathan figure, unphased by torture or any threat of death, almost unstoppable, and yet here he was, clearly breaking down. Perhaps it had been more of a case of suppression.

"I'm sorry," L said. "I am bad at hugs. That was clearly an exceptionally bad one, I shan't do it again."

Light gave a short laugh-sniffle. "I think you were right about the mask, but if this is it off, don't you think it would be better to put it on again?"

"Pain and different pain are not your only two options," L stated. "Don't be intentionally ridiculous."

"You sure? Because my mom was making a comment about how relieved she was I didn't seem to be going out with a boy after all."

"It may seem that way now when you are still in your parents' house," L admitted. Somehow, though, he doubted a mere comment by his mother was the sole thing making Light cry, or even the final straw considering Light hadn't even been crying when L came in. No, something about L's comfort itself had proven too much, probably its perceived falsehood. Which meant... this was kind of L's fault. More importantly, though, had his mother seen-

Light tried to rest his head against L's chest, of all things, shifting closer, and L... well, let him, exasperated mostly by it, but also perhaps feeling slightly guilty and confused. Why seek out the thing that hurt you? Was L, fake as he was, really his only option?

(That was part of it, but Light also kind of just wanted to see L's reaction and was testing boundaries, remembering how close L let him get last time. Could he get closer?)

"Aren't you afraid of me at all, Light?"

Light blinked, and laughed. "Obviously not. Though I guess I should be."

So indeed Light did not believe he had really convinced L to be merciful with him. Interesting.

"I suspect Light of having a martyr complex. You were happy to risk your life, and you're aware I could decide your guilt and lock you away. DNA analysis is being done on traces left on the tapes. It's only a matter of time before the Second Kira is brought in, and they could take you down."

Light was glaring now, lifting up his head. L idly noted they were the same exact height, which was even more obvious when someone was only inches away from you. "Okay, I'm gonna call you out on your bullshit because it's obvious no one else will. Torture makes most people break down and tell you whatever the fuck you want to hear. You want me to be Kira? Then whatever poor sop you catch will probably agree I'm Kira, because I bet you're thinking you 'know the Japanese system will make it difficult to get a prosecution attempt going without a confession, I'm a rulebreaker, I'll just trample all the rules in order to get one!'" Then, when L didn't immediately deny it, he gave the meanest smile he'd given L yet and he said, "I thought you were smart."

L jerked away, glaring. The moment of niceness was thoroughly ruined.

Light seemed to regret it as he shifted his position, his voice softening. "Look... just don't torture people. It's not hard."

"Most people can't kill by looking at you. Some unpleasantness may be unavoidable."

Light sighed. "I suppose you're right." That sounded ominous sounding from a killer who could apparently off him at any time.

"But I can endeavor to not actually torture any suspects," L clarified, deciding this might be necessary to avoid going on Light's 'too evil to live' list. Plus, it was true he didn't actually want a false confession, as unlikely as that might be. "You did not answer my original question, I noticed," L said.

"Mm, I don't know." Light waved. "It wouldn't be much of a waste. It's just my life." He paused. "And to clarify, you didn't actually ask a question, but I'm assuming you meant to imply one about a martyr complex. Obviously, it would be horrible to arrest or kill someone who didn't behave as heinously as you believed. But if you're asking just about myself, I guess I don't care as much as I should?" The second to last sentence did not say 'someone innocent'.

L was a little surprised, but considering how bored and in pain Light must be, really not very much. And he actually had been wondering if Light was mildly suicidal, to just hint at L he was Kira like that. "Some would say Light-kun has everything, and that all lives are precious."

"If you can't actually change things for the better, what's the point? I'm just one person. I don't even have the power to make - I really hope you don't tell him I said this - Aizawa stop being a bigot."

"You're being very hasty," L chided. "Things can feel like they take forever when someone is at your age, that structures are immutable, but when change does arrive it can leave society almost unrecognizable." L hadn't really been expecting to give some sort of pep talk. Again. "People are only truly powerless, usually-" barring not being tied up with ropes or the like, or the state declaring you an invalid incapable of taking care of yourself and sending you home to your abuser so you have no choice but to kill them, "when they believe they are powerless."

"Hm. You're not completely evil," Light decided, sounding half-joking but L suspected it was anything but. "You do care about justice at least a little bit deep down, don't you?"

"That information cannot be inferred from what I stated," L said. "It was an observation."

"I know," Light said, giving a short huff. "But you have to have spent at least a little time thinking about it. You could have been some sort of crime lord, but you decided not to."

"Being in law enforcement is the best position if you want to commit crime," L said. "The only one better of course is politics, but I wouldn't touch that with a ten hundred meter pole."

"You wouldn't even be able to pick it up."

"All the better."

Well, there was one thing about Light that L liked. He was easy going enough to laugh at L's jokes.

"I don't want to kill you, Light," L decided to say, leaning in slightly (they were already fairly close, would have been closer if L had not jerked away before) and watching Light flush slightly as if L had confessed something else. He figured the apparent reciprocation would help him stay on Light's good side, while the actual content of the words didn't mean very much.

Just because he didn't particularly strongly want to, didn't mean he wouldn't do it or that he strongly wanted Light alive. But he supposed he could compliment Light on being far more charming and successful than his usual crooks, and certainly far more his equal.

...it might end up being necessary to make some sort of deal. L wasn't immortal and had no interest in chasing infinite Kiras. Maybe Light would get a small amount of what he wanted after all, as bitter as it made L to lose even a little bit in their game. But he was a preferable target for a plea deal than Second Kira, though he knew others probably wouldn't agree since he still had more deaths to his name due to starting earlier.

He should probably apologize for the hug again. L really should have known that all hugs were secretly pure evil, and never crossed that terrible line. He should stick to something morally safer, like torture sanctioned by law enforcement. Or, no, he just promised he wouldn't. Hm. Maybe just a little torture? Locking up in a room with no stimulation for a mere day?

Light was honestly just kind of overwhelmed. He thought he'd started settling on a good trauma response, which was to quip and then go quiet because if it is Light's own responses that put Light in danger, by gifting clues, or being in a position other than a curled up ball (he might not be able to hit Misa, but he's thought obsessively about it and has decided he can still use his strength to ball up and then she won't be able to unturtle him) then if Light simply doesn't say or do anything, just goes catatonic or going through the social niceties he has memorized, no one can hurt him.

But L keeps nudging him into responses, sometimes even making him laugh, the bastard, and for a moment after a quip by Ryuk "Oh, he's offering you false comfort now?" he suddenly just couldn't take it any more.

Everyone wanted to hurt him, or was indifferent to hurting him, or would not want to but would go through with it fucking anyway and frankly he probably deserved it, but it still hurt for some reason. He didn't have anyone he could fully trust.

The guy he sort of liked just wanted to use and kill him, or best case chain him up for ages. The girl he didn't like but hypothetically should have been on his side was a nutjob who would kill any woman who looked at him funny and would merrily kill her own friends, which was absolutely fucking terrifying because... Light really didn't like having more innocents on his hands. He felt so frustrated with himself for the mistakes he'd made, for the ones he did, but told himself it was irreversible so all he could do was endeavor to do better in the future.

But maybe better was just not killing at all (though he refused to be sorry about the dictators, thank you very much), which was not a great realization to be having at this particular time when he might well be forced to kill again. So maybe there was no future. Maybe he was coming up on the end, and he'd better plan for that, and try to figure out what his last acts should be.

"Why do people suck?" it was a bit petulant, but an honest question. He wasn't sure if L would really deign to answer.

"All sorts of reasons. Often greed but more often just abject stupidity. Their leadership pits the lower classes against each other, or against foreigners, instead of focusing on commonalities. Our instincts haven't caught up to fact we as a species are fully capable of providing for everyone on the planet, although with how we are trashing the environment that might soon not be the case."

"But there must be something you would or could do," Light said, fixated. "Like, let's pretend you were Kira for a second. How would you be better? How would you fix the world? Or just more to your liking, even. I'm sure you could do a better job of it than the current Kiras."

L froze for a second, wondering if Light was really offering what L thought despite the fact L's ears were in perfectly working order. Because he had little doubt, that if L were really interested, that this could go down the route of L having the apparently near godlike (or minor godlike) power of Kira, or effectively so by ordering what he wanted.

"I don't think you can fix stupidity, Light," L said, trying to let him down gently while at the same time frustrated with himself. It would have been so easy to lie and say, give me the weapon and I'll take care of everything for you. Hell, it would have been so easy to actually do it, and logical in order to get extra info to end the case.

L had never really been interested in being Kira. He already had the power to kill nearly anyone non-political he wanted, he didn't need magic for that, and for the most part, that power just didn't interest him. Tailor had been an exception because he was useful, that was all. That explained why he wouldn't do it for real, but it wouldn't explain why L found himself hesitating over faking it.

He'd have to come up with a sincere sounding answer, and that could be... dangerous.

"So you definitely do have a sense of justice," Light concluded triumphantly, to L's confusion for a second before he realized that, yes, technically refusing to be Kira because he didn't think it would work to fix the world counted, if weakly.

"I suppose." What was safe to mention? "There is one thing I'd fix if I had a magic wand. I'd give minors and people declared mentally incompetent more control over what homes they are sent to. Too often, we give people no choice about going home to their own abusers. It's one thing about giving them no choice about a removal from someone, it's another to give them no choice about a move to someone they think is genuinely hurting them or even who they may just dislike, which if they are uncomfortable talking about their abuse may be the only warning sign."

"Are you speaking from personal experience?" Did Light suspect him of being an abused orphan?

"I've seen some pretty sick cases in my time, and those miscarriages of justice were one of the ones that bothered me the most because they seemed so stupidly fixable. There was this case I had of murder-suicide I was asked to look into, because everyone was in disbelief it was really a murder-suicide as the huge adoptive family looked so happy in their photos. It was fairly boring to me, because I could clearly make out at one glance that one of the children in the photos that had many forum comments for how 'cute' it was, was being starved. And one of the children had outright begged, apparently, not to be sent back once, then she was forced to write an apology for lying."(^)

"Boring, or disgusting?" Light said. "You called it sick, so I think you're disgusted even if you think you feel numb about it." Maybe. He'd seen so many, it was better to take a clinical attitude to it all. "It's okay to feel things, you know. I won't think less of you for it."

(Light moves to cup an arm around L, but hesitates at actually going through with it. L is fixated thinking on other things and ignores the nonsense comment about feelings.)

Now, if L were ruthless enough, there were things he could think of that might, while painful and capable of badly backfiring, might provide a payoff for human survival in the long run. He was extremely afraid of mentioning them to Light, though, not when Light was already so close to them as a conclusion himself when he was going after dictators and corrupt cops, and had seen the media bow so quickly and readily to a Kira. If Light had been even slightly more experienced with governments and politics, he'd be even more absolutely terrifying than he already was, and L frankly could have lost on day one to such an older Light. He was very clearly a prime example of 'too dangerous to let live too long'.

L felt a weird sense of loss, nonetheless. Perhaps it was a simple instinct triggered by touch and Light looking up to him. The earnest desire to please and impress was something anyone would find flattering. Perhaps it was just all the raw potential. He would have to do something nice for him before he put him down like a puppy that had the misfortune to be born a wolf among poodles.

It was strangely hard to think of anything else for a little while.

He made the belated realization that he was actually sitting normally for once, having moved his knees down when Light had moved closer to put his head against him, which was quite awhile ago. Clearly, that must be the culprit. Somehow, it also feels very tempting to put his arms around Light and feels far more natural this time. He settles for just one so that it, of course, does not count as a hug.

It does feel like things have shifted between them, a bit. Before, L had been determined to make it a game between equals, with a winner and a loser. It's harder to think of it like that when Light is so quick to go 'ah, okay, you know more than me, you're my social superior.' and when, technically, if this had been a game of chess, Light may well have won round one, so to speak, because you don't have to win by killing the king if you can just checkmate him with the threat of it. L fully intended to win round two, but had a hard time feeling as good about the idea as before.

L stiffens as he feels arms pulling up underneath his own and wrapping around him, Light clearly aiming to get revenge. It's a firm hug, and actually... feels good, actually.

L is an insomniac who rarely relaxes. Caffeine and sugar constantly pump through his veins, and his odd choices for positions often make it even harder for him to relax into sleep.

This time, it is L who falls asleep on Light, blacking out if only for a few moments before he jolts awake, so terrified of his own decision making or lack thereof that he flees the room to go down a cup of coffee.

Light hunts him down pretty quickly, like he's caught the scent of something very interesting and doesn't intend to let go.

L is feeling very defensive and rattled, not for the first time afraid of Light but this time for a very different reason than before. He couldn't get complacent. And that had felt... he put his hand to his chest. Disturbingly peaceful.

"It is interesting to hear Kira's reasoning for his wanton killings," L said, eager to get the first word in, afraid that... Afraid of what? That Light would make fun of him for napping? That seemed unlikely. He didn't know what, exactly, he was afraid of Light saying just then.

Light glared. "I'm not Kira," he said instead of what he was really thinking. That wouldn't do: L wanted him to open up more, not less. Light didn't usually deny it completely outright like that, preferring double talk. Perhaps L had been too blunt and insulting for that this time.

"Not currently." There was that lull in kills. "But you sympathize with him, do you not?" Taking a softer tone was not one of L's strongest suits, for all that he had bizarrely been doing it a lot lately. "You just hide it from your father because you know he'd disapprove, but you enjoyed the logical puzzle of how to use the minor criminals to gather evidence."

"I should never have suggested letting minor criminals die, I got too caught up with it," Light said with a sigh. "If anything, I'd think that'd make my chances to be Kira less, since he doesn't go after too many petty crooks."

"Yet there was one case where a petty crook died after revealing a mob boss," L said. "He's not totally against it, it just isn't his first preference."

"Do you ever find yourself thinking there is anyone who deserves to die?" Light asked, not actually answering the question.

"Perhaps. Morality is very subjective. I don't take on cases out of a sense of justice but because they interest me, like I've said."

Light shook his head, disgusted. "So someone hurts a lot of people, but the case is boring, you just look the other way?"

This was not going well. In fact, from the dark look on the other's face, he wondered if his 'do not kill' status was in danger of getting revoked. "Light, there are an enormous number of cases in the world. I need a mechanism to sort through them somehow. Cases that interest me are ones that would actually require someone of my level of expertise. The ones that don't can be handled by others. It's efficient. I do sometimes send a quick note on my initial opinion of a less interesting case to help point the right way. But there are simply too many of them for me to do that with all of them. I prefer cases with at least ten deaths, or a million dollars in damages. But that doesn't mean I've never ever looked at others, especially in the very early days of my career."

That seemed to mollify Light a bit, thankfully. But it made it apparent to L that things couldn't continue the way they were permanently. Light would not be a happy 'pet'.

"You don't look for the justice of it because it would quickly become overwhelming, right?" Light asked but sounded more like he had a conclusion. L didn't give a denial. "You're emotionally sensitive."

L wasn't...! How on earth did Light come to *that* conclusion? He became fatigued because it was too much to think about, even for him!

"If morality is subjective, then you would go with majority consensus I suppose? In that case, you should support democracy ending dictators coming to a bad end, or Kiras if popular opinion favors them," Light added, and L was grateful for the change in topic.

"Simply killing a dictator won't ensure another one won't arise in their place. All Kira is doing is ensuring most of the next batch of dictators will all be wearing masks, weeding out the stupidest ones and leaving smarter replacements who will do more damage because they actually know what they are doing. And the majority can be stupid and acting on information that is just plain wrong based on wishful thinking rather than scientific evidence. So no, I can't really agree with a majority all of the time, though a court system with a jury of peers with those who are too obviously partial to either side weeded out is certainly fairer than just letting mob justice or a random citizen with a god complex choose who lives and dies. In the end, I make my own judgments. Kira's actions appear to have improved things in Korea, but have destabilized Russia and created the possibility the next leader will be a complete lunatic who is now in control of nukes, making it like a coinflip."

"So you think you're better than everyone else," Light was teasing again, that was good. Though, he could be hiding anger underneath. The statement was not exactly flattering.

"When it comes to discerning facts, I am," L said simply, leaning against the wall.

"So am I," said Light hotly.

"And yet, you've made mistakes. Or do you deny that?"

Light didn't deny it, looking down. "Everyone makes mistakes, which I guess is a big reason Kira should be stopped; even if I sympathize with him, I know it's fundamentally flawed." Truth or lie?

Light might regard him as a hypocrite after this, which was true enough, but overall L felt he'd won what he wanted from this exchange. A less confident and more sad than angry Light was a less dangerous Light.

Or, should he have provoked him into making the kills in front of him? No, Light wasn't stupid. He was unlikely to go for the bait... But unlikely was still worth trying, perhaps. He was about to speak when Light, being bizarrely trusting because of course L would hold it against him if he actually killed in patterns suggested by L, asked, "What do you think of African dictators?"

"I think that there are very different socioeconomic factors in play, and that despite superficial similarities between one place with a dictatorship and another, in Africa the biggest problem is actually Western civilization and without addressing those underlying factors, very little will improve for the average citizen."

When you are young, you have only had so much time to get exposed to information, no matter how intelligent you are. Light looked fascinated, like this was new to him. "Don't they send huge amounts of economic aid? I mean I know of course they fucked things up pretty bad before with slavery, but you're saying they're still doing it? I do remember reading on a Rationality forum something about people sending Bibles instead of usable aid to starving people, is that what you mean?"

"Not quite. The international 'aid' -" L paused, because this was dangerously close to the path he'd most feared Kira taking, which at its most careless might lead to literately nuclear responses, so it was time for some fibbing, "- which I am sure is entirely well meant," he did not think that at all, actually, because L was a cynical son of a bitch, "is actually a very good scheme at funneling resources from Africa to the First World and at subsidizing already powerful corporations at home. Even some of the better ideas that really do simply give resources back, tend to be clumsy and leave people displaced and poorer, for instance building massive dams that displace fishermen and then not giving the fishermen a new livelyhood, or sending 'free' food in non-draught years, often the one thing a poor uneducated family can produce, so that local food prices are worth less but the original sender profits because their own government pays the private producer. The original government gets to look charitable, but a democratic government wants votes and lobbyists more than it wants money, and subsidizing one of its own companies gives it exactly that, and the private producer gets plenty of pork. To rub salt on the wound, there is often an expectation of being paid back for these 'gifts', leaving the gifted nation poorer in multiple ways instead of just one by increasing the national debt. In addition, and final insult, in return for aid one often requires following dubious economic advice such as 'austerity' of not spending on your own citizens to help them out of poverty, or selling resources to private corporations which may not even be members of the country, which perpetuates the cycle."

Light was looking quiet and dismayed, so L took the opportunity to hit him while he was down:

"If you simply go around killing rulers called bad names of every country, you increase the chances that you will gift an opportunity to a foreign nation to increase their influence and power or create a chaotic power vacuum. I cannot iterate this enough: simply murdering people and hoping for the best is clumsy, and Kira was lucky with their particular first targets. In fact, a dictator who rejects austerity may even be helping their country, even as they damage it in other ways, though most of them would simply accept First World aid and use it to empower themselves by gifting it preferentially to their own cronies. The world is not a black and white place, and Kira is felicitous that the targets he chose so far so neatly fit a black and white picture."

It wasn't just countries with dictators or in Africa, of course. South Korea had been fucked over by the IMF, the 1997 Asian financial crisis (which began in Thailand) being as bad as it was could be potentially traced back to them strong arming draconian structural adjustment measures, governments taking contractionary fiscal policies like high interest rates, reduce government spending and deficits, and allowing insolvent banks and financial institutions to fail as advice in the wake of the crisis exactly when such advice was least needed. Japan had been affected but less so. Pegging local currencies to the foreign US dollar did not help either and helped start the whole crisis, as there was not a sufficient supply of the currency in Thailand.

"So... did none of the aid work at all?" Light sounded horrified.

"That is not true, efforts at eradicating disease have been quite beneficial," L admitted. "Though there have been fuckups, like not predicting the poison covered anti-malarial nets would get used for fishing by hungry farmers which may have been preventable if at any point anyone decided to actually talk to the people they were trying to help about their needs. And efforts to increase tourism has had benefits economically and for preserving wildlife." Although L could not help but again see the latter cynically as very self-beneficial that merely happened to have good side-effects, as it was largely First Worlders that were enjoying that tourism.

Light was quiet and thoughtful, and seemed grateful to be corrected rather than mad. L was just glad he didn't immediately ask about South America's history next, or the Middle East where treating the solution as 'murder both sides!' would be especially childish. It would be good to distract him.

"I still want to solve your case. I'll give you a pass on killing a dictator just this once if you show me your murder method. I can give a heads up to people from the local region so they can prepare for the fallout and move in to stabilize the country as much as they can before foreign powers step in to do their own 'stabilizing'. That would make it a lot less like tossing a coin. I can even suggest a list of targets of likely successors, so you wouldn't be simply replacing one for another."

Light blinked at him, then glared. "I know you think I'm a superpowered toy, but I'm not." Not a denial that he was superpowered, just that he wasn't a toy, if L read between the lines correctly. Realizing this was perhaps a little too close to honesty, Light added, "I just like to talk about 'what ifs' because it's hard to find intellectual discussion, but it doesn't make me Kira. I liked what we had when you were 'Ryuuzaki' and I want to continue that."

"Of course not, Light," L said. "I do consider you a friend," he lied through his teeth. Except he felt weirdly rocky this time when he tried. It still came out smoothly, of course, but there was an unnerving pinch internally. "Or something like a student and potential successor." That was far less of a lie, but didn't cause him any internal dismay thinking about it.

"You do?" Light looked at him dubiously but hopefully.

"Of course. I've never had anyone else on my level before," he patted Light's ego. He considered adding 'why do you think I have not killed you yet?' but knew on reflection that Light would see through that one right away and deduce L was keeping him as a puzzle. "You are a very difficult person to fully dislike." That part was annoyingly true. It was clear Light earnestly wanted to fix the mistakes he was making as Kira. The offer of that power, even indirectly... he had to admit it was a little flattering. Would be more so, if he didn't already have power, of course.

"You going to start a collection of people who interest you?" Light joked.

"I already have," L confessed, only to see a disturbed look on Light's face. 'Who do you think I had cut the power? It was a pair of minor but skilled criminals I caught and released in return for a favor,' he thought of saying, but instead said, "I have a number of potential successors, though I don't keep a particularly close eye on them, if I fail, another L will take the case."

If Light had been a normal criminal, that would have put him on edge, but instead, Light relaxed at the 'innocuous' answer. "You made that sound really dark and twisted at first. I worried you had a bunch of people bound and locked up in some basement somewhere. You really need to work on how you talk to people, L." Yes, well, soothing feelings ordinarily wasn't his job. "If you're out of practice, it's not much wonder you struggle with your own feelings."

Then Light does something utterly baffling. L straightens to his full height as Light moves close enough to touch, but pins him against the wall without actually doing so: he can slip right out very easily if he tries. He feels his heart beating rapidly. It's nonsensical, he was just fine the first time Light leaned against him. If the hands were higher, he'd immediately peg it as a dominance move, which would be something L definitely doesn't care for.

"I don't want a kiss," he says, which is true, but he still feels strangely mesmerized.

"Okay. Can I hug you again?"

"I really shouldn't," he said, which really spoke to how rattled he was. He should be encouraging ill placed attachment. He's just worried that if he does it at this exact moment, it will be him and not Light with the handicap. He is not sure his usual dislike of hugs will be enough protection, especially when it gives him a faint flicker of happiness that Light realized he needed to ask this time.

L sought friendships and love, but he couldn't feel those things himself, because he could not trust. And Light was the last person he should ever put trust in.

Light grins. "Can I ask you to do something 'stupid'?" Like an inverted mirror of their earlier conversation.

"I..." Why has his brain abandoned him? "Really shouldn't."

Light reaches out to stroke his head and ruffle his hair.

"Go back to sleep. You clearly need it. Leave a camera on if it'll make you feel better."

L shakes his head. He hates sleep. He always has. He has always been proud of how little of it he can survive on, and he hates showing weakness to an enemy. Light seems to have a nefarious knack for seeking out all of his weaknesses and taunting L with it in subtle ways. Sweets. Showing his face. Somehow, even managed to alter his posture to get L off his game without L immediately noticing, after L foolishly told him how important it was to him.

"Is it nightmares?" Light strokes him again, which relaxes him and causes an inadvertent wave of exhaustion threatening to collapse him on the spot. He really should be telling him to stop that.

"Sometimes." L has indeed seen plenty of bodies in various states of decomposition and pulverization, and videos of brutal violence. "More often it is just hyperactivity of my mind." He has no idea why he is confessing this. Or why his body is traitorously trying to yawn and his eyes to close, his head to tilt.

Light catches him mid-sway, and L has to admit it's time to move away from the wall. He really doesn't know what is wrong with him. When he re-settles down, he can't help but stare at Light rather than actually sleep while an enemy is watching him. A catnap with his eyes open? Sure. He's done that many times. Timing a quick nap that he knows will likely be shorter than someone else's sleep and is easily disturbed by the slightest motion? Also fine. Actual deep sleep longer than 4 hours? That leaves him uneasy.

Light notices his unease and purses his lips, and reluctantly leaves, but not before fetching a blanket, looking around in the nearest closets, the first revealing only brooms.

"If I learned your true name, would you trust me then?" Light said.

L jolted. "I feel like in that situation I should have the opposite of trust."

"But you'd be able to pinch yourself and confirm you weren't dead," Light teased.

"Kira is reprehensible," L lashes out, agitated but struggling to say why. Surely all of this should just be a small irritation, not... not make his heart beat wildly like this. "I am Justice, because society has entrusted me with that power, though I myself am not necessarily very just because I don't hesitate to cheat by doing things like illegally cutting power lines. Kira is just Killer, which is an entirely different class of things, and is threatening to destabilize society."

"I see." Light tilted his head. "I don't quite get that point of view, but I'll try to learn. I'm kind of neutral about Kira, I guess you could say." Odd as it might seem, that didn't go against his profile of Kira to say, especially the more 'scientist' flavored profiles. While he'd kept it quiet, he was still disturbed by the bizarre case of a criminal who had somehow managed to phase their hand through a wall before dying of a heart attack. Kira had the capacity to be an utterly ruthless experimenter, so no matter how much warmth they might show, it was stupid to let down one's guard.

L had a feeling more like being dissected than by being hailed by a would be pupil. "It's not that complicated, Light. In addition to everything I said previously, if you kill someone, they can't reform. So it can be considered vastly preferable to capture criminals rather than merely kill them."

He's starkly aware of the hypocrisy spewing from his mouth. But he can't help himself. L can believe something is good, and still not be that goodness himself. He wasn't like Light, who idealistically seemed to crave perfection and seemed to regard L as merely another opportunity to try to self correct. Normally, someone so perfection obsessed would be more egotistical. He wondered if there was some sort of childhood trauma behind it. Perhaps the Aizawa incident was sufficient to nudge him on that path, but it seemed like the sort of thing that needed more than one small moment. Maybe it had been a series of small decisions that had snowballed over time.

Although, on second thought, living a life of zero failures would shape a person dramatically. A single instant of failure, however small, could be ground breaking for such a person, especially if they had a propensity to overanalyze everything when bored.

"Light," L interrupted him leaving, something niggling at him. "It is extremely unfortunate the Second Kira came on to the scene in multiple ways, but the biggest is that it puts a stronger spotlight on Japan and makes the idea there are only a few 'major' Kiras, possibly all in Japan, much stronger. If I were Kira right now, I'd strongly look into fabricating another Kira right now outside of Japan. I know Kira is in a lull right now, probably anticipating the Second Kira getting caught, but..." L shook his head. He knows following this advice immediately wouldn't look good for Light. Light knows it wouldn't look good for Light, but also know that it was strongly the sort of thing Kira might have done regardless and in fact, for all L knew, Light was already contemplating it. And he knew Light could be 'baited' into doing 'the right thing' even if it had consequences for him.

It will provide a good piece of extra evidence, even if L is the only one to know it for now. It would reflect terribly on him if anyone knew L was actively encouraging Kira to make a kill, but it wasn't like it was the first time.

L had seen cases where even with the most obvious evidence, people bent over backwards to explain why someone they liked hadn't really been guilty or couldn't be guilty. He'd lost faith in the task force and was now more interested in proving it to himself, though he would still prove it to the others if he could. It would not be the first time he'd played Judge, Jury, and Executioner.

He hadn't teased Light about why he was so sure it was 'magic bullshit' and not science like he'd planned.

Maybe he really would go take a nap.

Light's thoughts when he went home again were wild, restless over L's critique and cynicism.

He craved seeing him again, which he wanted to dismiss as merely hormonal but unfortunately couldn't. Light had often interacted with people in a friendly manner, had 'friends', and hadn't previously considered himself lonely because he was very self sufficient at entertaining himself, but L had him wishing they could have somehow met any other way.

He looked at the new Russian leadership. They were all wearing masks as an Anti-Kira measure and had fully abandoned what little pretence of democracy there was, since one can't exactly vote for 'Anonymous', making it superficially appear like Light had just made things worse there. L was right that Light had been clumsy, but he was absolutely wrong that the world couldn't be improved.

There was a pre-existing list of powerful figures with known names and faces there who had been suggested as potential replacements. He couldn't figure out which one? That was absolutely fine.

He'd control them all.

Simply killing them was clumsy, it was graceless, but the Death Note could do more than that. He wrote down that they worked to establish a fully functioning democracy together - then, after a moment of thought, decided to make it so no Death Note user, no populist strong man, could easily un-do what he just did:

He specified that it would be a sortition style democracy, with direct leadership of the people on many issues and for everything else, officials chosen by raffle from the populace. Some professional investigators would exist, but a similarly raffle style citizen's watch would do the bulk of the policing, to cure the fact that the corruption was rotten both up and down the ladder.

If this made the world shit its pants and think 'Kira can kill even without a face if he is determined enough'? So be it.

It was kind of interesting to see how exactly the Death Note would interpret 'extra deaths' here. A civil war ongoing already would cause countless deaths, so changing the exact cause from 'plain power grab' to 'establishing a true democracy' shouldn't matter, right? Or, would it make it a rare bloodless coup, which was less implausible if he'd gotten lucky enough to nab all the major players? In that case, not only did it prevent extra deaths being caused by the note but it prevented a lot, a heck of a lot, of deaths that would have occurred as-is.

If this made L go 'shit, Light is clever enough he probably is not bluffing', that could be a bonus, unless it terrified him into immediately disappearing Light into a deep dark hole never to be seen again. But Light felt that was fully worth the risk. He felt genuine pride in his work right then, and would take any torture, any end of his life or - as much as it pained him - end of his family as collateral damage.

L's cynicism that the world could not be improved could go eat shit.

L was woken up with words he never wanted to hear: "L, you need to get up."

An irrational terror filled him that something terrible had happened because he had slept. That this was all Light's terrible trick. Groggily, he remembers his own advice and suppresses a groan. 

Seeing his stricken face, Watari offered: "It is up to you whether it is bad news. I simply thought it was something you would want to know right away, because it could effect the entire investigation and potentially put an end to it."

"What has Kira done now?" L said.

"He's apparently taken over Russia, as the leaders there are all acting very strangely and talking about dying for their sins. And there's more. As North Korea and South Korea have successfully joined together, though many challenges still remain logistically, Korea has decided to offer him full amnesty as a thank you, though he would be required to come live in the country and give up breaking international law and do many years community service as restitution for the innocents and criminals not deserving of the death penalty he has taken. It looks like other countries are strongly considering bribes for Kira or a Kira to come live in their country along a similar vein. China in particular is looking incredibly nervous and are discussing what bribes could be given to Kira, including significant amounts of money, but they're also making aggressive noises about potentially nuking Japan if their higher ups are targeted next."

L yanked his plush chair back up into a vertical position.

This was exactly what L had feared. Light had figured out he needed to exert control over governments, not just sloppily kill 'bad people' and hope for the best, and all from a single critique by L, which meant this was half L's fault. He was escalating, and anywhere could be next. The only thing stopping him was that he was probably still naive enough to trust democratic countries, but what happened when that trust inevitably broke? Would he turn into a full blown dictatoral monster?

L had woken from a pleasant dream just to walk straight into a nightmare. He had wanted more time. He needed more time.

He couldn't bear to kill Light until he had the full story.

The one fundamental political truth is this: You usually cannot half perform a coup. Once you start a coup, it's ride it out, or die.

And Yagami Light had started a coup against the whole damn world. Or, perhaps it had really been a combination of Light and Second Kira, who went after the media, which is one of the first moves any coup must make. That move might have been thoughtless, but once it was done, it was done. Any experienced political actor, which unfortunately Kira and Second Kira were not, were going to read that as a coup.

The 'fake' First Kira tapes had soothed some ruffled feathers, re-assured that First Kira was not that interested in a coup because innocents were not be targeted and it was implied First Kira would take care of Second Kira themselves if Second Kira didn't clean up their act, so it could have been just Second Kira thrown at that sacrificial altar, maybe. But Light had gone very far, very fast.

Any country that actually acquired Kira or a Kira was going to make other countries incredibly antsy. If Light actually took up that amnesty offer and revealed his face, he'd be dead within a week, L was sure of it.

But did Light know that? He was young and weirdly trusting. L felt an irrational flicker of worry that he told himself was just the possibility of his case ending in a disappointing, predictable way.

He called Light immediately.

"Hey L!" Light was chipper and happy. Totally oblivious. "Are you happy Kira amended his or her behavior again? And the last dark period of no killings must have bothered you a bit too just because of the lack of new evidence." Read: He absolutely knew what he did and was playing a game of chicken with L to murder him on the spot for it. He didn't care what a 180 it did from the previous profile of 'Kira does not like to be baited', or, no, L could just imagine him giving the biggest shit eating grin and saying Light appearing to give in to baiting *proved* he wasn't Kira because Kira hates being baited, so a hypothetical Light-Kira gleefully giving in to it makes no sense. It was yet another fucking 'almost confession' that would be utterly useless in front of the task force, L realized with a weird mix of rage and almost fondness. But mostly rage, even if that mainly was about other things of more importance at the moment.

"No," he ground harshly into the phone. "I came to warn you to not take the amnesty agreement. You'll die."

Light became more subdued, but more thoughtful than sad L was mad at him, "Did you only see that half of the news so far? And is that concern I hear?"

No. Yes. Denying it to Light would make it easier to deny to himself, but he wanted Light to believe he was concerned, didn't he? "Believe what you like," he said, compromising with his own turmoil. "And, no, I haven't seen all of it-"

"L, the news just came out here a few seconds ago. They aren't just establishing a democracy, they're establishing a sortition democracy that would be very difficult to impossible for Kira to control, but also difficult for any oligarch to influence, as it would be composed of a large number of completely random citizens and frequent re-shuffling, which would make bribery or threat over all of them difficult."

L blinked. That... was not what he was expecting, he had to admit. "Light, did you just slip up and admit something only Kira would know?"

"I'm watching and reading the news in the original Russian," Light said smugly, like he knew L would ask this. Of course he did. Then, as if aware smugness was not very endearing and suddenly feeling a bit self conscious about it and worried about being disliked, Light added, "Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?" with obvious hopefulness. "I know I was mostly just useful for the tapes, but there must be something else you think about."

No. Yes. "Not right now," L decided.

L hung up, absolutely exhausted despite the sleep (actually he feels the sleep somehow made it worse) and feeling something dangerously like hope and shame that he might have been wrong, that Kira really could fix something about the world that L couldn't, that something could actually be done to prevent all the horrors that he had seen and knew would keep him in business and in sleepless nights for many years to come if he lived through this. He smothered Hope in its cradle. Sortition democracy just meant replacing one pack of idiots with another. He couldn't- he couldn't...

L needed more sugar, yesterday.

Chapter Text

"Light-o, I've been trying to figure it out and I don't quite understand. Why are you so upset and looking over your shoulder all the time lately? Is it because you think your parents won't accept your feelings for L? Or is it because L doesn't reciprocate?" Ryuk seemed to think the genre had changed to soap opera with a dramatic love triangle that merely needed L to fall in love with Misa to be complete.

"Do you know what having sex with someone without that someone's permission is, Ryuk?" Light told him flatly. God, he really had to spell it out, didn't he? "It's called rape." OK, maybe he was still in a bit of denial there, maybe even he himself wasn't sure if it really counted, because Light really didn't like to think of himself as some sort of victim, but Ryuk was annoying him.

Ryuk looked startled, though goodness knew his bulging fish-like eyes couldn't get any wider. "I thought that was a man on woman thing. Rem was going on about what a sweet, innocent girl Misa was when they met, and I honestly wanted to hear the whole story but you were just so out of it-" Ryuk started to complain.

("You might want me to kill for you, if perhaps not L himself, but know Yagami Light that I will only kill to save Misa," Rem had rambled. "Only for her will I sacrifice my life."

"Do you know how to kill a shinigami, Light?" Misa said with glee like she wasn't talking about murdering her best friend. Humans were so funny, but why did Rem put up with this? Well, it all meant more entertainment for Ryuk so he wouldn't say anything about it. "Rem would probably be the best at telling this story."

And Rem had started to talk, taking forever to get to the good parts, but just as she was, she paused. "Light Yagami, you are not listening to a single word I am saying, are you?"

"Oy, Light-o! Light-o!" Ryuk waved his hand over Light's face. What a time to zone out into calculations!

"I think it's late and it would be a good time for you to go," Light said, flashing his politest smile with a blank eyed stare that made the almost exact bare minimum acceptable eye contact with everyone, favoring the shinigami slightly over Misa. Ryuk was so annoyed, but, humans did have their little social customs that involved things like sleep which as a shinigami he'd never understand. Light had truly chosen a terrible time to care about bedtime and schedules.

"Waiiit! I got you a gift! And we need to talk about when and where to meet again!")

"Well, it's true that she would almost certainly not get prosecuted by the law here." Light was feeling a strong urge to go on a rapist killing spree. Even women had a very hard time getting justice for it. "But coercion that isn't pure physical strength is still coercion," Light explained, already feeling tired of this conversation. "I was already not really doing so hot because of the torture, I think I would have done better with the groping and threats if not for that," he tries to regain some of his useless pride back. "I can find you a sex-ed book or something later, I have important research to do. I know I'll probably be forced to agree to sleep with her at some point, but I'd rather try to not think about it."

Ryuk grew flustered. "Ah, that's not necessary, thank you. As a shinigami, I don't need to know the details of human reproduction any more than I already do."

Pff, hoho, Ryuk was shy. Too bad the information was only good for teasing.

He was running out of time before he had to meet Misa again, he just knew it. But hopefully he had another week. He'd actually been feeling a lot better after his last conversation with L - up until it was clear L was now ghosting him! He hadn't seen or heard from him since then, and while it hadn't exactly been a long time, even a day felt long right now to Light for some reason.

Fearing L might have decided to suddenly arrest him tomorrow, he found it hard to sleep and decided to choose another target: Ba'athist Syria. With awareness of what L said that not all cases were unambiguous, he was pretty sure this was a fairly black and white case as the human rights violations ranked as some of the worst in the world. The people there genuinely wanted change, as evidenced by Damascus Spring, but had no opportunity to safely voice it without getting arrested and tortured. The disgusting thing was that Bashar, the current dictator, had presented himself as a hope for reform from his father's policies, then showed his true face by acting to shut it down. While it seemed like after many years of struggle the sentiment was sufficient for the people to overthrow the dictator themselves, it would certainly be a lot easier and less bloody if Light simply did it for them, and arranged to have all their arrested intellectuals and political prisoners released (provided they were even still alive of course) to do with their own country as they wished.

After a bit of anxiety still not allowing him to sleep, he also decided to go after a bunch of rapists. In a moment of rage which he immediately regrets, he also has a couple of them chop their own balls off. It was so easy to do things like that with the death note, just write something down in a few seconds and then it was done, irreversible, no pause, no 'are you sure' pop up. In that moment, he can understand his father calling it a curse. That was too easy.

(Light vows to never, ever get drunk. He wasn't keen on it in the first place, but now he's actively frightened of himself.)

For some senseless reason, still unable to sleep, he decided to quietly see if they popped up in the news online.

That was the moment he belatedly learned the very uncomfortable way that the death note apparently didn't consider pregnant women as having a second person inside them. Light... didn't know if he would have paused had he realized before the death the woman in question was pregnant. It stirred up a lot of publicity within the hour (it was daytime over in the country she lived in and she'd died in broad daylight) because Kira had never gone after a pregnant woman before, and people were very confused why, even as the details of her assault on a barely pubescent teenage student of hers became more wildly known. His parents were trying to coerce him to marry the woman.

KIRA KILLS A BABY, headlines in the very conservative parts of the USA read. Most other places which did not consider fetuses babies went with 'KIRA KILLS PREGNANT WOMAN', and only a few media outlets went with 'KIRA GOES AFTER PEDOPHILES OF BOTH GENDERS'. He read a provocative piece titled 'Can murder ever be feminist?' from a more obscure niche site. It argued that while the state punishing both genders equally for the same crimes was such, Kira taking justice into his/her own hands mirrored patriarchal male privilege and displayed entitlement to do with other people's bodies as they saw fit. He felt sick at being compared to the very people he sought to punish, to Mi-

He finally went to sleep in raw exhaustion, wondering if he had really accomplished anything at all or if he was a monster.

Light has a dream where Misa expresses shock at the idea she'd force him down, and for a moment, it almost seems like it won't be a nightmare. "I'm not a rapist, silly!" He feels so stupid. Was he freaked out and worried over absolutely nothing this whole time? He wanted to go hang out with L instead of this nonsense. "You like him better than me! Doing that with guys is gross - I'll just have to cure you!"
"I don't want to touch you."
"Then I'll kill every man and woman you look at until you do!" It's absurd, he thinks when he wakes. There's no way she could actually get away with killing everyone just because Light looked at them... is there?

Light decided to do some quick research on L early in the morning. You can often figure out where a murderer lives by geographic triangulation of their appearances/murders - the exact same technique L used. Light figured that you could also use it to figure out things about a murderer investigator's location. L's first cases were, unsurprisingly, often located in the UK, but that by itself wasn't enough to locate him as many of his others were not. Light could by looking at the data available before L took the case give a good guess as to which cases could actually be solved by never visiting the physical location in person, which further narrowed it down and further biased the data toward the UK.

What was really interesting was that an old article he found made a reference to 'previous cases', but he could find no record of those previous cases.

That was kind of a giant red flag that they had been removed because they potentially contained information that could be used to figure things out about L, like his city of origin. Perhaps someone had robbed L's favorite candy store and he felt personally motivated to catch the crook even though normally they'd be beneath him, or something akin to that, or those removed cases simply happened to cluster around his home in an uncomfortably close way. Now, Light had no way of accessing these cases and old newspapers from another country that weren't digitized.

But someone in the UK? They very likely might. And even if they didn't have that, they might have something on Junior Tennis Champions: sure, L had said he couldn't find anything by digging that way, which implied a false name (so he was already active as L then and hadn't simply taken over from someone else), but Light would still learn something about him and where he'd been.

So Light made an account at an English website called L's Biggest Fanclub, and asked around. Bingo! Someone said they had clippings of every single L article or suspected L article from around the world, and was willing to email him.

His dad, unfortunately and uncharacteristically, chose to check up on him before heading in to work.

"Light," his dad seemed oddly pained. To be fair, the early 2000's website was extremely garish, with very janky animated gif images, a webring, and clunky boxed HTML tables. "What are you doing?"

"I was thinking if I figured out L's name, and he didn't drop dead, it would support my innocence."

"Light, there is a killer running around that can kill with only a face. We don't know if any of us will live to see the end of year," his father said bluntly. "I would prefer you not do this. It would reflect horribly on you if L died by some coincidence."

Light deflated. "Yeah... I guess you're right."

He clicked the website, and the computer, off.

Somewhere, a Whammy teen pouted their Kira baiting scheme hadn't worked, their potential target going silent instead of taking the payload.

Oh well, they could still give a bunch of L fans viruses. That was always fun.

"I dedicate this next song to Kira!"

Misora had some difficulties following Misa. As a celebrity, she often went to events where there would be many cameras and it would be extremely obvious to security guards that Misora was following her. Naomi didn't really care for the solo, but she did take notes of what the lyrics might say about her psychologically. The duet was pretty good. All of the songs together painted a picture of a woman who was very love obsessed, and saw her lover as some sort of savior.

So Naomi put a bug on her, after carefully looking for an opportunity to brush past her or to interact with her as a fan. An autograph signing turned out to be just the trick. Some sleight of hand, and Misa Amane found herself with a nice new pen that looked identical to her old one. There was a good chance it would get discarded or given to someone else, but at least for a little while they'd be able to listen in.

"Rem, I can't stand it any longer! I- wait, whaaat?"

Somehow, the bug was found and de-activated.

"Who is Rem?" L asked.

"I don't know. Perhaps her stuffed plush she had with her?" But even as she said it, it didn't sit right with her. How did Misa know? "Do the 'Eyes' give some kind of supernatural ability to see electronics?"

"That would be highly troublesome if true. I've taken the opportunity to bug her apartment while she was away as well. Hopefully when she returns, she'll talk to this 'Rem'."

But she did not.

"I think we can confirm it is neither her cat, nor any of her plushies," Naomi said. "She's stopped talking to this Rem entirely."

"That might just be discomfort from knowing she was bugged," L pointed out. "But that is the most likely explanation."

"I know you don't like the idea, L," Naomi started to say. "But I think you should consider that this is a shinigami."

"Unfortunately. But the human associated with it may still be caught."

Then she spotted someone she knew who should not have been there. "Excuse me, I have to go."

"Light, is THAT where all the family tinfoil went?" Sayu exclaims when she sees him dismantling his little Faraday cage. He'd hoped to have done that before anyone noticed. "Mom was looking for that for dinner last night! How did you even breathe in that?" He didn't, that would have provided gaps. "Were you pretending to be a knight?"

"No," he said with hot embarrassment.

Thankfully, the phone rang. Sayu makes an 'ooo' noise and Light ignores her.

"Yagami," is the first thing L says to him on the call, which hurts Light's feelings a lot. Yagami, not Light. "Don't come over today."

"I must have made you really mad," Light concludes. "You seemed really cool with things up until you spooked and ran to go get coffee - was it..." Painfully aware of Sayu there, he leaves the room. She seems very disappointed to be missing out on the drama and tries to follow him, sticking her tongue out when he closes the door on her. He double-checks with a flick of his eye over the room that his parents aren't watching and slows the door close solely to stick his tongue out right back at her.

"No, Light-kun, I don't hate you for being gay," L says with exasperation, finally dropping some of his frostiness but definitely weaponizing the politeness of 'kun'. "However, I would appreciate if you stopped pretending to be strongly attracted to me. I am aware I am not that attractive, the taunting is not appreciated."

"I'm not sure I'm actually gay, though I don't know what to call it," Light said. Since he's clearly too transparent, maybe he should just confess, even if it's a touch embarrassing for him and frankly sounds unbelievable. "If I imagine you as a woman, I still feel interested. If I imagine some random man, I don't feel any interest at all. I really like your mind, but I don't think you should sell your body so short so hastily either as it is hardly like you are unfathomably ugly, Ryuuzaki-san." There's something especially awkward about being extra polite in this moment, and with a fake name at that, but Sayu might still be eavesdropping and he wants to signal he noticed L's name reference choices and still respects him. "You're the only person I've ever been attracted to, or even wanted to be attracted to. I can't even imagine ever being so attracted to anyone else." There is a quiet pause, and Light gives a pained, tentative question of "Ryuuzaki?" which is as much a question for the name itself and its lack of honorific as it is a query for a response.

That was easily the most romantic thing L had ever heard, and it moved his cold shriveled heart not one inch. Though it did make him imagine some tantalizing taunting possibilities.

"That's hard to believe, considering you have attempted to date before, or at least claim to have an ex."

"I understood it as socially expected of me and thought it would simply click at some point if I wanted it to," Light confessed. "But now that I'm more experienced I get that likely isn't how it actually works."

"That is all very fine for you, but utterly irrelevant. I do not experience much in the way of fine feelings."* And L hung up on him, because he had better things to do.

L was distracted by an attempted hack on his systems, and by yet another stalker getting added to the list of people closely following Light's schedule.

Figuring another nation-state is trying to figure out where Kira is from L's own knowledge, L decides to do some hacking of his own. Now, L might be a genius, but that doesn't automatically make him good at everything, so at first he thought he might have to resort to asking for help.

But in fact, his first guess, the US government, turns out to have such a hilariously incompetent security system that even L's hobbyist knowledge of programming proves to be sufficient. One of the first things any competent programmer learns is to protect against SQL injection, which essentially works by inputting something like letmein' OR '1'='1' as a password or username on a website form, the 1=1 statement always evaluating as true if successfully injected. The crude and definitely not national security standard method is to simply check if the forbidden character ' is present, and do something like add a slash before putting it in a database and then removing it again. The better method is to treat the entire user input as untrustworthy and tell the system to not read any of it, just store it like a black box with a prepared statement or salting and hashing (encrypting) the entire thing into a random series of letters and numbers.

L decided to look through some public code libraries that were likely to be used by the code for a vulnerability that could confuse a character checker. Lo and behold, there was something that looked promising, a section that assumed without properly checking that an input length was a certain length. Now, he did not know off the top of his head every single inputtable character, because again computers were not L's specialty, but he knew someone who did from Whammy and he knew special characters could potentially symbolize things like 'terminate sequence'. After conferring with them in order to save some time (he still would have been capable of doing it himself at that point, it merely would have been very tedious), he had his planned hack by using a pair of characters placed in front of a ' that would confuse the input checker into thinking it had read two when there were three and fail to read the third one.

There was no way it should have worked to hack a government, any government, but it did.

From there, it is easy to download everything digital they have on the Kira case and all their plans. Apparently they went and hired yet another detective behind L's back to find Kira, kill him or her, and bring back home the super weapon. It made perfect sense that they would do this of course, because L was not affiliated with any specific government (and to the extent that he was perceived as representing one group's interests more than another, it was for the EU, not the United States) and so could be regarded as a potential loose cannon, useful for tracking Kira but not necessarily trusted to bring them in, or if he did, to Europe, and while much of Europe and the United States were fairly friendly for now, that didn't mean the USA wanted Europe to have a super-weapon that the USA did not.

It was child's play to hunt down the other detective by tracking the funding of their place of stay, and L ordered them eliminated by a criminal he has been blackmailing (and occasionally paying for this or that) all this time just for such an occasion. To keep things neat and tidy, he steals the detective's name and sends back periodic 'updates' on the situation from 'the detective', ensuring efforts on that front would stay sabotaged for quite some time to come. It will be easy to blame it on a rival government if anyone ever actually notices the disappearance, as L is very good at disposing of bodies.

A small part of him feels a flicker of hesitation at actually going through with it, because this is different from killing Tailor by proxy. But if he does not do it, Light will die before L has all the answers, and L can't stand that.

Once done, he can understand Kira's perhaps faked obsession with names a bit better now. It really is quite satisfying to take it.

He reads a file discussing US discussions on the Kira problem, how they wanted a surgical touch because Japan was not only an ally but very conveniently geographically located as a bulwark against China. L winces when he reads a concerned comment about US infantry stationed at a base there abusing Japanese citizens and it suggested it be covered up for now to lower chances of Kira retaliating. What a pack of idiots. If L had gauged anything about Kira's character correctly, it was that Kira would be much more impressed by properly cleaning up your own house rather than trying to shove it all haphazardly under the rug, and was liable to get very pissed. Fortunately for them, he suspected Light was going to be too distracted to encounter this news by the time it finally unraveled in their faces.

The mood toward Kira was fairly favorable, as Kira had targeted US enemies, but there was discussion of how to potentially ramp things up if Kira started targeting less... savory American allies, such as Saudi Arabia, and a long list of what to consider a warning sign Kira might actually go after the United States itself and its interests. There was a psychological analysis about how killers usually go after softer, more socially acceptable targets first and may slowly escalate, and Kira was showing this classical pattern, just with criminals instead of women and animals. (There was also a copy of L's own criminal behavioral analyses, which he had provided and had no interest in re-reading.)

Amusingly, the very next sentence L reads made it clear they didn't really consider Saudi Arabia as allies, talking about how it might be favorable if Kira removed the Saudi from Arabia as the USA itself had contemplated at one point, and how the majority of the attackers of 9/11 had come from Arabia. However, after attacks on Saudi Arabia by terrorists, the USA was pursuing a strategy of friendly helper to improve its image there. If Kira put in place leadership that was actually ethical and for moving away from oil into solar, that would be less beneficial to (Republican and centrist 'Blue dog' Democratic) US interests. They concluded Kira's move purely to create democracy in Russia made it somewhat more likely Kira would act in a way that was favorable to the USA here, as Kira had not forced Russia to give up oil in the long term either, and wondered if it was a sign of political savvy or of political naivety that Kira's exact politics were hard to read. Favoring the death penalty (and arming yourself to take out your enemies extra-judicially) was very strongly associated with the conservative right wing in the United States, so perhaps Kira was actually very favorably inclined to them, in which case they could try enticing Kira to take out particular targets and see if Kira bit. If Kira was willing to be led by the nose by suggestions, then there was no actual need to take Kira out except to prevent another nation from doing it first or to prevent another nation from behaving erratically out of raw fear.

In short, a lot of the people currently in charge of the USA thought Kira was potentially 'one of them' (though they disliked the imagined hue of his skin), and this had dulled a lot of the urgency on the death of Putin they might otherwise have had if Kira had, say, immediately replaced Russian leadership with a bunch of socialists or even just otherwise-conservative environmentalists.

Kira's latest moves had definitely kicked things up a bit, however, and L had to admit he found the CIA 'backing out' incredibly suspicious. It would be one thing if Kira had unambiguously killed and injured many of the agents, but the idea Kira had killed or injured the agents via controlling other people was just a rumor. Backing away because of Russia on third party soil was definitely not in character for the USA, so that couldn't have been the real motivation either, although it could be they were intending a proxy war as that was their style with another nuclear power. Americans were an incredibly aggressive people when provoked, so backing down completely in general was rare (but not unheard of if they could save face) for them, but the government was not a monolith; it was entirely possible (nay, certain) some of the superiors were just cowards, however, it was important to not underestimate just how huge a country generally is. Even if one department of a government backs down, another may see it as an opportunity, especially if there are petty squabbles and ego-bruisings between the two. The CIA, DIA and FBI, for instance, might be quite happy to one-up the other depending on who was in leadership at the time, though they usually worked in different areas, with the FBI obviously tending to be federal. Despite Light's previous disbelief, there were in fact FBI agents that worked on foreign soil, though they were usually focused on providing analysis of American manufactured enemies like Al Queda, which could often be done in a virtual office on American soil. The Kira psychology analysis he'd read in the database had come from the FBI.

And mass controlling a lot of people as well as killing heads of state? Was moving this toward a military matter, no longer just a mere criminal case. One of the very things L had wanted to avoid. Countries survived having leaders killed. Having potentially your entire government's head staff, all their major politicians and oligarchic allies controlled and then murdered was a very, very different matter. This was, if a bit smaller and more targeted than the word usually implied, basically now revealed to be a weapon of mass destruction and mind control. And it was, frankly, half L's fault.

Most worrisome was an attempted analysis of L himself and his origins, and how it was odd and a bit troubling he seemed to have the ability to mobilize different nation's police at a moment's notice (clearly only the US should be able to do that), and even discussion of wild guesses that L was Kira himself. L didn't particularly want state level resources thrown in the ring to try and find L's identity - it was almost like the morons were trying to do (Second) Kira's job for her, though to be fair Second Kira was probably far too oblivious and self absorbed to actually notice what governments were doing behind the scenes. (That wasn't that much of a knock on Second Kira - most teenagers were that way. He reminded himself to not get too complacent as Second Kira could still be very dangerous.)

He was going to have move buildings again, most likely. What a pain.

With that done, he decided to go hack a few more governments and see what they were up to.

"L, I wanted to let you know I was approached by another American who wanted me to spy on you," Naomi confessed, calling him up suddenly. He quickly delegated the hacking task to someone else.

"I see. Thank you for telling me that. Tell me, how do you feel about the prospect of the United States invading Japan to attain a 'shinigami power'?" he deliberately phrased it in the most inflammatory way possible.

"Horrible! As an American citizen, I could never approve of my country doing such a thing. I don't think my fiancee would have agreed with that either, we became agents to protect people not hurt them. Frankly, if it really is some kind of supernatural agent with a mind of its own, I don't think that move would even be successful. It might not be the kind of power you can even take." L trusted the analysis concluding the entire thing was potentially stupid more than he did the emotional display that the idea would be wrong. Of course, he had no reason to distrust Naomi, but L just didn't trust in general and this was a high stakes game. It was entirely possible Naomi was contacted, realized L might be watching and she needed to make an excuse, and in fact planned to spy on him regardless. Or that she would start to feel guilty about not supporting her country more if she developed a disagreement with L for any reason. If, however, she thought the notion was inherently stupid and harmful to all parties involved, she was far less likely to change her mind from such guilt later.

"They wouldn't actually have to invade. They already have troops here due to the treaty," L stated. She was too polite or too trusting of authority to call him out on his shit-stirring earlier. "They've already started quietly moving more of them into Kanto as a just-in-case measure."

"You'll have to move, they know where you are. At least they won't suspect you would build a big expensive building only to not use it," Naomi stated. "I could play a mole?" she said a little hesitantly.

"If you already declined, they will be suspicious if you suddenly change your mind after you had time to talk to me," L stated. "But thank you for the offer."

"Mm, I'll only do it if they make a show of 'convincing' me," Naomi said, proving she wasn't stupid. "If they just never offer again, I won't bring it up."

L ends up killing yet another detective that is spying on him personally and adds their name to his list. If he wants to make the move successfully to another building, he can't have spies reporting on his every move. And L doesn't particularly care for the notion of being right next to a large movement of soldiers.

He's going to move out of Kanto shortly. But L can give Second Kira another three days, perhaps. Bureaucracy often moves slowly. In the meantime, he'll use a new hotel.

Unfortunately, L still has to baby-sit the task force.

"I've been thinking about it, and I think it was suspicious that Light knew there was a Second Kira," said Matsuda. "I mean, it could have just taken a long lag to kill Tailor. So it was really clever of you to try to trip him up like that!"

"No, it wasn't," L responds, unable to believe he's really having this conversation. Was their ego really unable to take this? Or were they that stupid. "I actually meant it that time. It wasn't a test."

"But Kira's patterns and behaviors are so much clearer if you have access to the database. How could he have known there was a Second Kira?"

"He could have hacked my computer," his father defended Light. "I often let him use it for studying."

"While I agree he's probably gotten past your nonexistent security," L said easily. A determined Light with physical access could just install a key logger and steal a password that way if he needed, which he likely didn't. "He really, really didn't need to in order to guess there was a Second Kira. It was wildly out of character for First Kira. Trust me, behavioral science and using it for analysis of criminals is literately my specialty. It is what I got my degree in." He can't believe he's having this conversation twice.

"But Light doesn't have a degree." Matsuda is still skeptical, and L sighs and carefully goes over each piece of publicly available death, how even if you ignored Kira not immediately killing Tailor going after innocent people went against the image Kira was trying to project, the way he reacted incredibly violently to innocents being treated like they were guilty, and basically all his kills up to that point going after criminals or the unjust. Kira was justice obsessed, even if he had a curious experimenter side.

Having enough, he almost calls Naomi and asks her if she could please tell Matsuda that multiple Kiras was an obvious idea. But then he considers Matsuda's misogyny and realizes this might drag the argument out further, with the unwelcome bonus of Matsuda asking if L told her the idea already.

L is slowly dying inside of himself.

L hates people and finds himself actually missing Light for a second.

It turned out the Dutch government was running even more laughable security, where a single inputted slash in the right place was enough to get inside the servers.

A very, very bored Whammy student who occasionally doubled as another L in other countries (his Canadian Kira had just upped and died on him) summarized some hacked discussions in the following way:

Spain: Okay, if L actually brings the codename 'shinigami' superweapon, what country gets it? 

Germany: Not It. We don't trust ourselves with a superweapon after the whole Nazi thing...

UK: Well, it would be rude to immediately insist on being It after you refused.

Italy: We had our own dictator. Maybe we aren't a good choice either.

France: I don't trust L completely, so we sent another detective as backup. I can take it since you guys don't want it <3

UK: NO.

Germany: NO.

Spain: NO.

Italy: NO. it's bad enough you're doing the nuclear power thing.

France: You guys are idiots if you think depending on the USA long term is a good idea. Idiots. That country is 50 countries in a trench-coat and they can barely agree with each other.

UK: I swear to God if you do another Napoleon imma smack you.

UK: also the United States is like the annoying rebellious sibling/child I never wanted. They rebelled once, but I'm sure they would never hurt me again! We're besties now.

France: Well, I don't want them to have it either.

San Marino: How about me? I'm tiny and cute and serene. You know I won't go on a murder spree.

Germany: You're too tiny.

France: You just don't want anyone to have it, do you?

Germany: Destroying it might not be a bad idea.

Luxembourg: I'm slightly less tiny.

North Macedonia: I am the biggest of the smallest European countries, and yes, I know that's a weird brag.

UK: I'll be honest, I forgot you both existed.

Italy: Uh huh. 'Forgot'.

The Vatican City-State: I am the actual smallest country, technically.

Poland: I had no idea any of your citizens could use a computer. I am genuinely astonished.

Austria: Could we just share?

Spain: There are at least two.

UK: Since no one can make up their minds, we'll take one. We're pretty sure L is one of ours anyway.

France: We all knew you were going to do that. Your politeness is just a fiction.

UK: Suck a frog. <3

France: ...fuck, ladies and landmasses, I think my detective might be dead. There was a code-word only they knew part of a random word series and didn't have written down anywhere that they were supposed to transmit.

UK: Suspects?

UK: only I am allowed to bully you.

France: Well, if the Russian agents were successfully removed like we think they were, then maybe China or Japan. We know the US is active there.

Spain: It was probably the USA imo. They're like Konoha from Naruto, pretending to be the nice guys. Or someone with untreated bipolar disorder, ping-ponging from red to blue and back.

UK: The politically correct thing to do is blame China.

Germany: But not too loudly.

Luxembourg: what if it was L.

UK: Don't be silly. Why would L do it?

Luxembourg: it's what I'd do and we share a letter. No one suspects Luxembourg. NO ONE.

France: ...

UK: You didn't do something like stalk L after he was on guard for Russians doing the same thing in order to assassinate him and the Kira suspects, did you? And after we all got the report about the Chinese assassins?

France: ...

Netherlands: So he can claim self defense and you can't even argue about it. Wonderful.

UK: Fuck's sake Gallia, you cocked/coq'd that up. This is why the phrase 'friendly fire' was invented.

France: I don't go by Gaul anymore, don't deadname me. :( And I am not a rooster.

Sweden: Let's bribe L with candy.

Canada: can I join u guys if I bring out my national maple syrup reserves.

everyone else: no.

Australia: I have koalas with clymidia, can I join

The Vatican: I love STDs, go ahead.

Poland: I just hope this doesn't end in me getting invaded again.

The Vatican: i'll invade u with the pope-mobile.

Poland: Oh god.

The Vatican: oh god indeed.

L did not give Matt an A-plus for their report, finding it a bit too fanciful and anthropomorphic to arbitrary geopolitical lines on a map, but it did give the essentials. And he had to take a lot of points off for the completely unnecessary Naruto reference. And Sweden did NOT say let's bribe L with candy, nor did any of the rest after that happen, Matt just made that up so L would crave brain bleach.

The US was still oblivious to their detective being removed for now, but it was unfortunate the EU would be on guard now.

Light is unhappy over the two days this drama unfolds, not knowing why L is ignoring him, and doodles L-systems and L-functions in his math notebook. He asks his chemistry teacher about how discovering new elements once worked and is simply told that one can predict an element's properties by how electrons filled out their orbitals, and that it was believed all the natural elements had already been discovered but that there was a facility in Japan that slammed elements together to try to make new heavier ones for very short periods of time, which Light already knew, and all he can think about is how L would have known what he'd meant right away (and then perhaps belittled Light for being lazy when he already knew most of the answer). Really, he should have just asked if there was a nice little book somewhere with known characteristic fragmentation patterns of each element and a table of their light spectra. Flipping through his freshman textbook, it seemed more focused on things like gas laws, chemical reactions like acids and bases, using chromatography to isolate compounds, and, yes, filling out orbitals.

He has more luck studying on his own, which turns out to offer a minor realization: he had completely forgotten the possibility that nuclides, additions of extra neutrons to a given element, could have gotten unusually large. That would technically make the element the same as a normal one as long as it kept the same number of protons, the issue being that this should be unstable, but that was the same issue a new element had. However, it was pretty easy to figure the difference out. It would alter the mass to charge ratio far in favor of the mass. At some point he'd have to get over his fear of exciting the pure form of the element too much and just bombard it, if he ever got the opportunity, and send an ejected sample over a varying electric field or something like that. Asking to see a senior's textbooks, he sees their Organic Chemistry does talk about fragmentation patterns and mass spectrometry, so it's something to look forward to if Light lives past this year perhaps.

Oh, but he had to stop his chemistry tests. It was too dangerous to continue when people might start watching again at any time.

"Why did you doodle little hearts around trees and a math equation?" someone asks.

Light suppresses his first idiotic impulse, which was to blurt that he was sexually attracted to math. Because clearly, that would barely be a better response than saying he was infatuated with a guy who wasn't into him. "Ah, no reason."

(Light finds himself wondering if he should switch from Law as his main track to Chemistry or Physics. Even for Light, quantum mechanics was a bit confusing. The math was not that hard, at least to start with, but the interpretations left something to be desired.

"Sensei, instead of saying it goes over all paths, how do we know the photon goes along any path at all? From the photon's perspective, does it not have zero distance, no time, no moment of rest between it and its final destination? Could we not phrase quantum mechanics as a way of reconciling the light's point of view with that of the massed world's?"

"It is precisely because it has no rest frame we don't take on the photon's point of view, Yagami. In any case, properly merging relativity and QM is more of a question for a quantum field theory course, and this is a quantum mechanics course."

Light found this deeply unsatisfying. Was Light not allowed a point of view?**)

It was very unfair. L tried to emotionally manipulate him, but the moment L himself potentially felt something, he ran off like a coward? Or, was it that Light had somehow fucked up with his latest move as Kira and L was mad at him for that?

He'd taken pains to make it seem like there was a new Russian Kira operating. That was basically L's own advice! How could L be angry with him for that? Or... was he not at all, but just satisfied Light had gone for the bait and was now plotting Light's death, having decided that this was sufficient circumstantial evidence for L's tastes to 'prove' Light was Kira, and now he didn't need to even make a pretense at friendship anymore?

It made Light really anxious, when before he had been pretty buzzed and excited because, hey, he'd gotten L to actually emotionally react! He'd fixed some of his mistakes! He felt alive and like he actually wanted to live past the next four years. But then L just suddenly cut him off entirely, and Light didn't know why and struggled to guess why.

For all he knew, L had just dropped dead from a jealous Second Kira and was never going to talk to him again for that reason.

Had he gone too far with pinning him up against a wall? Was it the hug?

Finally, to his surprise, L called him. "Alright, you can come visit now if you wish. Although, I need to give you a new address."

"...are you done being mad at me? Do I need to apologize?" Light twirled his finger around the landline phone wire and kept an eye out for Sayu.

"Mad at you?" L sounded confused for a moment. "Hm, I see why you might think that. Well, Light can certainly apologize for being Kira if he wishes."

Light can't help but feel exasperated, but also relieved. "You very much were. But I see we are back to first names, so clearly you just needed time to cool off and want to pretend nothing happened."

"...I was mad at myself," L confessed unexpectedly. "Don't worry about it."

How could Light not? "You were content to take it out on me."

"Not everything is about you. I simply decided I might need to increase my distance for my own sake, then I decided I could just go back to how things were."

"You're not making a lot of sense," Light pointed out. "First you say you don't have feelings, and now you're implying you do? I'm willing to accept you want distance, but that's still an emotional reaction is it not?"

"Light-kun," L said in a mild tone. "It doesn't matter why I can't, only that I can't."

"Well," Light began, "I think it matters to me." Ugh, he didn't need the 'I think' in front. Why did he phrase it like that? He felt unusually tongue tied.

"I will make it clearer, then. I do not have the sexual desire to reciprocate in the way that you wish me to, toward anyone," L said bluntly. "I am asexual, though I do like to occasionally read smut. If for some reason I did engage in it, I would be a top, and something tells me you would also prefer to top." He wasn't wrong. "As an introvert, I also sometimes simply need time to myself. Further, while you may technically be an adult now in most countries, I think your father would be fairly unhappy with me and perhaps your future self would be as well. Our relationship has a power imbalance and could easily be seen as coercive if I made a move toward you when I have the power to get you arrested, not to mention I would have to get your father's consent as you are under the age of 20. I have no desire for you to develop a resentment toward me in that way." But a resentment in another way was fine? Well, romance did sometimes stir up murderous feelings in people. L probably didn't want to be strangled by Light's bare hands for a reason other than being incredibly annoying.

"I guess that makes sense. I guess I leaped to conclusions. I tend to view being flooded with social interactions as a challenge to be readily overcome, so you could say I'm extroverted. I'm sorry if I overwhelmed you." That description didn't feel like it quite made sense, as he imagined extroverts being a bit happier with social interactions than he typically actually was, but compared to L he was certainly a social butterfly and had never had any difficulty making friends. He just craved a bit more than the shallow friendships could actually give him. "I guess I'm thankful you aren't trying to manipulate me romantically." Though why did he still feel disappointed? And why had he felt like there had been something between them last time? And what on earth was that about reading smut?! Light was still very confused.

"Good day, Light-kun. I will eventually see you later."

Light tried to remember if he had ever been so frustrated in his entire life. Unfortunately, yes, there were more frustrating times, like being tortured, but that did not make this moment any more enjoyable!

Misora chooses to eavesdrop on L and Light.

It's not that she's spying for the Americans or anyone else. It's just that she can't help but feel a moment of doubt and there was no better way to have it soothed. L not being accountable to anyone was categorically not a good thing, and if L were actually Kira, they'd all be screwed.

Watching and listening to their fumbling flirtations... it reminds her of how she met the love of her life, at a meeting where their bosses in the CIA and FBI had been fighting over who had jurisdiction over a case instead of immediately cooperating. Misora had taken a long time to realize she had feelings for the man who, like her, just wanted to get to work already. A dislike of petty politics and a great deal of straight forwardness was something she really appreciated.

But she's not stupid with love sickness. She's actively troubled by the fact L thinks Light is Kira and is playing with him instead of taking him seriously.

She suspects he was emotionally compromised, even if just in the form of friendship perhaps, but so socially stunted he won't consider it. Clearly, something happened she's not privy to, but it doesn't sound like it was actually totally one-sided, which was strange. If it had merely been Light doing something, why would L be mad at himself? Light wasn't abusing him, was he? With their lopsided power dynamic, that possibility didn't make much sense, though it wasn't impossible.

Light doesn't match her mental image of someone who would ruthlessly kill her Raye just because he was an annoyance, even if he was Kira. He's lucky: if he had, she would have shot him herself already.

"I have had a dream of the Russian Kira," a masked figure said on TV. "For my crimes, I believe I must do penance and die by my own hand. For my community service, I had done all that I can to re-establish a democracy that is not quite so fragile as before to a strongman, or indeed even to Kira's own hand should one of the Kiras ever turn fully toward evil. The Russian Kira will immolate and be reborn as many times as needed to cleanse our beloved country. True patriotism is a willingness to stand up to the rich and powerful of your own country in order to improve the life of the average citizen, and in that, Kira is a citizen of all countries. I am sure they thank Korea for their kindness and consideration, and I consider it interesting they were so quick to assume it was Kira, but I am convinced Kira will not be taking the offer at this time as Korea has a functioning democracy and Russia needs Kira more; even if there are many within Russia who wish to kill Kira, I believe Kira does not fear such things for our Kira will always be reborn."

Then, if there had been absolutely any doubt whatsoever this was an act of Kira, when the man tried to suicide by knife and others leapt to prevent him, he died by a heart attack, the mask falling off his face only after it started.

Well. That was certainly melodramatic. L had wondered what kind of message the First Kira would really make on their own, and it did not disappoint, full of lies (he hoped) and misdirection (they neither affirmed nor denied acting in Korea), but mixed with a strange fervent idealism. He noted how the speaker was very careful not to say they knew information they shouldn't have (and a lot of their 'information' was actually false and phrased like an irrational religious belief) and implied it was all gut feeling, and couldn't help but think back to the strange case of the barely literate prisoner that made digits of Pi. There had been a strange burst of cases of criminals (some of them prisoners) making poems, stories and songs before the recent killing lull, most of which were of much better quality than the Pi digit letter and seemed to contain no message or taunt that L could decipher. They were simply pretty to listen to, and had created a small public backlash of 'how Kira could kill someone who could make something so meaningful and artistic'. There had also been a couple odd cases of prisoners making minor inventions, all of which seemed to be within the abilities of the prisoner in question. One person hit their head, became a savant, and made a minor math proof.

A lot of the current wave of criminal killings were rapists who had been let off very easily, such as with a very short sentence, or even let go entirely. Some of these cases didn't even have clear evidence beyond distraught testimonial, sometimes due to mishandling such as rape kits being collected and then never processed. It was interesting because Kira had been a lot more reluctant in the past to go after suspects purely on testimonial, yet the experimental aspect of it screamed First Kira far more than Second.

There had also been a couple gang rape cases that Kira - though he couldn't be absolutely certain - had been treated extremely viciously, being controlled into self mutilation before bleeding out. That wasn't Kira's usual style at all, to the point he even wondered if it was a new Kira.

Had something upset them and made it personal? He couldn't help but think back to the scarf. It might be unavoidable bringing it up after all. For once, he didn't enjoy increasing Light's Kira percentage.

But there was something else he was wondering that some of the evidence reminded him of, though he didn't expect much to come of his prodding.

"El-uuzaki?" Light sounded surprised as he picked up, and mangled an L into a 'Ryuuzaki'. "You called back faster than I was expecting."

"I merely remembered a question I had on my mind. You seemed very convinced it was magic bullshit."

L is used to predicting what other people will say, which can make conversations very dull. Without trying, his brain starts building a little mental table of likely responses:

'Well, with faces and names used for kills, it seems pretty obvious. How could a name kill?'

'With names used for kills, it seemed obvious at the time I formed the idea, but now that I think about it that was before I decided we do not actually know any Kira actually needs a name, and the face thing could simply really be a need to have some kind of identification of one target over another. It does seem like Kira should be able to kill with merely a location, but that does not seem to be the case... unless they are hiding it so their enemies will slip up.' Cue a wolfish grin.

'Do you have any reason to believe it is not? Honestly.'

What Light actually responds with is this:

"Did you find evidence it wasn't?" sounding very excited. "I admit I got kinda despondent about catching Kira which is part of my lack of enthusiasm for helping you before," L did not believe that at all, "but maybe I was too hasty to conclude it was hopeless?"

Was Light thinking of the wall phase through case that L had covered up? Best to cut off that line of thinking.

"No, quite the contrary. I found one of those Russian potential leaders had heavily bunkered themselves. They were in a short term self-sustaining, oxygen producing habitat that was encased in a Faraday cage and had heavy sound dampening that should have prevented any sonar or electromagnetic weapon from reaching them for mind control, and yet, here they are, being controlled by Kira."

"It worked even through a Faraday cage?" Light sounds very surprised. Why is Light surprised? Surely Light should know this works. Why would he fake surprise, if it is faked, over this? "That makes no sense," Light mutters in what seems to be directed to himself.

"Light-kun?" L asks.

"Ah, just me being stupid. I guess it was magic bullshit after all. Gotta study, bye!" This time, it is Light that cuts the conversation short.

Hm. L doubts very much Light-kun was being stupid. Careless, perhaps, but not stupid.

In any case, perhaps it is time for L to start showing up in Light's classes. College was a time of being exposed to many new ideas, and Light jumping to some sort of conclusion from it could be considerably more... explosive, than such typical mixing of ideas.

Light curses himself for almost offing himself on accident. His Faraday cage had had no gaps for portals to open without being literately inside Light and potentially leaking out Light's insides to the shinigami world. That other Faraday cage, though, did have lots of room.

So was it just fate manipulation, which probably didn't care about electromagnetism, or did the Death Note open up micro-portals as needed to carry information to and from places in order to carry out the death? Were death world portals forbidden from opening up inside a living being and that was the only reason he'd survived his carelessness?

He can only imagine the reaction if he'd been discovered dead in his little tinfoil suit during his silly experiment. Brilliant honors student, dies of asphyxiation like a toddler because he was too dumb not to put something you can't breathe through on his head. Or would they have found his entire heart mysteriously missing? It's best not to dwell on what-ifs, since it clearly hadn't happened.

It is easy to get distracted by another embarrassment:

"Light, are you having a rough spot with your giiiirl-friend?" Sayu teases him.

Light gives her an unimpressed look.

"Or is it a boyfriend? You've been talking to a Ryuuzaki a lot and that definitely isn't Misa. Ooooh, are you cheating on your girlfriend with a BOYfriend? You complete CAD," Sayu sounds wayyy too pleased about this idea, "Tell me everything!"

"No!"

"Tell meeee."

"Nooo."

L's next appearance takes him by surprise.

L very, very transparently grabbed Light's arm after class and lured him away from some students who were discussing how 'Russian and Chinese communism was not real communism'.

"Hey!" Light objected. "You can't dictate who I talk to, Ryuuzaki. I was really curious what they had to say!" He felt a flicker of unease; should he have used -san?

"If Light-kun is interested in dictatorships, then the moves of South Korea and Taiwan toward democracy should be of deep interest to him. Taiwan goes against the conventional image of dictatorships in that it has recently moved to democracy on its own." It was very obviously a distraction, but it was an interesting distraction and sounded like it might actually be tangently related to what he was wondering about, so Light would let it slide.

"Not entirely, there was a lot of pressure from the USA I believe," Light objected.

"Yes, the geopolitical reality of being close to China, which still regarded it as part of it, and having its best ally and defense be a highly democratic," L paused very slightly like he was thinking of disagreeing with himself, "mostly," L stopped again, "somewhat democratic nation is certainly a factor that should not be ignored, nor should we the people inside it who worked to provide pressure towards democracy. But it is hardly all of the whole story, and misses something very interesting: the party in power willingly decided to hold elections because it knew it could win many of them. And they were absolutely correct. The eventual transition to another party in power, you may care to count, took considerably more than a month, or however long Kira can control for. Unlike in many places where the start of industrialization lowered quality of life, Taiwan was actually able to raise it, and its one party enjoyed genuine popularity. This, plus USA pressure, plus their main political opposition merely wanting greater democracy and not advocating for any particular other policy, and plus a lack of proper heir for the dictator, all combined to make Taiwan an interesting example of a country that semi-peacefully transitioned to democracy."

"That less than a month may not always be enough for a smooth transition is a good point, though I think Kira's choice of a sortition democracy specifically helps with this because then you are no longer worrying about having to keep leaders under control. The example of Taiwan makes one wonder if, distasteful as it may be, Kira might get some results simply by threatening the heirs of powerful families or quietly having them removed, provided Kira really can kill without a heart attack." It wasn't as weird talking about himself in 3rd person as he thought it would be. Kira was a kind of mask, a role to play, just like any other.

"That... certainly would not be my first preference, though the phenomena of the 'hostage' has a very long history. What Light-kun must keep in mind, and which may yet destabilize Russia yet again, is that some democracies vote to destroy themselves. The sortition democracy move considering Kira's apparent time limitations was definitely clever, but what one must never underestimate is that some dictators are legitimately popular and, as Taiwan demonstrates, may even win some elections entirely fairly, giving them the confidence to actually fully transition to democracy in best-case scenarios and in worst-case end them."

"I don't disagree with you." Though he did wonder what he might do about it, as he didn't exactly want to become a dictator himself. Maybe he could change subject. "The sortition also demonstrated 'costly honest signaling'. How does a peacock in nature woo a mate simply by having a longer tail? Could it not simply dishonestly pretend that a longer tail signals greater fitness? But in fact, the tail incurs a cost, and that cost itself is a signal."

"Or Kira may have been worried another Kira would appear and undo all his work, in which case it was no real cost at all," L stated. "But overall, yes, it was a good indicator of his priorities, which helps with something Kira had been previously lacking. Threats and punishments, such as the less lethal move of a mass boycott or protest for non-Kira individuals, do no good if the target is given no clear message on what they must do to repent. Too many complicated or conflicting demands can also muddle reactions, and you can see that in the way many different people across completely different political parties are claiming to be for a policy Kira would want, with many of those policies being completely contradictory to each other. 'Ensure a genuine democratic process' is popular across a wide range of the political spectrum in many places, and it is quite simple. But what people ultimately care about are bread and circuses, shallow as they are. If you remove a popular dictator, there is a chance people will simply immediately vote to bring in the next one if they are desperate and stupid enough. And people are almost always stupid enough if they have no idea of anything better."

"People will read 'Kira wants the policies of the common man to go forward' as 'Kira agrees with me', because even minority parties like to think they're more popular than they really are," Light suggested. "But in practice, majorities are likely to support more progressive policies than their politicians of often upper-class origins, such as better access to healthcare and jobs. The Ancient Greeks considered sortition democracy to be better than representative democracy, the latter of which many of them considered inherently oligarchic. So greater democratization will probably lead to more progressive policies and better quality of life on average, and has the plus that incompetent leadership can be removed easily or is never put into place to start with."

"Light-kun must be careful with generalizations. Nations can be xenophobic and self sabotaging. I bet if you gave a direct democratic vote to racist Britons in a moment of bad mood whether to idiotically sever all ties with Europe, they would."

"If you grew up there, then I guess you'd know better than me whether that's true," Light had to concede.

"Your own home is also a bit xenophobic," that was polite of him, Light knew some people who were very xenophobic, but maybe that was just a universal human thing with bigots living everywhere, "and has cultural factors that can lead to self-sabotage. You don't work to give your people the happiness and free time that would lead to a higher birthrate, and you don't encourage the amount of immigration that would make up for its loss, with some overlap between the two since a happier nation is a more appealing immigration target. Not to offend, but you are scheduling yourselves for a bad population crash some years down the road."

Light had a knee jerk negative reaction. But then he remembered some students lamenting that high school and college were going to be the best part of their lives, and after they were going to work themselves to the bone. And he remembered all the homeless people he had seen by the internet cafes, and lastly, he remembered his own terrible momentary impulse that he had suppressed, which said it wouldn't be so bad if he really had killed foreigners spying on Japanese illegally even though that would be cold blooded murder. That half-conscious impulse hadn't come from nowhere. "I did sometimes find it weird that when other teens talked about how frustrated they were at their families working overtime and having no time to spend on them personally, not one single one of them talked about unionizing." Another one of those moments where Light felt he was like some alien being among everyone, destined to be alone in a crowd. Light had gone to an upper middle class school, but overwork was just as big a facet for life for people like doctors as it was for minimum wage manga artists who stained their fingers black and chipped. "The right to protest is a part of our constitution: “All people shall have the right to freedom of assembly and association as well as speech, press and all other forms of expression”. But I don't see people making as much use of it as they could."

"It is fairly common for younger teens everywhere to not have much in the way of deep political awareness, with some notable activist exceptions. But yes, it is quite entrenched here even among older workers to be very subservient to their social superiors and to prove their worth as people by over-work. As long as an idea persists widely in the masses, simply removing leadership is not going to work to fix it."

"While I appreciate how our culture emphasizes cooperation and respect, and it would certainly be chaotic if every individual had different notions of justice, I do find it frustrating we can't just stand up and say your own ideals. You'll be mocked by your peers and ignored." Pausing, realizing this might come off differently to a Westerner, he added, "Not that I'm shy or anything. It's just different here."

"I assure Light-kun I never had that thought. Would Light-kun not be happier conforming?" L teased. "Would it not be easier?" A double message: wouldn't it be easier just to not be Kira?

Light rolled his eyes. "You don't really want me to conform. And I'm not just saying that because of your culture." You want me to be Kira.

"Light-kun is correct. But it is not too late for him to conform if he wants to, and that I support whole-heartedly." Read: confess.

He could rip into him, about how L hypocritically encouraged him to rip off his mask and engage in the opposite of conformity. But he refrains, because he can fuck with him in a different way. "Perhaps you would be happier if we swapped places of birth," Light joked. "You could be a conformist and finally eat a healthy diet. Your posture would be better too, that can't be good for your back." 

"I will pass, but I thank Light-kun for his surely very sincere consideration." L is fidgeting a bit more, like he really isn't used to conversations this long. Perhaps best to give him an out for politeness.

"Thank you for wasting your time to come talk to me about all this, I really appreciate it." Even if there was a good chance this was just L trying to double check Light wasn't planning to murder the leadership of his own country next, and it was a bit annoying L thought the worst of him, it was still of value to him. The idea the time limit could be a bad limitation for peaceful transitions was a good one, and that dictators could be pressed to peaceful transition sometimes naturally was extremely interesting and not exactly something you heard talked about often. Or ever. L was actually the first time Light had ever encountered anyone speaking about the idea.

It poured fuel on his fascination, as Light craved intellectual stimulation. He experienced dismay as he remembered how he'd acted at a mere two days of no contact. Could you get addicted to a person? L didn't like Light, this probably wasn't going to end well. He needed to resign himself to the loss.

"It was no waste." L nibbled on his nails and Light was def. getting the vibe that perhaps L needed a break for awhile from this socializing. "I felt an obligation to do it."

"A moral obligation?" Light teased.

"Yes, I suppose you could say that," L grudgingly admitted, like having morals was some kind of sin. "If Light-kun is Kira, then the only thing worse than killing people is killing people incompetently. But further, Light-kun deserves to have someone feed his mind for its own sake. Sweets of all kinds are important."

Could it be that he was actually slowly winning L over?!

No, he couldn't read that far into it just yet.

They lapsed into a comfortable silence for awhile, and Light felt very content, if still faintly annoyed at L. He could understand that L was probably a bit afraid Light would suddenly radicalize upon exposure to new ideas in college and kill a bunch of people in the name of some political philosophy. But that did not mean he had to like it that L was moving to isolate him or treating him as some unhinged easily influenced loon. Of course, L had outright confessed earlier that he was going to isolate Light, but he'd managed to make it sound like he was doing Light a favor before. This felt different.

Feeling a spark of rebellion, he abruptly jumped away and moved off back toward the other students. "Hey! Is it too late to ask what you guys were talking about?"

"Not at all! The name is Takada," said a young woman from a senior year. "When we invaded China, the two major parties there temporarily joined forces to fight us off, but splintered afterward with the communists gaining the upperhand and forcing the other party to flee, eventually resulting in the present day situation with Taiwan and China. When Japanese-seized lands were taken back from us, it opened up a political opportunity for Taiwan to more easily engage in land re-distribution from the wealthy to the poor, and the remaining wealthy could simply be accused of being Japanese sympathizers and their land seized regardless. We were just talking about how superficially this sounded more like something the communists should have been doing, and yet they went for strong government control and Russian Lysenko's psuedoscience instead of giving farmers direct control of land-"

L followed behind, and Light turned his head to wink at him. "Trust me at least a little bit, won't you?"

L seemed oddly pained for some reason at that sentence, his face carefully blank except for a distrusting flicker of the eyes. Probably the whole 'you are a literal serial killer and you know I know you know this' thing, but maybe also he just had a trust phobia.

It was an interesting discussion. He'd already thought poorly, like most people, of the communist dictatorships of the past, but he hadn't really thought about the aftermath as much. Deng Xiaoping was a pretty interesting (though hardly saintly, very far from it with the murders) figure, favoring science and education and helping China get back on track after having a GDP lower than post-war Vietnam with some interesting mental contortions that 'only practice mattered, not words' in order to allow capitalist policies. But what was baffling was why measures like exams worked only on merit (thus would not open room for discrimination by class origins, the way a committee might) even needed to be re-enacted in the first place!

Light's opinion was that it really didn't matter what you labeled things, only what policies a group did or didn't have and what policies you were actually advocating for in the future, but he could certainly sympathize with the young students who voiced frustration that the 'communist' parties 'had not been communist' by their own preferred definition, just like many countries with 'Democratic' in the title weren't actually democracies, even before the 'communists' took a turn toward capitalism. He certainly disliked it when people weren't logically consistent and changed meanings to suit themselves. But it seemed fairly clear to him the 'state run communism' and 'worker committee run communism' concepts were two very, very different ideas that often got slapped with the same label, to no one's benefit.

He didn't particularly sympathize with a not particularly articulate student who said 'anarcho-communism' was the real path forward. You literately couldn't choose anything other to label your idea than anarchy, a synonym for lawlessness? Light of course was happy to listen to new ideas, but this notion of simply 'getting rid of states and police' sounded horribly vague. He needed concrete details, damn it. Sortition democracy? Direct democracy? Mob rule? Then they said they thought Kira had imposed anarchy in Russia and Light was like... nooo?

Well, maybe by a very literal interpretation of translating anarchy as 'no leader'.

At which point Light realized he was just having a definition argument, the very thing he'd just told himself wasn't worth having.

Of course, the best part was making L suffer. The poor man looked like every argument or historical tidbit was incredibly familiar to him and was deeply, excruciatingly bored, though he did gain a flicker of smug amusement when Light/Kira got called an anarchist.

Light poked him afterward, both figuratively and literately. "You don't need to worry I'm secretly hungering to be a dictator. For one, I don't have the ability to do it." Another double-message. Even as Kira, revealing his face would be really risky. If he put up a constant stream of messages from the shadows, that increased odds of interception, and leaving a dead body every single time wasn't really great when all you wanted to do was answer yes or no to line twelve of a policy proposal, and just leaving things be for months didn't suit his level of perfectionism. L as Kira would be able to pull it off, he was sure, but Light wasn't quite there yet. Maybe with bribes to Ryuk, but he bet Ryuk would get sick of playing postal service very fast if it was multiple times a day or even just once a day. "Two, I know perfectly well that even a competent dictator leads in the long term to instability if the dictatorship stays, since the successors will eventually not be so competent and favor loyalty over dangerous fresh new ideas like critique of dear leader."

"Mm, I didn't think that Light-kun was, but it is very nice to hear it aloud." Was L lying again?

"Do you have any examples of a 'bad' leader being taken out that led unambiguously to bad consequences?" Light asked.

"Yes," L said but didn't elaborate. He seemed a bit pensive with whatever example had immediately sprung to mind so quickly.

Light raised a brow. "You know I'm going to look it up myself if you don't tell me."

"Haiti. The United States labeled their leader as psychotic and recently looked the other way from a coup to remove him. Aristide agreed to a power-sharing peace deal, but the rebels declined, and the US strongly suggested Aristide leave into permanent exile, with the implication refusal meant the rebels would kill him. After, the quality of life by every measure decreased for Haiti: wages, housing, crime, food access, the region saw a decline in them all for an already struggling people; the looting that followed Aristide’s departure cost Haitian businesses hundreds of millions of dollars, most of the Haitian national police force’s equipment was stolen, over half of its officers quit, nearly every prison in the country was emptied, and the price of food more than doubled. The coup ultimately destabilized the country," L cautioned. "The USA has had a rather back and forth position with Aristide depending partly on what party was currently in power, at times acting to remove him from power and other times restore him to it. He actually accepted US terms on economic reform when they returned him to power before, but this wasn't enough to soothe the GOP. They embargoed Haiti from supplying its own police with weapons and terminated infrastructure improvement programs, which, as you can imagine, likely led to a reliance on armed gangs by Aristide as things deteriorated. Aristide was not a particularly great leader, but they didn't exactly make it easy for him to be such either." (^)

Interesting. The USA seemed less stable than Light had realized. He wondered uneasily if that meant they weren't a long term reliable ally for Japan. He couldn't say he was a fan of the way they wanted to station troops and get rid of Japan's military without guaranteeing they'd protect Japan in return, but had kind of hoped naked self interest would have them stay guardians. If they were sufficiently stupid, though, even that might not be enough. "Also, I've been thinking about it, and you don't really think Africa's problem is really mainly just the West, do you? I mean, it sounds a little infantilizing. I'm pretty sure the West didn't order the Congo Wars, also called Africa's 'World War'. Right?" Light said with a little uncertainty, because if L said 'lol they did', he'd have to admit he'd believe him.

"Did I misphrase it to sound that way? My apologies for my over-simplification. Of course African countries are equally capable of the same level of stupidity and malice as everyone else."

"How kindly misanthropic of you."

"I suppose as a Westerner, I instinctively put myself in the mindset of 'what my group could do about the situation', which would be to more effectively use and give the aid and to not be so idiotic about encouraging austerity measures. If I were an African, I suppose my suggestion would be a mirror of that, with greater difficulty since political backlash can result from being seen to reject policies from the West, no matter how stupid, and if the West dislikes you they'll run a coup against you. For the conflict you mention, the West did play a role in shaping the background leading up to it, such as the borders of the Congo itself, or the exacerbation of racial tensions between the Tutsi and Hutu as colonizers deliberately encouraged racism. This led to the complex situation where, as a response to its own genocide of Tutsi and wanting to reject that history, Rwanda now claims that anti-Tutsi forces that fled into the Congo represent a deep threat. However, like many human conflicts, there is not just one single factor and greed is a considerable component, as there are very desirable mineral resources that happen to be right along the border. Rest assured, Light-kun, that it was never my intention to imply any group of humans was incapable of being greedy and self-interested. The Congo is also run incredibly incompetently, and does not even really have any paved roads or rail over much of it whereas Rwanda is making an effort to improve itself, making the fight far less one-sided than one would guess by the sheer size difference. Rwanda can invade a country 100 times its own size, and basically get away with it if not pressured by other countries such as by aid withdrawal or others jumping in to fight, entirely due to logistics."

"So... are you for or against Rwanda here?"

"Neither. I consider the end stalemate to be a good thing. By the Pretoria Accord, Rwanda withdraws in exchange for commitment towards the disarming of Hutu militias. Kabila of the Congo was responsible for the deaths of many child soldiers, so his assassination is not something I feel any grief for. However... I do not think the upcoming elections in the Congo, the first multiparty in many decades, are going to lead to genuine improvement. One of those running is Kabila's own son, and even if perfectly fair which seems dubious, he stands a chance at winning. The main opposition party is backed by... Rwanda," L concluded with an amused tone that made it clear he expected Light to draw the dots on why that might be a problem all by himself. People do not usually want to vote for someone pro invading them, even if the reasons were 'good'.

That was a little frustrating, as Light would have preferred a clear villain and victim and course of action.

If he simply offed Kabila's son now preemptively, it would muddle Kira's apparent pro-democracy messaging and it would appear to support indirectly Rwanda's invasion, making Kira seem pro-war. Encouraging countries to start more wars was the last thing Light wanted.

"If you ask me what will happen in the very long term, I would guess that Rwanda will end up attacking again, either because of genuine extremists going after Tutsi living there or because it wants the minerals, or both, and that the Congo's main weapon will not be any sort of competence but rather trying to get international aid withdrawn from Rwanda. Rwanda will learn its lesson in the worst possible way, and next time around will simply bribe the international community with the precious minerals so they will look the other way."(+)

Holy shit, that was... really frikkin' dark and cynical. And yet, Light couldn't think of anything to argue against that analysis.

"I feel like their problems could be avoided if they had a different democratic model," Light said slowly. "Like... maybe Mr. Previous Dictator's Son should not even be in the running, you know?" A sortition democracy would neatly get rid of that. And it reminded him of the other dictator he'd just knocked off that had also been another dictator's kid. Maybe, and this was just a wild guess, people who have parents in power should be barred from coming to power themselves if you want to prevent dynasties.

"Well, if Kira suddenly does enforce that, at least I will know exactly who to suspect," L said cheerfully, and Light couldn't help but glare at him. What an ass. "Since it certainly won't be the UN doing it despite them having a large number of peace keepers there, some of whom are suspected of child molestation." WTF, L, are you trying to give nightmares? He was 100% trying to egg him on to kill somebody, wasn't he? And now Light couldn't immediately go touch those peace keepers or he'd look incredibly suspicious.

"If Kira imposed a sortition democracy once, it makes sense he or she would try to do it or something like it again," Light argued.

"And yet this time it would be of at least 'apparently' democratic leadership he would be overthrowing," L seemed to be in a considerably better mood now. "I will repeat my earlier offer, with minor amendment to expand the pool of targets."

Light couldn't help but be taken back by L's sheer audacity. "You don't agree with the UN here. Deep down you *want* this guy dead. You just hope I'm Kira and you can kill two birds with one stone. Unbelievable."

"That states it a little too strongly, in reality I am rather indifferent. If it makes Light-kun feel better, I have no confidence the masses if put into power would display any competence either. They would, eventually, have to select someone to actually run things like the treasury. And a majority is certainly capable of advocating for harming a minority, and those minerals will not stop being any more tempting for Rwanda. Thus, I am sure that no matter what happens, conflict somewhere down the line is inevitable. Perhaps the second Kabila will improve the economy a bit there out of pure self interest before it all goes to disaster, whilst lining his pocket on the side."

"You are a major pessimist."

"And you are very optimistic."

"Okay, so, if the two most popular players are dubious, who is the third most likely to win?"

"Ah... I believe that would be a warlord wanted for alleged crimes against civilians. A survivor of the Tutsi massacre, so one can naturally sympathize with him even without agreeing, as that would be highly traumatizing to anyone and make them want to seek revenge."

Fuck. Things were really messed up over there, weren't they?

But Light felt he could come up with a plan that wasn't too complicated, though it required Light to be alive in a year or more from now which was the most dubious part. Simply let the elections go by, and wait for the victor to start screwing up on human rights a few times so it was painfully obvious to everyone, even the ones who did shocked pikachu face the first time. Then do the replacement with sortition democracy, mayybeee with someone puppeted to have actual competence in policy suggestions for the interim government before the full transition and get them to hire some actually competent and uncorrupt officials which hopefully the sortition committees would decide to keep on. The UN might try to prop someone up, but they'd have a hard time if that person was dead. 

"What would you say is the main factor that leads to people actively electing dictators?" Light asked.

"Hm, I would say state or party control of the media is the biggest problem," L said, looking a little wary. "Do not underestimate the power of having control over almost all messaging. People are largely not critical thinkers."

That made sense. Wait a sec, control of media, that sounded familiar. "Second Kira really frightened you," Light realized. "Who else did they frighten?"

"Light-kun not need worry about it for now," L dismissed, which was interesting.

"L," Light said, with a long pause. "What did you do?"

"What makes Light-kun think I did anything? Perhaps it merely isn't an immediate problem, as long as I have the main access to information on the Kira case and keep tight control over its flow, and as long as people buy the idea Russian Kira is genuinely out in Russia which does not at superficial glance seem incorrect, thus giving the Kira organization a multinational distribution. Although, I really wish Kira had chosen a place other than Russia."

That made sense. Light was probably being fanciful. Except... there had been the kidnapping, and L had mentioned an assassin once. And someone else could have guessed that there was a Kira in Japan with police ties at any time.

"L," Light said, probably far more amused and flattered than he should be, so he had to put on fake concern. "Did you kill someone for me?"

"Don't be silly. Light-kun has confused me for Kira." L was such a liar. "By the way, did you know I am both the second and third best detectives in the world as well?" Then, in seeming non-sequitur before Light could process this or asked him what detectives he murdered and stole the name of, L added, "How does Light feel about the atomic bomb?"

"As a Japanese person, I'm not exactly thrilled with the common excuse that it was 'necessary' to end the war. Most of our cities were already rubble."

"I always had the cynical interpretation that it was not necessary, but that Japanese leadership appreciated that it allowed them to save face, and the Americans were happy for the ego stroking and simply made excuses their public would buy. As you said yourself, most of your cities were already rubble, so what were they taking so long for?"

Light's brain blue-screened for a second in absolute disgust. "I- what?" It was one thing to tell yourself a shitty excuse in order to live with yourself, it was another to suggest both sides were so evil they both knew it was an excuse and didn't care!

"If they really cared, they would not have started the war and thrown civilians into the meat grinder in the first place," L argued. "A literal embodiment of the Heavens or someone pretending to be speaking for him wants a good excuse to surrender, and arguing that the Americans had an unstoppable super-weapon they'd just developed provided just that."

"I- what. You are the most cynical creature I've ever met. Why are you suddenly bringing this up now?" Light decided to change subjects.

"Ah. Some nations may suspect Kira of having control of Russia's bombs now. If the Kira organization were a real organization with normal modes of operation, it would be true."

"Oh." Light felt a bit overwhelmed. "I see."

"Hence there is an additional element to the sudden wave of international concessions and bending over backwards to appease Kira, or, barring that, threatening to literately nuke Kira. You may not have seen the news yet, but China is now making noises about potentially nuking both Japan and Russia next if it is targeted. And some Russian civilians near the borders have oh so mysteriously vanished. Needless to say, Chinese men are not immune to getting heart attacks naturally in old age, so there is a very real chance World War III may start at any time without much warning even if Kira stopped all activities completely tomorrow."

"I see," Light said faintly.

Well, shit. Shit shit shit.

"Unless, of course, I catch Kira," L said, suddenly leaning very, very close and pinning Light against the wall, causing Light an unwanted flush at the proximity.

Ass. He knew perfectly well what he was doing, the fucker. It was probably just a petty retaliation, because Light did once so L had to do it too. Light ducked out of his grip and ran, well, walked very fast, to the bathroom to start running cold water and scrub his sweaty hands.

Gods, first he says 'do not worry about it' and then five minutes later is basically 'by the way, we might all die tomorrow'.

L was such a little troll.

Thinking it over quickly, Light was sure he actually could fix this, it would just be a little risky and need some careful thinking through to get around the annoying limited control duration. Plan A: If there was one thing any leadership feared, it was internal conflict. He just needed to pin the blame of leadership deaths on some pro-Kira or other faction, which certainly existed but was heavily suppressed, which made the research part more difficult. Also, maybe he should just straight up steal their nuclear codes? But no, Light didn't really want anyone's nukes. Sabotage? Better, but he'd have to make sure not to miss even one of them.

...he was going to have to go the hostage route, Plan B, wasn't he? Do what I say or I'll murder your whole family.

And perhaps take a page from Taiwan's opposition party and make cooperation seem more appealing by offering a chance to keep power, and taking the politically savvy route of carefully not favoring any policy beyond 'more democracy'. L had some good points. Threats needed a clear message of what a person could do to appease. Transitions often took time. A carrot and stick approach could cool things down, or at least start some sort of negotiation process which was probably more comforting than dead silence.

So his next move in China would by necessity be very, very quiet, but he'd direct it at the right ears, and he'd do it without much killing this time beyond what was needed to verify it was really Kira. Ryuk could probably be bribed out of sheer self interest.

What he was really wondering now was what L was thinking. He'd provided all the pieces in what now felt a very deliberate way. He was practically half-being Kira himself right now if Light followed his advice, yet he hadn't arrested Light on the spot in a 'fuck it, this has gone too far' moment yet.

Though, L probably figured he didn't need to wait too much longer.

"Feeling a little sweaty?" L remarked. "Or did you need to wash off all the blood on your hands? I fear it's soaked in more than skin deep."

Light glared. "You think the worst of absolutely everybody. Is there any figure - it can be historical, I guess - that you do respect?"

L thought it over. "I suppose I quite like Japan's prime minister that was against going to war with China just before World War II. When assassins showed up at his door, he politely invited them in to talk and air their grievances. He almost succeeded too, considering they were so taken back they actually sat down with him, but another assassin ran in and ordered them to ignore his words and shoot. His charisma and bravery actually reminds me a bit of Light-kun."

...was that a compliment or some kind of weird insult, considering the man still got killed? Knowing L, it might well be both.

"It was pretty wild. You had these radical soldiers claiming they were doing the will of the emperor when the emperor would have preferred to just do botany," Light remarked. "The civilian side of the government basically lost control of its own army, yet feared admitting it would just make things even worse by making them look weak."

"The radicals also remind me of Light-kun," L said shamelessly. "Considering they were willing to kill their foes."

Light rolled his eyes. "I have to get to class. You made me completely miss lunch."

(L starts to try to give him a pastry from his pocket and Light immediately rejects it. That is just absolutely disgusting, does L have no sense of hygiene at all? There's literately lint on it.)

L pretends to be a proper student and actually attends class for once, though he watches Light more than he pays attention. Light tries to be diligent, but he clearly finds L's presence extremely distracting.

Light approached him after, not letting him simply slip away.

"You were fucking with me," Light said, and it was a conclusion and not a question. "So, was what you said your real opinion?"

"What do you think?" L asked, deliberately evading. He doesn't even bother to clarify 'opinion on what?'

"That you know what someone else is thinking is rarely something you can know with absolute certainty. You're open to the idea that they're all absolute monsters who don't even bother making excuses to themselves, only to civilians, which says something deeply cynical about you, but if you ever said you knew for absolute certainty, you'd be lying. You have a poor opinion of governments and people everywhere. Some are surely malicious, but sometimes it must just be sheer incompetence. A guiding hand could show them the way."

"Light-kun is partially correct," L admitted. "I think many leaders are both malicious and incompetent." He probably shouldn't be saying that to a Kira willing to take advice from him, yet he can't swallow saying he thinks current leadership of the world is competent and kind when he very much doesn't. "Though Light-kun has forgotten to add 'mistaken ideals' to the list, and seems to think of himself as worthy of being a guiding figure, for which I must up his chances of being Kira. A person can be quite competent at taking and using power, yet achieve a bad end with their means that was not their ultimate intention. Kira-kun would do well to remember this and slow down."

Light had a strange way of getting under L's skin, making him feel seen and like he can't hide, and even more bizarrely that he doesn't want to, entirely. He's not sure he likes it, really. He expects a harsh judgment to come next, or some petty retort.

(Light wonders: who hurt you? who told you that you were ugly and unlovable and taught that to respect and trust was nothing but pain?)

It does not. Or at least, not the kind he was expecting.

"Do you really not have anything else to wear?" Light cast his gaze over him. "You always wear the same outfit over and over." What on earth brought this on?

"I like it. It's soft and unrestrictive." He wiggles his toes against each other.

"I kept wondering how your clothes didn't all fall off when we played tennis, which is clearly the best evidence that you are Kira because surely that was some supernatural power," Light remarked, and. That was certainly a mental image. Thank you for that embarrassment, Light-kun. "Let's get you some new clothes. I'm sure we can find something soft enough for you."

What fresh hell had he been damned to, what great sin hath he committed? Surely, Kira's idealistic crusade to punish the wicked knew no rest. "That's quite alright, Light-kun, I can afford clothes."

"I insist! It'll be my treat." Your method of torture, you mean. Seeing L's unimpressed look, Light relents. "I just think you would feel better about your appearance if you dressed nicely."

Oh.

Light-kun was trying to be nice.

He didn't know how to respond to that.

Or perhaps just trying deviously to flatter him, on a second and more comfortable thought.

"Perhaps just one outfit," L gives in. "For your amusement, as my ego does not need it."

On the ride there, Light asks, bored, "So, what was with Tailor speaking Japanese anyway? Wouldn't it have been better to talk in English and have it translated if you wanted it to seem truly international?"

"It was a little test. You and Kira both passed, congratulations."

This successfully distracts Light away from what would likely have been his next question about Tailor's identity and crime, which would have been more difficult to avoid without being obvious this second time. It still didn't seem to have occurred to Light that it was L himself who had Tailor arrested in secret without a proper trial or jury that could leak his existence. Light perhaps thought he himself was going to get a trial after the end of all of this, which no one who knew about Tailor's full story would ever think. Although his growing awareness of international politics may have made him aware of the idea that he might be disappeared, for different reasons, he certainly wasn't acting very afraid he might be thrown into inhumane prison conditions at any moment.

He had too high an opinion of L, and L frankly had no idea why.

But, while they were on the topic of niceness...

"Light-kun, there is one more matter on my mind," L said, feeling like he was about to walk on eggshells and forced to wear shoes while doing it. "Kira's recent uptick going after rapists. A few of which were unusually violent for him or her, which makes me wonder if something actually happened to Kira."

Light was very carefully blank and still. "That's an interesting hypothesis, Ryuuzaki-san." L wondered if he realized he'd gone back into politeness with the rest of his habitual mask.

"There are some negative effects I think you may not have considered," he tried for gentleness. It didn't suit him very well, crouched on a car seat like a fey being. "Many victims of assault know their rapists and are reluctant to come forward," he didn't like the way Light tensed slightly and turned his head to look out the window away from L, "if Kira makes rape an automatic death penalty, or worse, it's likely even fewer of them will come forward."

Light's face scrunched, like it didn't quite make sense to him immediately, then smoothed like he thought of something. "I see." Light usually was talkative and liked to show off, but this time he didn't elaborate in the slightest.

"This could be because of affection," no reaction, "or them holding something over them." Again no reaction. Light was good at stilling himself with forewarning. "Well, it isn't your job to catch Kira, and you don't need to be Kira," that gets a confused wary stare, but it is better than the brittleness and feeling like Light might shatter at any moment if L poked him, "so don't worry about it."

Light laughed, but it wasn't very humor filled. "Every time you say do not worry about it, it means worry about it."

"Does it? My apologies." L pokes Light for real and watches him expel a hot puff of air. "We're here."

L wonders if, only a month ago, he'd have viciously torn into Light and made him cry for the sake of solving the case. He realizes he doesn't actually know the answer.

There is a moment of awkwardness when it comes time for L to actually put on an outfit and he just stares at it.

"I guess... I could put it on? We are the same size," Light said. "Although it kind of defeats the point, since I wanted to see how you looked in it."

"I didn't dress myself for years," L confessed. "I don't like taking my clothes on and off. Too much effort."

"Really?" That... the weirdnesses of L just kept piling on, huh? But he didn't want to hurt him over it, and the way L's expression is very flat and seemingly emotionless at his question doesn't escape his notice. "Well, I would be perfectly happy to do it for you."

It adds to his confusion that while he feels delighted to be so close in a small space, and have an excuse to gently touch, he doesn't actually feel anything at seeing L mostly naked. Light was fairly sure you were supposed to experience something on seeing your crush half undressed, but he doesn't. Just a thrill that L somehow seemed more vulnerable like this.

Like he guessed, L looks good in a deep navy blue. Pitch black, opposite the white he usually wears, or dark gray also suits him very well. Green or purple would probably make L look like a zombie with his eye bags unless one put black makeup over it to make it look intentional. When he tries a brown vest over a white shirt and black pants, which are Light's preferred colors for his own clothing, he can't help but think L looks really stunning. He decides it is the cut of the vest rather than the color, though it is very satisfying to have them both match each other, and reluctantly concludes the dark gray version of the same vest looks as good or better than the brown. It helps that L is slouching backwards (perhaps hoping he can melt into the wall and avoid all the new clothing) instead of forwards for once, which has the effect of making L take up more space, look more confident (even if in reality there was no difference, humans instinctively interpret posture) and seem more like a punk leader of a gang or, in the nicer outfits, a slacker posh student rather than a nerdy shut-in. Although the fact he was still wearing no shoes made the look very funny.

He finds himself staring into L's eyes from mere inches away after tugging a piece of clothing over L's head, and it feels like it might turn into some sort of moment, so of course, L chooses to try to ruin it:

"It bothers Light-kun that Kira is an anarchist, does it not?"

And it did, but at that moment Light was chasing the milky haze of some strange, contenting emotion, so he absently muttered, "If you say so."

L gave him a very unimpressed stare, and Light realized his response, which was to a question about Light's emotional state, made no sense. Shaking his head and forcing his gaze away, he self corrects: "Sorry, ah. I mean. It's just a choice of definitions. I'm pretty sure Kira doesn't actually want to advocate for lawlessness, it doesn't fit his pattern of killing."

"And yet, by thwarting the rule of law, Kira does so advocate, whether he means to or not," L needles him shamelessly. "An anarchist was your biggest fan today! Kira-kun must be so proud." Light rolled his eyes.

"Don't call me Kira-kun." Good job L, moment ruined, just like you wanted.

"Kira-sama?" L does a little show of pretending to think, the pupils of his eyes pointed to the upward corner in a fake manner, tucking his arms behind his back.

"That's even worse."

"Kira-Kira sparkles?"

"No!" but Light is laughing now, which oddly enough seems to have been L's real goal that time.

He needs to find some way to stab his own heart out. This was just getting embarrassing at this point. He was half convinced if L had asked him if he was Kira in that moment he'd have just hummed, brain gone. RIP Light's brain. He needed to crawl into a hole and die of shame.

"Will these stand up to surviving with me if I wear them when I throw myself into the clothing washer?" L asked.

"What?" Light-kun very clearly thinks L is trolling him. "You do not bathe by using a washing machine, you would drown!"

"Watari made a very special washing machine that I wouldn't drown in, just for that purpose. It's highly efficient."

"You're such an absurd little troll man I don't even know whether to believe you or not." Odd that he calls him little when they are the exact same height. L assumes it is just to belittle him, or a reference to his slouching.

Light picks out a whole wardrobe, then apparently realizes he can't afford to splurge all that at once, holding up his wallet with a pained look. He looks genuinely sad at the prospect for some unfathomable reason. It occurs to him that it is a little odd Light wouldn't have more saved away, as he had seemed the frugal type when he had his room combed over before and his failure to immediately remember he didn't have the money spoke to saving being a long term habit. A sudden willingness to spend more - was that a sign of someone no longer planning for the long term? Or something else? What did he buy recently?

L should be relieved at the chance to escape, but instead he just wordlessly pays so he doesn't have to watch Light agonize over which of multiple outfits to get L, a person who very much did not care what outfit was picked as long as it wasn't itchy or tight.

As revenge, L picks out a dress for Light. Light actually seems to contemplate putting it on as a joke, but stops, his eyes flickering to the body guard following them.

"Why don't you go watch the entrance for a bit?" L suggested.

"That's not particularly safe," the guard argues.

"Well, you aren't following us into the dressing room either," L points out. "The store is fairly quiet right now. I won't blame you if something does go wrong."

"Very well."

No longer being constantly watched, Light instantly relaxes quite a bit, and does in fact put on a dress.

"How do I look?"

L just shrugs. Light, thankfully, seems to find this amusing rather than insulting, and quickly takes the outfit off in a smooth motion.

Light looked...

Like Light-kun always does, honestly. Like Light-kun.

Like every other human being in clothing,if more aesthetically pleasing by standard measures of attractiveness.

L may not entirely understand the point of clothing outside of winter. If it weren't necessary to not get arrested, he might be tempted to just go naked. He does like being warm and toasty and his skinny hide does chill very easily, so there's that.

Speaking of, the shop has a scale and L steps on it for a moment out of boredom. Light purses his lips in disapproval and says, "You need to eat more."(~)

Light is a mother hen.

"Although," a different calculating expression crosses his face. "You know what this weight means, don't you?"

For once, L was completely clueless. "No?"

"I can pick you up! Rawr!"

And Light-kun chases him across the store and nearly gets them thrown out.

Light-kun was certainly very physical and rambunctious under that refined, golden student exterior he presented in class. Perhaps they should have another tennis match to get some of that energy out.

It is when Light nearly has L pinned down again in a corner that L realizes this may just be a nefarious scheme to hug L again. Clearly, he must raise Light's Kira percentage again for this.

"You don't actually like walking to places, do you?"

"How did Light-kun come by that deduction?" L asks, curious but not too surprised: it is sort of true, after all.

"Well, you normally drive everywhere, and you hate wearing shoes. It's not exactly hard to put together. C'mon."

And while L is distracted for half a second thinking of how to respond to this, a thumb to his lips, Light scoops him up. L is tempted to kick him. Even when he was small, people didn't usually pick him up. He'd been an ugly pug child. And one of his oldest memories of it isn't a pleasant one.

"Light-kun is determined to have me suffer every single indignity possible today, I see," L gives a faked long suffering sigh, but does not actually fight him. He does feel a little unease - what if Light drops him? Or does something else like kissing him? But he doesn't want to give it away that he is anything but perfectly confident and mildly exasperated right now.

He can't see it through the mask, but he's very certain Watari is giving A Look when they come out.

Light eyeballs a fountain evilly, clearly contemplating dunking L in it for shits and giggles and wondering if he can do that and not accidentally drop some of the shopping bags and nice new clothes at the same time.

"Don't you dare," L mutters. He buries his head under Light's neck.

Light goes still. "My arms were getting tired anyway." And he gently puts L down, no evil dunking.

Perhaps Light-kun isn't Kira after all. He will lower a percentage point just for that.

"Hold on just inside the entrance, I just thought of something!" and Light pops back inside. L is a bit tense. Though it is just for a brief time, Light had slipped from his watch. Will he get up to something nefarious?

It turns out to be a pair of shoes. So yes.

"I know you hate shoes, but, we're almost the same size, your feet are just a bit wider than mine. I noticed that when you do wear shoes, they're really cheap ones, and shoes are one of those things where price actually does often matter a lot. Try these on."

L wants to scoff, to say he's tried on dozens and dozens of shoes before and often only found one or two pairs to even be vaguely tolerable, there is no way the very first pair he tries on here are going to be comfortable. But Light's gaze is so earnest, so try he does.(@)

They were the comfiest pair of shoes he'd ever worn. 

Watari's gaze is incredibly judgmental the entire ride back, once Light-kun has been deposited safely back home.

"L, you need to be honest with yourself."

"I am!" L snaps back, full of self loathing for a moment. L is not someone who ordinarily feels any self doubt, thank you very much. He successfully dove into sweets and work and found satisfaction that way over the years, without thinking of anything else. His monster speech had mostly been a way to gauge Light's reaction and psychopathy chances (would there be careful blankness? glee?) even if there had been a dose of honesty in it, because frankly, L was not a great person and did go through a lot of his life very numb, and did fear what someone unscrupulous who could make him feel less numb, told him all the lies deep down he wanted to hear, could do to him. It had not been an attempting at bonding in any way (or so he told himself), more of a warning that he wasn't interested, and yet somehow Light had tried to turn it into that. "Trust me, there are few people as honest with themselves as I am."

He liked Light-kun. He had to admit that much. But it couldn't go anywhere. Light-kun being Kira was ironically less of an obstacle than L himself, though Light being Kira was certainly enough of a problem all by itself. L was too... unsuited, for such things. He didn't want it either. He'd watched enough human beings murder and cheat on their partners to know he wanted no part of that kind of pain. Even he knew better than to taste poisoned sweets.

And no relationship could last past death, in any case.

"L, I raised you. I've seen you attack people for trying to give you hugs, much less pick you up. You cannot pretend this is normal for you."

"One of the very first things you did when you took me home was put me in a bare white padded room after I got in a fight with other children," L's voice was monotone. There was a reason he was not closer to Watari and largely treated him as a servant. "You gave me everything I requested for stimulation, but why should I have had to? What if I hadn't known what a computer was? Would you have just let me stare at a blank wall all day or endlessly fiddle with mind numbing jigsaw puzzles? Isn't that an interesting question?" he tries to phrase it like he's talking about the weather. He doesn't think he quite succeeds.

"You never told me that bothered you before," Watari says with surprise. "I didn't know."

"You should have," L says frostily, monotone disappearing. "I was a child."

An ugly and emotionally unresponsive one, but still a child. Children couldn't be expected to know anything. Genius doesn't help you understand things if you've never even encountered it first.

"I got you plenty of toys. You're sulking over nothing."

"I don't want to talk about this anymore."

He can't help the stupid, traitorous thought of his own mind from bothering him the whole ride back:

what if he had met Light earlier?

Probably, they would have driven each other up the wall and hated each other. Light needed a catalyzing incident to get over a budding perfection complex, and he loved morality speeches, so younger Light would have been absolutely insufferable.

An even worse thought digs into his mind, though.

What if it hadn't been younger Light? What if it had been this Light? Who looked at him like he meant something from moment one?

He hates Yagami Light so much, suddenly, an ugly dark feeling twisting in his insides. (#)

He nearly sets all the clothing on fire the instant he gets to a random hotel room. He refrains because he doesn't feel like catching attention by buying the entire hotel.

He does not consider burning the shoes, even though he probably won't wear them.

He analyzes himself like he would one of his own criminal suspects when doing behavioral studies for a profile, deduces a case of emotional transference is likely and that it isn't really Light he is angry at, and decides to distract himself until he calms down.

In the morning he tries to convince himself he doesn't really feel all that much about Light at all. He's feeling comfortably numb about everything again.

Light likely had only a small amount of time to take care of affairs if things were escalating, and to be honest he didn't trust Misa to stay away for as long as she said she would. "Sayu, I've been trying to grow these plants I cultivated from a seed. Can you take care of it for me? I'll leave you instructions on how often to water and how to grow. In return, I'll give you my entire collection of video games and some of my books."

"Onii-san can't do it himself?" she says, suspicious. "I'm busy packing my room."

"Hopefully I will, but... I suspect I might not see you again for a long time even if we're in the same building."

"The Kira case again?" She runs up and hugs him tight. "I hate Kira so much."

"Yeah." He hugs her back tightly. "I'm sorry."

"I'm going to kick Dad in the rear for hurting you. Actually, mom is super pissed about you potentially dropping out and all of us moving into some strange building right now, I might not have to do anything. She's talking about hiring some lawyer named Teru Mikami who is supposed to be pretty good. He normally only prosecutes, but he's offering to defend anyone accused of being Kira pro-bono if they need it."

"Don't do that," he chides. "Dad's suffering from all of this too." Wondering if this might be the last time he ever sees her, he adds, "I love you, Sayu. What would you say to Kira if you met him?"

"Hm?" she scrunches her nose, whether that was at his sudden corniness or the concept, he didn't know. "Well, I'd tell him he was wrong and to stop, of course. Rules and procedures exist for a reason. I'm sure his heart is in the right place, but, in my opinion, he should really try to be more like you big brother!"

He smiles softly and hugs her, then walks behind her so she can't see his eyes are wet. "You're absolutely right, as always Sayu," he jokes as he walks away, his back to her.

When Light calmed down a bit from his roller coaster of a day (the fuck was wrong with him that he could get distracted from potential World War III by flirting, of all things?) and got back home, he realized L had deliberately played him to fuck with his mind. Yes, people might suspect Kira of having nukes, but there was absolutely no reason to freak out over that unless they thought Kira was worse than the Russians who had already had nukes and didn't use them. And there was really no reason to think that. Worst case scenario, they should just use conventional bombs first, those were plenty capable of killing people without the escalation and mutually assured destruction nukes implied. Not that conventional bombs weren't bad enough, mind you... it was still a bad situation.

He'd thought the comment about Haiti having empty prisons had also been bait, but, the problem with a country with no infrastructure is it will largely lack internet. It wasn't possible for him to go after all the escaped criminals there en-mass because their names simply weren't available to him. So L had probably told him that story just to satisfy Light's curiosity and he could take that much at least as genuine.

The bit about the Chinese being antsy and potentially willing to start a war if it got Kira off their backs was probably very true. The asshole could have just led with that instead of trying to psychologically damage him. He probably wanted Light to draw mental analogues between nukes and his own 'superweapon', and freak him out enough he caved into a confession in order to stop a war, with the comparison of a man willing to die for peace to butter Light up for self-sacrifice.

"Ryuk, you and the other shinigami are going to help me with threatening China. With knowledge of what they can do to keep some power and avoid Kira's retribution, their nerves should soothe. As long as we merely advocate for greater democracy and no specific policies, we can probably encourage them to mirror Taiwan and South Korea."

"Me AND the other shinigami?" Ryuk said. "Why on earth would we do that, Light-o? Did you forget I'm not on your side and we aren't friends?" He burst into laughter. 

"Because if the entire human race dies, so do you. No more human lives as cattle for shinigami pens."

Ryuk stopped laughing.

"Yeah, it was funny when it was just the poor little human depending on you, but it's not so funny when the situation is reversed, now is it?" Light couldn't help but feel a little vindictive satisfaction.

"Maybe I should just write your name in my note," Ryuk said, face half illuminated and half in a shadow of Light's room, which currently only had a single desk lamp on and the curtains firmly closed. Ryuk moved back from the light and started to lift up his own note.

"But you don't understand humans, and I do, Ryuk. You need me," Light insisted. "You didn't even know there was a threat to your survival until I told you." That, thankfully, seemed to sink in. "If you just kill me now, they'll think Kira simply went into a no-kill period and is lying dormant. It won't fix the issue that they'll mistake a normal heart attack for the work of Kira and potentially start a world war that could kill all of humanity. Humans have enough nukes collectively to destroy the world several times over."

Ryuk was very quiet. Not unusual normally, but uncharacteristic when they were having an actual conversation. He put his spare notebook away. "Light. I will do what you say and talk to the shinigami king about an exception to the rule, but I want you to know this."

Ryuk suddenly appeared in the next blink in front of Light, no blur, no movement, eyes gleaming red.

"I don't appreciate being manipulated."

And Ryuk's clawed hand slammed around Light's throat and lifted him up effortlessly.

Light wheezed as Ryuk began to squeeze and press him up against the wall. The desk thunked as Light accidentally kicked it. His mind flashed back to the torture attempts that had also denied him of air, and in his instinctive clawing he accidentally re-injured his bad hand. It bled a bit through its bandages.

"Light? Are you okay in there? I heard a noise!" Sayu called out.

Ryuk dropped him.

"I'm-" he gasped for breath. "fine!"

"You don't sound fine." Then a pause. "Wait, are you jerking off in there like a normal teenager?"

"Yes, g-go away!" Light lied, kneeling on the ground.

"Ewwww!"

Fuck, he had to wear a scarf again. Thankfully he had kept it in his room in case of emergencies. He just hadn't thought he'd need it for this.

His relationship with Ryuk had always been unbalanced, but he had been able to pretend to himself it was some kind of twisted friendship. This... this was going to make the camaraderie harder to fake going forward.

"If I am not destined to be the one to write your name in the note, then the bond between us as shinigami and human is broken."

Or... just no faked friendship at all, then.

He had a suspicion shinigami weren't supposed to hurt humans without using the death note, but that Ryuk figured he could get away with it because the other shinigami would also be rather pissed at Light right now and he hadn't actually killed Light that way, so it didn't matter.

Why didn't they kill that way, for that matter? They can't possibly have been using death notebooks in Ancient Egypt or even earlier times. Why did they transition to such a nice 'clean' way of killing? Had the shinigami king enforced it? Did they not get as much 'fate' stolen from a more violent, bloody death? Did they evolve to depend on the books over time? He wished he could launch an archeological expedition into the death god realm.

...ah, but he had more important things to focus on right now.

He cleaned every inch of his room, determined not to leave one speck of death world dust. He even cycled through the air with a self assembled air filter using an old vacuum cleaner. Even the harmless discovery scribbles that are entirely in code he decides to destroy because it isn't worth the risk of being decipherable. He doesn't want anyone touching his chemistry set up as it might be rather strange and suspicious Light had somehow stumbled on totally new scientific discoveries just as L was apparently potentially debating if Kira had made totally new scientific discoveries. He hates that he now has no idea if some of his death note experiments actually worked and simply got covered up as heart attacks, but there's a faint possibility L now thinks he's dealing with a killer who can phase through walls and mess with spacetime rather than a magic notebook in which case a new stable super-heavy element that shouldn't exist might be accidentally interpreted as a murder weapon.

...was it a murder weapon?

Before he gives his last plant away, he hesitates at small, fast growing variety of pomegranate he bought as a sapling that needed only a year to fruit. The offering that grows is small, but it's edible, and it has been grown in death world dirt. What experimenting he's done with tiny multicellular organisms indicates this stuff isn't lethal.

Light pops six pomegranate seeds of the underworld into his mouth. He immediately feels ill but resists the urge to wretch.

Nothing seems to immediately change, and he feels a little silly for it. Although he does feel a great deal more tired, and his eyes itch slightly.

He finds himself thinking again, intensely bothered for some reason by the idea killing rapists would ultimately lead to less rather than more justice. There had to be some kind of solution. Light couldn't be powerless, he refused to believe that. He refused. The problem was the victims had no power, the problem was institutions, but how do you fix a culture, how do you fix a society?

As an experiment, he tentatively pulls up some Indian cities that had come up in his previous research on the subject. While a lot of India didn't have internet yet, these ones did have police with computers. The problem is that some of the names he's looking at, he doesn't have any proof that they're really corrupt, that they're anything than just flawed people who didn't react the way Light wanted them to. Light has tried to avoid killing innocents, he really has.

But... he did. He has. The intention didn't matter.

And no one has to know.

He writes down a chief of police, that he'll hire women, and preferentially pick victims of rape to work with sexual assault victims. That he dies a hero and with his dying breath declares he wants the most competent of the women to be his successor, who courageously fights off and kills a criminal to avenge the man and protect others the criminal was about to hurt. If the man hurt people in the past, then he vows to the women that he wants to change his ways and that's why he's doing this.

If there's not even the slightest flicker of goodness inside the guy, he'll possibly just die of a heart attack because there will be no way he wants to change his ways. So in a way that makes it more cruel. This plan relies on it being humanely possible the man could act like this. That the person Light is killing isn't a monster. Probably he shouldn't have written the bit about motivation down, but it will work better if it does, because if there is one thing people love it is a narrative of redemption.

It's a sensational story, and there's nothing about it that definitively points to Kira. The changes it makes might be tiny, in the end, might even be reversed within the month if a new male successor to the man's position pushes back on the new hires and fires them all or something. But it is a change. Sometimes, people just need an idea to be inspired, a role model.

Light... is willing to be a bit of a monster if that's what it takes to be the only wicked one left.

Ryuk will find some excuse to kill him the moment Light sabotages himself by ending all war by coercion, or maybe he'll get all the shinigami to agree to police humanity from world ending war, making himself unnecessary, and Ryuk grows bored and vengeful at the manipulation. Or L will kill him, or catch him and then Ryuk will kill him. But that's OK.

Light is perfectly willing to take his punishment. It's what he deserves, and the wicked should be struck down punished whenever it won't simply make things worse. Maybe rehabilitation is better, but Light can't muster the appropriate amount of shame for all this or he wouldn't be doing it in the first place. He can't even bring himself to stop for the shame and potential harm it will bring to his whole family, making it clear he can't possibly love them the way he thinks he loves them.

He's not redeemable, so clearly, Kira's very last victim must be Yagami Light.

Chapter Text

Even as he told himself he could probably give Second Kira more time to give him more of the data he craved, L found himself almost immediately contradicting himself. He ran the mental calculus in light of the now more volatile situation:

• L declares there is no weapon, the states don't believe him. L dies or possibly just gets captured and tortured for awhile, then disappeared into a prison or killed because having the great L announce he had been tortured would be a political embarrassment.
• L destroys the weapon, someone doesn't believe him, repeat.
• L takes the weapon, announces Kira has been caught, and takes a plane ride. Someone blows the plane up. L dies.
• L takes the weapon, announces Kira has been caught, and does not take a plane. Someone tries to steal it and another party simply tries to blow the building he is in up, because there's no kill quite like overkill. L dies.
• L takes the weapon, lies about leaving, they track planes and become suspicious he may have stayed in the country, do the paperwork by following the money and the definitely-not-suspicious foreign guy who keeps oscillating between hotels. L dies.
• L takes the weapon, lies about staying, goes on a private plane ride. L can do a lot of things, but he cannot out-spend a nation-state's military and they'd be tracking any plane that looked vaguely like it might have L. L dies.
• L takes the weapon, lies about staying, uses a cheap public plane ticket and fake ID and has to hope none of the opposition have seen his face which seems like a terrible strategy -

"An international call for you, sir. A Frenchman from Interpol, I believe."

L was very mildly surprised they actually called him about it, but not too much so. He knew they suspected him, so was there any point in trying to cover it up still? If needed, he could always dump his L identity, but they could make life very uncomfortable for him and he might have to give up the case if they were pissed enough.

"This is L. Speak."

"L. We wish to apologize for sending one of our agents to stalk you, and to re-assure you that we are not trying to assassinate you and take the 'shinigami eyes'."

"Oh?" L said. "That's fortunate - for you." He meant it as in 'or I will make your life unpleasant and drop working on the case, good luck catching a supernatural killer without me', but couldn't help but think of another meaning immediately. Honestly, L was already feeling tempted to join Kira. (he ignored a nonsensical part of his brain that said he already had.) If someone who was supposed to be on his side tried to kill him? He might just go say 'fuck it'. And maybe they were being polite right now in part because they knew that had to be temptation. "I had been wondering if he was there to kill me should I solve the case. Some of your politicians are pro-Kira, are they not?"

This was a jab purely to make the other man squirm: basically every country has some pro-Kira politicians, and it wasn't restricted to a single party either. Most of them, however, don't have completely overt and enthusiastic ones at the helm of any of their parties (many politicians opting for the safe option of 'we are glad to see dictators go, but disapprove of the crimes against average citizens done without a trial' or some variation of 'Kira should join with our government so they can act legally' plea offering), so it is not too much of an issue - yet. The next round of primary elections could change this considerably.

"They had nothing to do with this, I reassure you. We trust that this won't impact the donations you make yearly, will it? And you won't mention our illegal activity to the Japanese?"

"Of course not," L said smoothly. "Why, I had even been thinking of doubling it. But nothing like this happens again, do you hear me?"

"Of course, sir."

You didn't really think L got to the position of power over the police internationally he did purely on merit, did you? Not that he didn't deserve the position of top dog, but the world simply didn't work that way. Regular donations to departments around the world had a way of smoothing tempers over L's idiosyncrasies and demands the way nothing else did.

It was astounding. He kills one of their men, covers it up, and they call him up and *apologize to him* for it.

Human beings truly were disgusting.

Was there any chance they were just pretending to agree in order to get a confession? It was rather contrary of him, but he found himself hoping for it. Except, if it had been, they should have asked by now if it was him, the Americans or the Chinese, rather than leaving it simply heavily implied. Maybe they were cooperating because they feared he'd pick up the weapon any day now and didn't want to piss off the guy who could control nukes, and planned to kill him later. That would make sense.

"Do you mind if I use his name?" he decided to press his luck just to fuck with the other person.

"His name?" that seemed to jolt the other from complacency. "That is a bit irregular..."

"Fake names and identities are quite useful in the Kira case, and having a real background would make it more convincing."

"True enough. It is true he had no family to speak of to complain about it."

and just like that, L was praised for his murder and identity theft.

He'd honestly thought they'd push back a little more at the last one. If they're not plotting to kill him after all of this is over, he's going to be very disappointed.

No, on second thought, they probably aren't, but one should never underestimate how big a country is. Probably a different person from that country politically opposed to the one he'd just spoken to was strongly considering the option of making L's life hell in some way. If that wasn't the case, then someone from a different country would. His enemies were increasing like fleas.

He makes, ugh, small talk. "How are others feeling about it? Please pass my sincerest condolences. Even I can't tell nationality at a glance. I truly thought the man was an assassin." For Light, not for L himself. Perhaps L had gotten too possessive...

They talk back and forth on mind numbing things, the paltry whims of people.

"I do have one question that is bothering me," the man admits. "Why did you send a message from his device?"

"Mm? Well, he did a good job hiding who he was working for, it wasn't on his work computer at all. I thought if I sent a message, I could either buy a little time before the next assassin, or poke his employers into making a move. And since you called me, it seems I was right," L said with faux-smugness. It was also extremely misleading, since he had in fact known.

"I see. You are as brilliant as ever, L." Hm. He tired of this. It brought him no real delight to know he could get away with murder so blatantly.

At least, not like that. Brag in front of everyone and have nobody notice, sure, that was fun, but this? Hard pass.

L trusted that Light would take care of the Chinese situation. Perhaps it would have been more sensible to have simply arrested Light on the spot, but he didn't want to and, frankly, he wasn't sure that would have actually made things better. L needed to think this through very carefully rather than rush things. If Light was going to get up into shenanigans in that extra time, then at least they could be competent and act as evidence against Light for so foolishly following L's advice.

He regrets the complacency he had gotten into with Light's original killing patterns. Even as they shifted, they had generally been fairly good about killing only a single target at a time, with very clear time spacings, usually about an hour often but not always on the dot that spoke less of scheduling the killings and more scheduling something else, probably the research, just before them, before they shifted to be more precise. It was one of the things that made the multiple Kiras before the Second seem so fake to him, the times were very, very careful to never overlap if one looked over the data very carefully for 'most likely to be location-X Kira kill' and the time stamps of such. There were some exceptions: Kira was nothing if not very erratic after the blackouts, for all there were hints that they loved regularity and were merely going against it in order to spite L. Several week-sets of kills, L suspected, were done entirely by a non-Japanese Kira pretending to be a Japanese Kira while original Kira took a break, and one 'usual non-Japanese Kira' time-frame kill set was definitely done by a Japanese Kira at one point. But it all ultimately fit together.

L had fucked up in his complacency, confident he knew Kira's way of operating after so many pieces of data.

Too confident that it wouldn't cost him anything, in the long run, to share that he suspected a Japanese Kira who was a student with the Americans and later, after the Russian torture and killing disaster, with Interpol. Kira only killed one person at a time, or a few people spaced out. Ten or so people a day was horrible, but compared to the wider world it really wasn't that much. Had Light stopped at nine victims and never killed anyone else, L likely never would have picked the case up, nor anyone else, the entire thing dismissed as freak heart attacks.

Even when a world leader had croaked it, that had just been one person at a time, not too different from a normal assassination. The control of the other 'Kiras' could have been just charisma, in which case they were still under control of one mastermind who for some reason had adhered to rules like 'only kill 1 person in a bit less than an hour or so', just like they'd adhered to needing a name and face. After Light's torture, though, the killings had gotten so much more intense, and the latest round had been the worst. Many killings of multiple people dying at the exact same second, some of them very clearly mind controlled - it was a nightmare for more than just the obvious. So much worse politically than a case that before might have been passed off as some weird disease or food poisoning. Korea had been ambiguous, a stark break in the old pattern, but it had been a warning sign and L hadn't taken it seriously enough. Lightning wasn't how Kira killed, he'd told himself. Such freak accidents did happen sometimes. In any case, if Kira had decided to go more subtle from then on, that wouldn't have hurt things much.

But then he did the opposite of subtle, practically presenting himself as some sort of God. (Though, L wondered if there was some limitation to the control there motivating that: if what information a prisoner could convey was limited, then perhaps some things had to be treated as the religious information-free conviction that a near-majority of people were capable of, or faking such conviction which even more people were capable of.)

And then Kira/Light had to go and fire things up even more, by signaling he was willing to meddle in the Middle East, that he wasn't slowing down, that he was, if anything, speeding up and perhaps growing even more powerful.

Kira might not have an interest in killing L, but it was very possible he'd get him killed nonetheless.

Now, there was of course a very small chance Light was just a teenager with an extremely bad sense of humor and unlucky timing. He'd had people call the police with confused confessions of being God or Kira before, it wasn't exactly an unknown phenomena. The best evidence pointing to this idea was the Takara Bank Case in 1979 where several people had mysteriously died of heart attacks all on the same day, and one person of suicide; Light hadn't even been alive then, and the case had no connection to the Yagami family in any way. But it didn't match Kira's behavior in the slightest, so this was very unlikely. And of course... BB was still alive. But L had checked and he was still in prison.

His next call had to be to his potential successors. For this, he'd do two-way encrypted web cam. Phone calls typically aren't encrypted.

"L?" Matt, Mello, and Near look at their screens with varying levels of surprise.

"First, I'd like to talk about Matt's colorful report."

Matt looked slightly embarrassed, Mello looked proud. L immediately knew Mello had egged Matt on when Matt had experienced doubts.

"Can I see it?" Near asked.

"Uh, sure..." Matt reluctantly sent over the file with a couple clicks. "There you go."

Near stared. "This is horrible. Why would you-" then their eyes went over a new line, and Near had to smother a chuckle.

Matt's eyes went wide. "Was that a laugh?"

"I didn't know Near could laugh!" Mello exclaimed. "This has just become an emergency."

"I must send you all the memes. ALL of them," Matt said, and Mello nodded solemnly. "And the cat videos. Have you ever watched anything from Albino Blacksheep?" Near looked mildly alarmed but shook their head. "I gotta show you the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny."

"We're going to torment you every single day until you laugh again," Mello threatened. Near looked even more dismayed now.

This was all L's fault for making it a group chat. L felt zero guilt over Near's sudden misfortune.

"That is quite unnecessary." Near smoothed their expression. Matt opened his mouth like he was about to disagree. "Let's try to be a bit more professional. So what was the second thing you wanted to converse about?" Near asked quickly, perhaps with a tiny hint of desperation to change subject.

"Well, I haven't finished discussing the first," L said dryly.

"I see," Near looked it over again. "The French lied."

"I don't get it," Matt confessed. Mello looked grumpy.

"Think of what you know of L. Is he unlikely to notice a code?" Near said, in full fan mode.

"Y-yeah, but, it was random. You can't predict random," Matt defended. "Although I do have one question, why would they be reluctant to blame the US if they did kill their guy? They could use that to get the Americans to back off a bit, maybe."

"There was in fact a code that I had noticed. The problem is that there were either two codes, one random, or, as Near guessed, the French lied. Considering the French knew they were dealing with a sophisticated actor who likely had access to international communications, why would they give up one of their own tools to the enemy? As to your question, in such a case they'd be better off hiding what they knew so the USA would think they were still friendly and oblivious, then eventually using it as pressure for concessions or to make a politician look bad at an opportune moment like just before an election. Both of these have something in common."

"To set a trap for the future," Mello deduced.

"Yes. If they set a second agent in place with two codes, one very obvious and one more hidden, but the hidden one was actually not to be used at all, they'd know for sure what sort of enemy they were dealing with, someone who had access to the less secure communications and after being warned could get into somewhat more secure communications," Near said. "For instance, Kira can control people, so he might slip up and tell the agent to use the second code, not realizing this shouldn't be done."

"It's possible the real method of telling if the agent was discovered and removed wasn't a code at all. Normally, you don't want to put trackers on your own agents or their equipment, giving a beacon to other state actors where your spy is at all times, or more likely in this case periodic times. But I don't normally pick fights with states, and Kira is likely not a government actor either." L found himself filled with a grudging respect for this other detective. L had grown so used to other people's incompetence that, after finding the first code inside a set of encrypted messages that appeared to be giving periodic updates, he had grown cocky. If there had been a second set of deleted messages with a second code, it had been obscured and over-written by noise very well, and that was assuming they had even been transmitted with the same device.

The problem this second detective faced was one L himself did: sacrificing himself didn't do much good if his pawns weren't willing or capable to do follow up. Another problem, of course, was that L was not Kira, and was not so interested in the agent's hypothetical successor that he'd have tortured him or her for a second code or set up bugs to listen for him giving a second code for a few weeks or anything like that.

"So, the other topic?" Matt was looking less than thrilled. He probably felt shamed he hadn't figured it all out himself, and Near had.

"There is a chance we will all die this week."

"What the fuck, L!" Mello is first to voice his feelings.

"It is a small chance. To mitigate it, I am telling you that you are all officially off of the case. Do not tell me if you intend to work on it unofficially," L warns before Mello can interrupt again.

"You think Kira might control you to kill the other 'L's," Near deduces.

"It is a small possibility. I have taken the precaution of hiring another party that I asked to have randomly change their name with a coaxed judge-" he didn't even have to bribe, protecting someone fell under normal exceptions, "to waive the usual 'publish in the local newspaper' requirement, and to do it again at a random time. So in the event we all do die, not all will be lost, don't despair."

"Yeah, we only have to worry about dying, who gives a fuck about that?" Mello swears sarcastically.

"In the event we all die, will that cement Kira's identity and solve the case?" Near says.

"I believe so, yes," L agrees. Unless it was a foreign government that decided to off them, of course.

"Seriously?" says Matt.

"Then it is a necessary sacrifice. Thank you for telling me," Near concurs.

"Fuck this! L, you mean to say you know who Kira is?"

"Most likely," L admits.

"Then put a fucking bullet in his brain!"

"Or lock him up," Matt suggests. "24/7 watch. It's simple."

"Unfortunately, he actually was locked up and tortured by someone else first, and that didn't prove a thing," L says. "But I don't think First Kira will voluntarily hurt me. He's actually quite friendly." Too friendly, really. "It's actually the Second Kira I'm more worried about."

"That would seem supported by the data," Near states.

"Matt, you agree these two are fucking nuts, right?" Mello said.

"It is a bit, uh... dramatic."

"It was bad enough I had to share the title of L like some stupid participation consolation prize, and now this shit?" Mello rants. "Fuck this, L. I'm out. I am so done with your shit." He turns his screen off.

"Uh. Mostly what he said, but, if you have any interesting tasks with computers I'm still game," Matt said, looking sheepish. "The whole 'might die and only chosen because you needed an extra hand' thing is pretty demotivating, I gotta say. But uh, this Second Kira, is she at least pretty?"

"Please be serious, Matt," Near scolds. "A murder suspect is hardly an appropriate subject for romantic or sexual explorations. Although, on that note, a suspect is hardly appropriate for friendship either. L, why does First Kira apparently know your face? What would motivate you to call them friendly?"

L feels a strong urge to end the conversation. He knows 'because I wanted to poke and prod him and maybe get him to kill me' is not a socially acceptable answer, even to teenagers. "I merely wanted to inform you all of our potential impending deaths, however improbable it may be., and of Matt's error. There is no further information I'd care to share with you at this time."

"L, you ass, are you-" Matt is now the one swearing.

L hung up.

There was a new broadcast from the Hyogo prefecture in Japan. Well, 'new' was relative, since L was choosing to view it in the dead of night like the insomniac he was.

"We have decided to enact a new prefectural ordinance further banning organized crime activities. It stipulates residents must not contact, take aid from or assist Yakuza groups in any way. Make no mistake: there was talk of such reform even before Kira. We also are enacting more exclusionary measures against active gang members. We are merely giving existing 1992 anti-organized crime law more teeth with new ordinances."

"If they make the names of citizens who comply with Yakuza public, it won't just be a public shaming measure, it'll be seen as a nod to Kira," L muttered. "Exclusion against active gang members is one thing, but this sort of thing rarely stops there."

After, he idly asked Watari:

"What's the response of the new Russian government to the story of their agents being discovered torturing citizens in another country and getting Americans killed?"

"That it was just some rogue mercenaries that they have no clue how they got there, of course, and that even if they were, that was the old government, not the new one, so there's absolutely no reason to go to war." And so the mostly cold war that was supposed to be dead continued as usual. "The Americans are pretending to believe them."

"Of course," L said dryly. "About what I expected. I suppose whatever stupid bullshit the Americans are pulling, they'll end up saying a similar thing at the end." People acted like saving face was a strongly Asian tradition, but Western governments didn't always behave particularly differently. Though, yes, a Western who just tried to have a debate and got a lot of polite 'yes'es in the businessroom could come away thinking they'd been very successful while the Japanese person was actually fuming that they'd been disagreed with. Light was... very unusual, honestly, for enjoying fighting with L so much or not minding L's attempts to piss him off, as anger and disagreement was considered far more rude in Japan than it was in the West. Perhaps that explained partly why Light looked at him like a thirsty man that had found water: L had to seem even more like a unicorn in a culture that suppressed people like him, even before you added on that L ignored nonverbal cues.

"Including that it was the old government's fault?" Watari said with dry amusement.

"Well, with luck, we'll have both Kiras by the end of the day," L said. But he wasn't feeling particularly lucky, and his next call proved him right.

"Light, you need to wake up!" Sayu nudges him awake, and Light blinks groggily to see her frowning down at him in his poorly lit room, the window outside showing the sun wasn't even up yet. The moon's light draped across her form. "Were you wearing a scarf in bed? That's not like you."

He's slow to respond with anything but a groan. Light has only had a few hours of sleep, a glance at his clock reaffirms it's just before the crack of dawn and he'd been up half the night.

"Someone tried to bomb our house. L's team intercepted them carrying the explosives."

Suddenly, he is far more awake.

And just like that, Light is packing and preparing to leave his childhood home behind forever, feeling a mixture of groggy and stunned, like nothing is quite real. Could they really be leaving forever, just like that? One instant, and his home was gone? They all could have died in their sleep, and he would never have known how or why.

They had been packing up before, but this puts a new urgency to it.

"Don't pack everything, dear, just the essentials and a box of your favorites. The movers can get the rest," his mother tells him.

Light glances in agony for a long second at the little tiny container containing his pet micro-organisms. Realistically, he should have gotten rid of them when he had cleaned the rest of his room just to be perfectly safe, but he'd doubted L would murder his pet tardigrade and put it under chemical analysis so he hadn't quite been able to bring himself to do it, and the death note has hopefully been in the human world long enough now it is not covered in unique micro-fauna (and in any case, if they are at that point of testing the note, he's kind of screwed anyway). In the end he caves and takes Mr. Spiky with him instead of tossing him in the trash.

He does have to argue to save the plants. "They're a living thing too and we have a responsibility to them, even if I'm the only one in the house that eats pomegranates."

"You're such a sweet boy," his mother says. "I don't understand all this Kira suspect nonsense. I'm half of a mind to call up L and throttle him."

Light nearly rolls his eyes, but doesn't because it is his mother. "This isn't L's fault."

"He wrote a profile and shared it with Interpol that the suspect might be a Japanese student with police connections. Of course it's his fault!" Sachiko is pissed. And, huh, how would mom know that if he did? Did she simply infer it? Or was Light not the only one to hack into dad's computer on occasion? "And my dear husband went along with it instead of proclaiming your innocence immediately!"

Light finds it hard to argue with that.

Ryuk is super pissy, and chooses a terrible time to voice it. "I was thinking. I could write down in my book that you confess." Light can't help but jolt. "But it's much more entertaining watching you destroy everything around you. Also, I shouldn't be telling you this, but it's bothering me and it's quite strange: I've never seen a person's lifespan suddenly jump quite like yours has, without taking a shinigami deal. You're quite talented at messing things up."

"If I suddenly acted like I was being controlled by Kira and mysteriously died immediately after, everyone would think Kira was still loose and tried to frame me," Light mutters during the frantic packing of the house, trying to not be over-heard by anyone but Ryuk. "Especially since I have a nice alibi of being tortured while Kira-kills still went on. I did another round of revising my controlled Kira commands, and noticed I can use a Kira to control yet another Kira, plus there are infinite pages, so that I can set up for months or even years worth of Kiras to go on after my death. Nice try, Ryuk, but all you'd do is ensure even L would think I'm innocent and that World War III would be even harder to stop." That might be putting it on a bit too thick, maybe it would be more like the reverse where L would be convinced and everyone else wasn't, but it's nice to snap back at the shinigami he's been pretending to play nice with all this time, the asshole who all this time has been waiting to kill him in a fit of boredom and is now getting sassy that maybe he can't do that. Light doubts Ryuk has ever faced much in the way of consequences for anything before, so no wonder he's throwing a tantrum like a violent spoiled toddler.

It kind of hurts, honestly. He'd spent so much time trying to befriend him, even as he'd known it was a horrible idea: this was a being that killed people for fun, so all he'd really been doing was hoping to endear himself to Ryuk a bit rather than the reverse. But it was hard to not fall into complacency after months of Ryuk being 'harmless' and 'funny'.

And, fuck, he really had altered his lifespan for the worse, hadn't he? He'd thought he'd been careful by testing with his microbial communities, but Light realized then that he might have actually just selected for very long lived survivors, because there had been an initial period of slow growth. Microbes bred so fast they could adapt to new conditions very quickly. If there had been pre-existing mutants with twice the lifespan of the others or who bred in half the time of the others, then they would very quickly be selected for in some weird substance that halved your lifespan but didn't actually kill you instantly. What he should probably do is take a death-dirt habituated population and grow it in a normal medium and see if lives twice as long. Purely for science, mind you, it doesn't really benefit him in any way now that he's already messed himself up.

And, oh, Light knew he really shouldn't have poked the dragon. But the prospect of potentially ending all war (or even just world war) forever? It had just been too good an opportunity to resist, and it wasn't like he was gambling that much of worth compared to the rest of humanity's future anyway, just his life. The shinigami were going to at least discuss the idea with each other now, at least going to think about the fact humans could potentially all kill each other off even without the threat of Kira making them anxious. That made it all worth it, in Light's opinion. If he could just wrangle a promise they'd step in to stop any nuclear warfare, that would make even his immediate death afterward entirely worth it.

It had struck him as weird that the shinigami didn't seem to fully realize the full scale of nuclear winter (or global warming) or didn't take it seriously, but when he thought of how Ryuk had described their world as lazy and boring, he realized there was no possible way the shinigami had a program of carefully influencing humans away from world war because that would be too much like hard work, or, even more, too much like something interesting to do. So somehow, they were so lazy they'd missed out on a major human development like 'humans becoming capable of fully killing themselves off and thus the shinigami by extension'. Ryuk at least had shown an interest in self preservation, so it couldn't be they were suicidal; instead, they had to be actually ignorant.

That wasn't too farfetched: if a shinigami gained lifespan by killing, then they were probably good to go paying attention to the human world only once every 50 years or so. And they clearly weren't doing interesting things like watching university lectures to gain a mastery in every subject, because again, shinigami were lazy and boring, and free university lectures were (in Light's opinion) quite interesting. It was hard to think of a more disappointing set of immortals.

Still, he had to hope Ryuk wouldn't think of some of the less suspicious ways of killing Light or controlling him to stop the other Kiras too soon, but the best ones revolved around more effort (controlling the court system, framing Light for murder - it would be easy to just kill L in front of Light and the entire task force and have L gasp out 'Light is killing me!111!', which would be very inconvenient) than the lazy shinigami seemed inclined to. If he can just delay Ryuk killing him until the other shinigami have securely decided on ending world war, it'll all be worth it. If he repeats that sentence to himself a lot, well, it's because dying is still a very stressful thought. He feels a lot like when he first got the note.

"If you do decide to monitor humans from now on, food security is an important part of conflict," Light said quietly. "I think you could maybe utilize the note's infinite pages to feed an essentially unlimited number of termites or wood roaches and beetles, and feed those to birds or mushrooms. You could set up an entire ecosystem with an unlimited food source. End world hunger and the struggle for resources, you end many wars."

"I think that might go against what it fundamentally means to be a shinigami," Ryuk muttered, his mood darkening again. He really didn't like Light trying to cajole him into acting less selfish, did he? Clearly, Light needed another shinigami subject to experiment, err, negotiate with.

His phone rings just as he clambers into the car.

"Ryuuga-san?" he said very politely, because his mother was listening and, uh, she had mixed feelings about how he had been so thrilled to have a Ryuuzaki's phone number scrawled on his good hand. Happy to have him finally show such genuine happiness over a friend instead of going through the motions, unhappy at the romantic undertones toward a boy. Grown man, actually.

"Can you make it to school today? Also, interesting choice of name."

"I nearly get blown up and you want me to go to college like everything is normal?" Light grumbled.

"Yes. I'll have a sniper watching."

"That doesn't actually make me feel much better, but fine." More loudly, he said, "Mom, can you drop me off at college?"

"Absolutely not."

"I just want to say goodbye to my friends real quick. And they have good security, I swear." Seeing she isn't looking very convinced, he adds his ultimate weapon: "One of my best friends there is a cute girl and I never got her number." It might not hurt to actually talk to Takada as a friend from time to time, she was an interesting person and they had a lot in common.

"Well... fine," his mother caved. "But it's far too early, so we'll take you to our temporary address first. After, do you want me to wait five minutes in the car for you?" Light shook his head. "I must say, I'm glad you're showing an interest in women. Not that I wouldn't still love you for the, uh, other way." Ugh, mom. "Just, it's better this way for everyone, don't you think?" Please stop talking.

"Your mother doesn't know what a bisexual is, does she?" L mused.

"You can stop talking too," Light muttered.

"Ryuuga, or Ryuuzaki, which is it? I wasn't born yesterday, dear, let me talk to your friend for a moment," his mother requests. "Put him on speaker."

"Uh, he hung up the moment you asked that." Coward. Although there was something distinctly funny at the notion L might be afraid of his mom.

He takes a bag and a backpack full of all his college textbooks and a few others. He doesn't need every single book, and he probably doesn't need the radio that is also in the backpack, but they were already packed together and he desperately needs a quick nap, though he's not sure he can manage one.

Halle Lidner is pissed and wants to know what idiot deviated from the plan. Turns out it was an ex-Russian spy who was adrift without a purpose after his dictator boss died and wanted revenge. They'd been feeding the mole false info but it seems he figured it out and snapped, and threatened someone into giving him the information he wanted. Making it worse, they suspected he'd joined forces with agents from yet another government who had decided any potential Kira was better off dead than alive, so now they had to waste time tracking them down before they killed anyone.

L proved to not be completely incompetent and useless: he'd apparently stopped several attacks on different targets already. Maybe the guy wasn't all talk after all, despite the sweet time he was taking.

"Shouldn't we kill the Kira suspects?" she is asked.

"No, you dolt. At least, not yet. It would be better to get the weapon, and for that we may need Kira alive. The original plan stays. It's unfortunate Naomi wouldn't cooperate, it would make it easy to intercept in the moment L catches Kira and offer Kira a deal they can't refuse."

She can still remember the conversation clearly, vexing as it was.

(

"That's a nice little baby bump you have there. And you're glowing." Of course, Naomi was always gorgeous, especially in leather.

Naomi stopped in her approach. "You think so? I haven't told anyone yet."

"It's hard to be a single mother without a job. I can pull some strings and get you your job with the FBI back. I'm sure you must be eager to work on the Kira case."

"I have employment right now, actually."

"I thought so!" Jackpot. And here she'd worried tracking Naomi down would be a waste of time, but clearly, she had to be here for a suspect. This kind of music had never been to Naomi's tastes, so the appearance of being a fan had to be faked. And considering Misa Amane hadn't been on their little list, it was very likely this was Second Kira, which made things even better as L hadn't shared any information on them. Actually, L had gotten pretty quiet lately, which was pretty infuriating. Did he think he could just dump them after they stopped being useful? "L, isn't it? I can make it sweet for you. You can have both jobs. Just tell us everything L is doing and thinking, and if he's about to prosecute or arrest a Kira."

"I can't do that, it wouldn't be ethical."

"A million." The currency isn't specified, but they are speaking in English as one American to another, so they don't really need to.

Naomi's eyes narrow, suspicious. "That's a lot of money to spare on one spy."

"I've got a lot of funding right now. Come on, think of the baby. When this case is over, you'll be back to being jobless. You can't possibly be satisfied with being a stay at home mother. You were wasted on Raye."

"It was never about satisfaction. Raye and I were both very unhappy with the rise in school shootings and the way our country was doing nothing about it. Maybe they aren't so common yet, but killers easily beget copycat killings, and I decided I'd rather have at least the first few years be safe at home. It's paranoid of me, I know, like being afraid of an air plane crash, but it makes me feel better when nobody is bothering to do maintenance on said metaphorical planes."

"Tch, that's not very patriotic of you, Naomi. Where's your fervor for the second amendment?" she teased.

"I thought the FBI and the CIA had finally agreed to put their past squabbles aside," Naomi prodded.

Lidner grinned and leaned in close. "I'm not giving information away just because we're old friends, cuteness."

Naomi blushed.

"But I might be convinced to do something else. I hear you're currently single. And I stand by what I've said many times before: you deserved better."

Naomi sobered. "Too soon, Halle. And I have no regrets over my choice in partner."

"Too bad." It hurt being rejected twice in one conversation, but it wasn't like this was the first time. "I hope you enjoy mediocrity."

"Maybe I will," Naomi retorted. "At least that's better than enjoying nothing at all while stewing with a superiority complex."

The nerve...!

"You will regret this, Naomi."

Naomi just looked at her with raw pity. "I already regret coming to this country. I sincerely hope you don't also."

)

Naomi doesn't think of Lidner much at all.

Instead, she reflects on how utterly boring it is stalking a suspect 24/7, and finds her mind drifting to other things. Raye, frequently. What to name the baby. If the case will be over in time for her to fly back and give birth on American soil, which would mean less paperwork and far less of a hassle for her.

But she also finds herself musing on L's eccentric behavior.

She hadn't been pleased at all by his alias of Ryuuzaki, or his true appearance. The man was very unnerving. But it wasn't the past that was bothering her the most right now about him.

Maybe, she tries to comfort herself, the tennis match they'd apparently engaged in was just L being stubborn and wanting to gauge the suspect's personality in person. Maybe he was mad at himself because he had misjudged how feelings work, as an asexual, and really had intended just a friendship-honeypot all along, or something more professional, and really did have no romantic feelings back.

While her interest in her original job at the FBI had mainly been about paying the bills with work she didn't hate, she'd always cared about cases involving the youth, so while Light might be on the older side of 'young' and to her American eyes a technical adult, she does still feel a flicker of protective relief at this idea.

L and professional conduct don't really belong in the same sentence, though. Still, she's basically convinced herself that L had just forgotten how people worked, up until she talks to the bodyguard Ide who followed L and Light the other day and came to relieve Naomi so she can take a bathroom break.

Light picked L up and carried him around. Ide snapped a picture, like Naomi had requested if L 'did anything weirder than usual'.

Fuck it, L. That did not look platonic. L had tucked his head against Light so his face couldn't be seen in the photo, and Light seemed in shock. Not unhappy, just stunned. In the second photo he looked absolutely smitten.

Ide disagreed, though. Thought they were just goofing around, which also wasn't terribly professional of them, but in Light's case that could be excused because he wasn't a professional, he was a literal teenager.

Naomi decides to keep it just in case she ever needs to blackmail L for anything. Also, it's a very cute photo. L's face doesn't even show in it, so maybe Yagami would like a copy if he turns out to be innocent.

Somehow, horribly, it's exactly as she has to go take a bathroom break that the suspect suddenly makes a move.

Even more horribly, her suspect manages to give them the slip, making many twists and turns and abusing crowds and breaks in lines of sight to horrible advantage.

It's as if Misa Amane could see them at a distance and knew everything they were doing.

Misa was a little miffed with Rem.

Okay, yes, it was Misa's fault for half-tuning Rem out when Rem started rambling about the stalkers again. Of course Misa had stalkers. It seemed like Misa's life was destined to always have stalkers.

But she couldn't have started with outright saying 'you have a bug listening to everything you say'?

"I'm sorry, Misa. Humans have changed a lot in the last 110 years. I didn't realize everything that you could do now."

"110?" Misa asks, once it is safe to do so again.

"One of the last times I bothered to study the human world for myself to write down a name. The shinigami were quite bored and having a contest that they always have about every 100 years or so. The winner is the one who finds the human with the longest lifespan left that is possible to kill at that time. I won that contest by finding a human who would have lived to 120, though it didn't give me a great deal of pleasure to do so. Most humans who would live that long or longer are killed by shinigami in their youth."

Rem killed a 10 year old to increase her lifespan. But Misa already knew Rem was a killer, so this doesn't really tell her anything she doesn't know.

Misa thinks about more important things, like how she can see Light again and have him tell her how to fix all this.

She goes on the move.

Light doesn't immediately find his friends - if he can really call them friends (he would like to, they had been amusing enough) - right away, but he does briefly meet the anarcho-communist from the other day who offers him a brownie. He wants to reject it, remembering his father warned him not to accept any substances from anybody, and frankly Light's stomach feels too ill to eat anything, but he can't help but think of L and how he'd probably want a brownie and not even care if it had been shoved into a pocket.

Naturally, L showed up at his school again, wearing his normal clothes. He was squatting with his shoeless feet perched on a bench, right in broad daylight. Light does his now familiar routine of quickly scanning for danger before approaching, trying to not feel rejected over something so silly as a clothing choice. He thought he saw something blurry over L's head for a moment, and something like a thread between their hands, but he was just imagining things. Gods, if Light gave himself defective eyes and potentially (if Ryuk wasn't messing with him) halved or quartered his lifespan for nothing, he was going to be pissed at himself. It was a good thing Light was the only member of the family that liked to eat pomegranate.

Anyway, L probably just didn't like changes in routine, the lack of shoes wasn't an insult. Probably.

"Ryuuga-san!" he greets loudly, and politely because they'll be overheard. Normally he'd use Ryuuzaki, but he used Ryuuga earlier, so, why not? When he's closer, he playfully starts things off, "I was thinking of our conversation the other day, and I want to press back on you a little bit about Japan. While it's true the market reforms of the 90's did lead to increased insecurity for workers, which could be taken as a sign we don't care about them, we also paired it up with increased social welfare and keeping housing stock on track with demand. Doing so, we've seen greater economic gains than countries that implemented market reforms alone, although it could certainly have been better," he felt frustrated his politicians hadn't done more, "we were also recovering from almost going into a great depression. I admit, I wish our bank would do more about the value of yen, but it is a complicated issue. When I think of how some other countries have it much worse, I'm still grateful overall to be in Japan."

"Did I say you didn't care at all? My apologies," L said, sounding bored and not very apologetic at all. "Perhaps the real problem is that you care too much about others. Your father and others work long hours, often not even showing up at home, in the name of taking care of you and others and to show what good little people they are, and in the process ended up actually hurting you. If perhaps he'd been a little more selfish, things would be better off. But if they were more selfish, then they'd be selfish, so there's no way to win, now is there?"

"I know your game is just to say the most pessimistic things you can think of," Light said, sounding amused rather than mad. "Kami, you're such a shit." He knows how the conversational beat 'should' have gone, with Light taking one side and L the other, but if they both know the other knows, then what's the point? So, just for the moment, he dumps the script in the trash and side-steps it entirely.

"Does Light-kun not have a retort?"

"I do. What do you think it was?" he again tip-toes around the script. Instead, he sits next to L and mimes L's posture, crouching on the bench.

"Light-kun is forcing me to play against myself, and is very cruel."

"So you can't think of anything I might retort?"

"Hm. Slippery slope fallacy."

"YOU KNEW." Light mock-punches him in the shoulder, and nearly bawls over laughing. "Fucking hell, you knew it was fallacious and you said it anyway? You fucker." Then he freezes and smooths his face over reflexively because he was a bit too loud and another student passing by is giving a shocked expression that they just heard Yagami Light swearing. Err. He straightens and starts sitting normally. "You know, you were fallacious the other day too."

"Oh? You noticed that? Light-kun is far too polite."

"Did I swear only in my head?" Light said, puzzled. "And I didn't right away, I was too struck by the emotional calculus to think about the logical," he hoped L wouldn't think less of him for that. "It's weird to me, coming from a culture that strongly values loyalty, that you would deliberately make the West look worse. If Japan really was too stubborn to stop without the bomb, then that would have made the West fully the 'good guys' in that situation. I, um, I decided to look up some of the things Japan did and it was a lot more fucked up than I ever realized," Light admitted. "We don't learn about Korean comfort women in school, or that even the Nazis were shocked by how we Japanese treated our prisoners. And I definitely never heard of the Nanjing Massacre. It was eye opening."

"Light-kun is very layered. Even when he appears unrestrained, he keeps a lot to himself," L mused. "And to think Light-kun worried he was shallow."

Light flushed. He wasn't sure he really deserved that flattery when he hadn't instantly made the deduction, and when he had, had felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of all of his own thoughts outpacing the speed of proper conversation and not matching its tune. "So, um, if I had called out the fallacy, how would you have responded? Surely you planned that far ahead."

"Have you considered that sometimes one can have the wrong reasoning, but the right conclusion? There was a strong incentive for them to use the bomb regardless. That things may have aligned to make them the 'good guys' is a convenience, in that case, and the black and whiteness the situation was paintable in entirely misleading."

Light sighed. "You really are cynical. And today's fallacy?"

L smiled. "Light-kun really is going to make me debate myself. How cruel. In any case, do intentions really matter if the end result is the same?" Huh. That worked for both conversations, if weakly. In fact for today it was still kind of a shit response. But in a sense, they were the same topic with the same goal for L: messing with Light.

Light laughed. He leaned and smiled. "You like it. And yes, I'd say intentions matter. For apologies, if absolutely nothing else."

"I've never seen the point of apologies," said the man who loved to give false ones. Why did he feel inexplicably fond even as he felt pained?

"Uh huh," said Light in a skeptical tone. "Tell me you don't socialize much without telling me you don't socialize much. Perhaps you could try asking Korea. Apparently, we never gave them a proper apology." That bothered Light quite a bit. He wondered what people in Korea must be thinking right now, if they suspected a Japanese Kira had tried to help them. Optimistic about change in their relations in the future? Angry and feeling powerless about being subject to some other party's whims? Both of those things at the same time, because people were complicated? The one comment he'd read from a Korean who knew Japanese was 'some of our South politicians are pretty corrupt too, I hope Kira yeets them into the abyss, fuck the chaebol families'. There was still so much about the world he didn't know!

"You should take a minute to say goodbye to your friends, which I know you have none of-"

"I do!" Light said aghast. "I'm not you, L. I can make friends with people who aren't perfectly on my level." It was just a bit lonely. He had, actually, met a math-focused student who seemed like he might be close, in the years ahead of him, but they'd been more interested in seeming intelligent than being friendly and they'd quickly rattled off definitions and terms he wasn't familiar with yet, and when asked to explain something just repeated their previous explanation. That conversation had sucked pretty bad. What was even worse was that they were supposed to be a teacher's assistant.

Plus, wasn't L his friend? Sort of?

"-then after head into my van full of candy right away," L continued as if uninterrupted very bluntly. Wow, he really phrased it just like that, huh?

"The call was just a scheme to kidnap me all along, huh." Light shook his head, amused. "Okay. Want me to pick you up and carry you around?" Light meant to just tease, but it's actually honest. "I'll carry you everywhere you want." He hopes L thinks he's exaggerating, because Light kind of wants a hole to open up, swallow him, and let him die. What is even this corniness coming out of his mouth? "On campus or to the van, I mean," he backpedals. "I could use the exercise. We'll tell everyone you lost a bet."

Was that a slight flush? L cleared his throat. "No thank you. I found it interesting you used the Ryuuga name again, considering he died."

"Oh, yeah," Light had actually forgotten about that, up until some of his annoying classmates started playing a new song non-stop in the halls. The song was really, really damn good. "Sayu was a bit beaten up about it. Lucky you, though! You got the name all to yourself now. You can add it to your identity theft list."

Light wasn't sorry, though. It recently came out that asshole had been sexually harassing people and worse. The only thing he was sorry about was writing that Ryuuga wrote a new great work before he died, because suddenly everyone was talking about what a shame it was he died and kept playing that fucking song everywhere, kept saying someone who made something so wonderful surely had to be innocent even though multiple women spoke out against him. He'd admitted to sleeping with a teenage fan, and no one did anything about it. Light felt kind of sick thinking about what if the guy had met Sayu. The weird troll move L had made about pretending to be him had been quite awhile ago at this point, and frankly, Light had killed a lot of other people that night he killed Ryuuga. A lot. He'd scheduled a huge burst of deaths to all happen at once, and in the insomniac impulse spree (Light had to grudgingly admit that maybe he was not totally mentally OK right now) he'd dropped his old rule about spending an hour researching a given person. Ryuuga almost hadn't even made the news, and outside of Japan he frankly hadn't at all.

"You have Matsuda convinced you're Kira now."

"...really?" Light said dryly, not sure why he was surprised. "I mean, yeah, if he'd dropped dead the day I'd met you, that'd say something, but the guy wasn't exactly innocent. If anything this should make me look better, because as a Kira I should have wanted to avoid touching the guy at all costs unless he killed someone in broad daylight."

"I'm a little frustrated," L professed. "I try to convince people you're Kira, and Matsuda finally agrees... but each and every single one of his reasons is completely and utterly wrong. I'm honestly torn." He looked like he had a headache.

"In my experience, humans rarely respond by actually changing their mind when you call them out on their fallacies and misconceptions," it's a partial apology of a sorts for before. "I can imagine you wanting to bean yourself to death on a wall from the stupidity," Light said with amusement. He has to stop himself from half-consciously trying to mirror L's posture again. Sympathetic mirroring is something humans do instinctively with someone they're feeling in-tune with, or who they empathize with a lot. "And I guess it must have freaked you out a bit when Ryuuga died."

"Light-kun is so sweet to think of my health. He continues to demonstrate his dark and horrible sense of humor that finds oblique threats and potential of my death funny."

"Sorry," he had to admit that was a little tasteless. Or a lot tasteless. He stifles a yawn and is surprised and delighted to see L stifle a yawn a second later - that meant he wasn't the only one fighting off his subconscious trying to mirror. "I'm honestly really surprised you're defending me against Matsuda. I thought you'd be quite happy to take coincidences and circumstantial evidence in order to troll me. To be honest, I can't picture Matsuda ever harming me, so I think you wasted your time."

(L thinks he knows why Light likes him now: Light just has terrible taste. Also, no, Light, don't trust cops not to hurt you, what the fuck. Stop being so damn innocent, you are literately soaked in blood.)

"You have made me a better person, and I offer you my sincerest hatred for that."

Light laughed.

"I wasn't joking."

Light laughed even harder.

"You are a gremlin, aren't you?" Light said when his laughter abated. "I wish you would stick around to annoy me every single day of my life." That was a weird and masochistic sounding wish, but it was still true for some reason. "It makes things very lively," he defends against entirely unspoken and perhaps not even thought accusations.

But L didn't seem to be in a humorous mood, and if anything, the word 'lively' made him sad.

"Light, I profess myself concerned," L said in a monotone. "I have you under watch, and my main suspect for who hurt you under watch, and yet somehow, you still found yourself hurt. Or kissed, but if it's not consensual that's still a form of hurt."

Shit. The scarf and re-bandaged hand. With all the chaos of the day, he'd not had the opportunity to apply makeup to hide it instead of conspicuously wearing the scarf again, and despite wearing the damn thing it had started to fall into the background of his sleep deprived mind.

"It's not a big deal," Light hedges, aware L won't buy this but also aware if L thinks he's 'won' that he won't feel the urge to rip the scarf off, confident that he's deduced what is underneath. "I'd rather talk about something more interesting, like, um, your opinions on the Middle East or South America. To be honest," he looks straight at Ryuk, knowing that if he's going to go under observation this might be his best opportunity for double-talk. "I kind of deserved it. You know I can be kind of a tease and don't mean any harm by it."

Ryuk looks the slightest bit mollified, but not very much. "No harm. Sure. I'm sure you'd mourn very much if the shinigami all killed themselves by accident, saving humanity's hide for you. Even with your apologies for manipulation, you're manipulative."

"Light, being hurt by someone you trust is a cruel and unusual punishment," L argued, distracting him from responding to Ryuk. "It's not something anyone deserves. Even Kira."

"Someone gave me this and I thought you might like it," Light said, and offered L the brownie, trying to change subject because he didn't think immediately agreeing with L would help him at all, nor could he overtly disagree with L. It wasn't like he'd expect Ryuk to cave in to peer pressure.

L stared at it, arching a single eyebrow. "Light, that's a weed brownie."

Light drops it as if burned. "I swear I didn't know." Oh god what would his father think?!

"Relax, I don't arrest people for drugs," L lied. Light knew L lied, because he'd looked up some of his cases, and one was about several million dollar drug schemes. "As it happens, I also got you a gift, though I didn't bring it here. A laptop."

"Really?" Light perked up, then grew suspicious. It would have spyware on it, naturally. L wanted to observe him, but he also had to know Light would know that, so... Hm, he could just ask, couldn't he? "I take it if I tried to uninstall the spyware in a naive way, it would re-install itself or pretend to be un-installed? Or turn out to have some kind of hack or backdoor at the hardware chip level?"

"Something like that."

"Am I allowed to take it apart or mess with the OS and potentially brick it?" Light said hesitantly. The obvious easy if expensive solution was to replace all the pieces, but, it was also a gift, so that felt, well, rude.

"Of course. It is a gift, Light-kun. I know what smart teenagers are like, and I have plenty of money."

"That's one of the most thoughtful gifts anyone has ever come up with for me," Light said. "Thank you."

"A computer full of spyware is a most thoughtful gift for you?" L is being deliberately obtuse.

"You knew I'd guess right away and want to take it apart as a puzzle. So, yes," Light retorted. "Do all your attempts to annoy people always backfire?"

"Only on Light-kun, it seems," L sounded fond in spite of himself. "But you've changed the subject. While I know I am fascinating," this almost sounds sarcastic, "if you don't want to go say your goodbyes and you won't discuss the case, then it's time to leave."

He has to think for a moment. If he's about to be put under permanent observation, he really needs to settle things with Ryuk a bit better. "It doesn't really have relevance to the case, though I'm sure you'll disagree, but," he looks to Ryuk again. "I am sorry that I can be an irritation. I guess it's just my nature to test boundaries and see what I can get away with, even though I know I shouldn't and it's going to get me hurt. I guess I just don't really care about that part. I'm sure that serving justice must feel very satisfying." Trying to make the being that choked you like you better is incredibly awkward and humiliating.

"Nah, not really, no," Ryuk laughs. "That's your deal, Light-o, not mine. Nice try, though."

For some reason, L looks rather grim. "Light-kun is suici-"

Light clamps a hand over L's mouth, painfully aware of Ryuk there, laughing at them both.

"What?" How on earth did he come to that conclusion. "I didn't say I hurt myself!" Although... he could see how L may have come to that conclusion. And arguing with it might not even be Light's best interest. Damn it. "I have plans for the future."

"Many suicidal people have plans for the future," L said, moving Light's hand away. "If Light-kun is Kira, then Light-kun is showing blatant disregard for any and all harm I might do to him based on following my advice so closely it may soon become apparent it would be highly unlikely for anyone else to be First Kira. Or did you not mean your question about the Middle East? If Light-kun is not Kira, as he claims, then he is also showing reckless disregard for seeming like Kira and has displayed he doesn't think it matters if he was executed as an innocent, because he feels he is powerless to change much about society. Regardless of which it is, Light both likes and dislikes Kira and wishes he had the power to make things better. Light-kun is also likely not stupid, so that explanation for the recklessness must be thrown out. Hence a simple conclusion: Light has stopped caring that much about whether he lives, perhaps having set up more deaths to occur after his own." L paused, eying the scarf and likely thinking of supernatural possibilities around impossible harm occurring, which wasn't what Light wanted but none of his options were good. "But if Light-kun says he didn't hurt himself, I will believe him and take it as a measure of his innocence if he should suddenly die to Kira. To be honest, I didn't really think Light hurt himself, but I would appreciate confirmation since you brought the idea up yourself." Ryuk stopped laughing. L may have just accidentally saved Light's life. Or perhaps not so accidentally, L was pretty sharp.

"That's a lot of If's." Now Light was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Did he... want to die to Ryuk? Not so soon! Why did L have to be so damn observant? "It wasn't me."

L isn't stupid.

He's intimately aware of how Light likes to make periodic eye contact when he's actively invested in a conversation and not zoning out into thought, or gaze into eyes at strangely intimate moments. He probably shouldn't feel disappointed by his final conclusion that Light does in fact fall toward neurotypicality if perhaps not quite perfectly, but he does, just like he felt disappointed Light wasn't a petty childish murderous mirror of L in every way but something sweeter, like a poisoned apple offered by a witch. He'd thought maybe he was the 'feminine' style of autism, the kind that masquerades as ultra sociable and memorizes every social script and so tends to go totally undiagnosed. But if he is, he masquerades too well even for L. (Of course, the idea autistic people never make eye contact or that only autistic people avoid it is actually a myth in and of itself.)

He knows, instantly, that Light isn't looking at him at all during his disturbing little speech that 'has no relevance to the case' and there's a deliberateness to this, because Light, even if just out of observational sharpness, outright admitted before he pays a tiny bit of attention to how much eye-contact everyone makes.

The speech is layered in meaning, the 'abuse victim' meaning, the 'Kira case' meaning, but he doesn't know what to make of the lack of eye contact which says to him there might be a third meaning, which would make this one of Light's more complicated verbal spars for all on the surface it seems straightforward. No, four, since there's also the 'sorry if I trampled on your boundaries L' meaning.

He also noticed the change in eye contact when Light suggested earlier that he 'deserved it', which was a very disturbing comment to make. L was normally numb to such things, but there's enough honesty there that it does, because Light is an intelligent person and L had hoped (though he would not call it a belief) that a sufficiently intelligent person wouldn't lie to themselves like that and make justifications for their abuser. It was clear he was very wrong about that, although Light could be a liar so it was hard to tell he did have a tendency to be weirdly sincere in his own way, if hidden under a first layer of meaning.

There has been something biting at L for some time, which is that Light is far, far too casual with someone who might kill him. He doesn't think it's just smittenness, or that Light is stupid or completely naive, or just got over-confident from trying to egg L on to punish him and L not taking the bait. The way Light is actively digging for information, not caring if his kill patterns will implicate him, tells him two things.

Possibility One:

L can hurt Light as much as L wants, and Light will never, ever complain. He'll just take it. Either because he's feeling guilty about Kira, or because he's harboring under the bizarre belief that it is Light and not L that is the annoying one between the two of them or that if he lets it happen he'll be more liked.

Possibility Two, which is not mutually exclusive with One:

Light doesn't intend to live through this at all. He's moved toward the idea of putting into place systemic changes, which won't require Kira long-term at all if they work correctly. And of course, Light outright said he didn't value his own life that much. It had been hard at the time to know how seriously to take it, because teenagers can be so melodramatic and exclaim 'kill me' with mild provocation, but now it seemed pretty clear it was actually very serious. Light was having a slow motion break down, and everyone else in the whole world was in the wreckage.

And L hates that. He doesn't want this to end with his suspect killing himself before he has any actual concrete evidence, before he has the murder weapon though he increasingly fears there might not be one. And he has to admit, the way Light grew fond instead of irritated at the laptop 'trick'... in that moment, L had thought to himself that he really wanted to keep him. Light keeps looking at L like he adores him, like L is lovable, and it's freaking L out. Light was going to figure out, any time now, that L was one of those systemic problems that shouldn't exist in Kira's perfect world, and it was going to end badly. But the urge to keep him was there, nonetheless.

The problem, of course, is that keeping him might get L himself killed at this point, even if Light is the tamest tiger in the world the dogs of governments are on the loose sniffing after them. He really, really shouldn't. But he wants to.

If he could just get the damn murder weapon, if he had just a clue what it was beyond the strangeness of Beyond Birthday and his eyes and a weird aborted talk to a mysterious 'Rem', everything would be so much simpler. He really hopes it isn't Light himself or some invisible being.

...speaking of, what is Light staring at? He thought it was just thin air, a way of making a dramatic point (an aversion of eyes can be stereotyped as lying, even if that's not how it really works, so perhaps there was a secret message that Light didn't mean a word he said, that he didn't think he deserved it at all), but maybe it's not. Or maybe there were really five different meanings.

It could be a shinigami. Is Light being threatened? Maybe there's a different reason Light doesn't expect to live.

With that thought, he's careful about how he phrases his verbal attack. It wouldn't do to get Light killed by jumping to wrong conclusions, after all.

"It wasn't me," is Light's response to it, and L never truly thought otherwise. But now he wonders...

L gently brushes his hand up to Light's neck, but Light jerks away. If L actually sees the marks, or even just feels them up, he's going to know it wasn't a young woman or even a human being who made them. The hands would be too big. Light is pretty screwed, honestly, and it's all Ryuk's fault.

"Then I'd think you'd be grateful to go under greater observation. By the way, if I do die today, then the task force probably will actually prosecute this time and you won't be able to wiggle out of it."

Light turns to mock-glare at this obvious statement, which he is sure at this point was just teasing, but stops in abject horror when he sees a rather familiar blonde figure heading toward them. L too stills, Light's terror unmistakeable. It should be safe since she has no reason to look twice at the other man, unless... "By the way, your name wouldn't happen to be something incredibly stupid, like literately the letter L, would it?"

The way L freezes unpleasantly for a second, unable to force himself to give a 'good' reaction quickly enough with no preparation, Light has his answer.

"Fucking hell, you absolute lemming." Light empties his book bag and shoves it straight over L's moronic head. "You go out when there is someone who kills with merely a face and you fucking have the audacity to blame me if you die when you can't even cover your fucking face?" He has never sweared this much in his entire life.

"Light-kun is very angry," comes L's muffled, surprised voice. Why was this a surprise, he literately asked him not to do this. What feels like ages ago, but still.

"You are wearing the Bag of Shame now, shut up."

L was actually a bit astounded Second Kira decided to come over like this despite the fact he'd hoped she'd make a move. Misa Amane knew she was being watched and surely had been warned that any meeting would be bad for First Kira, and while she hadn't immediately caved under it, it seemed today she'd had enough and slipped her watchers to go stalk Light. He could only assume the supposed shinigami (Rem?) had helped her evade any watchers. As L had decided to bring them both in today, if she'd waited even a little longer she would have lost all opportunity to meet with Light again.

But this was fine. They'd finished processing all the evidence they needed to have her arrested, so that would happen today. Having her try to meet up with Light was just a nice little bonus proving they were connected.

He does feel a flicker of unease. It's hard to see through the bag and while he doesn't really think she'd do anything in public, he doesn't like the idea of leaving her alone with Light in any capacity.

He doesn't have much of a clue what the hell happened to Light, and that scares him. It scares him that it scares him. He had tried to come in numb and cold and calculating, but the moment he'd seen the scarf was there again, some of his sense of calm had slipped away.

Did Misa order this 'Rem' to go and hurt him? That made absolutely no sense, yet deranged people rarely did. Perhaps Light had refused to meet up with her, and she'd made clear there would be consequences for that.

Misa Amane skips over audibly. "I just couldn't wait so long to see my darling Light again! I tried to find you before but somehow always kept missing you," She stops, perhaps looking over them with confusion. "...why is he wearing a bag over his head?"

"I lost a bet," said L at the same time Light said: "He's an idiot."

Misa giggles. "You're so funny, Light. I didn't know you were such a tease with your friends!"

You know absolutely nothing about me, Light thought.

"Anyway, Misa realized the phone she wanted to give Light somehow ended up back on her person, so here you go!" That's because I reverse-pickpocketed you and gave it back.

"I don't want it."

"Light! It's not kind to play with a girl's feelings. You don't know what I'll do if I have to get Light's attention some other way!" He could imagine. More Kira tapes, more murders. "Besides, I really need to talk to you alone for a second," she says more quietly.

"...fine." Light grudgingly takes the pink horror. He could always chuck it in a bush somewhere later. Or down a sewer, that would be more effective and ensure it was not returned.

L is tilting his head verrryyy curiously, but thankfully cannot see much of anything out of that stupid bag. He doesn't even know what Amane looks like right now, which is just Light's luck. Maybe they can still both get out of this.

They move quite some distance away but still barely within eyesight of L, so Light can immediately tell if L takes that stupid bag off his head like the lemming he is.

"Your name is doing something funny, it keeps flickering," Misa told him immediately.

What? Ryuk certainly hadn't told him that.

"Light, they over-heard me say 'Rem'," Misa confesses, continuing before he could talk. "They bugged my house, too! It's driving me crazy."

Light groans. "That's not great, but it's not the worst, either. They clearly plan to arrest you soon, probably as soon as you leave here today. L may have just wanted us to meet up. Do you realize you appearing has potentially ruined my life and your own? I warned you. They've got to have some kind of other evidence on you."

Misa pouts. "If you're not going to be helpful, how about this? Can we make use of the fact Kira can control people in some way? We could say he threatened me into helping with the tapes, seemed to control a criminal to do it and I got scared, make 'Kira' appear in person, and frame someone believable like a corrupt cop or something."

"That's... actually very clever," Light said, stunned. Also, fuck, he felt a flicker of attraction right then. He did *not* want to feel attraction to Misa. Apparently, competence and cleverness was what he was into. For his own sanity, he needed to believe she was stupid, because he didn't want to be attracted to her. At all. This... this was probably just one of those broken clocks can be right twice a day thing. Even an average person has a bright idea once in awhile to counter out all the stupid ones. "Good idea, Misa."

She kisses him, and he hates himself for finding some part of him is actually responding this time.

Misa preens. "You like it when someone is clever, do you?" Why couldn't she have been good at reading people when he wanted her to take a hint and get lost? "You'll like what I did with the burner phones, then. I had them paid for in cash by another person and brought to me. So there's no reason for them to suspect I have one."

"That guy over there was an investigator," Light said bluntly. "Honestly, all you needed was to hang tight, and Kira kills would have continued and they'd have no concrete evidence on you at all beyond a tendency to talk to imaginary friends." Actually, would that be true? Even with a fingerprint, Misa's friend likely had no record, so did they have something else to point in Misa's direction? "You coming here was one of the worst moves you could make."

"Oh! They're watching you really closely too."

"Yes, Misa, I told you this."

"But you and him seemed so close."

"We don't have a lot of time," he eyed L standing up and seeming to debate trying to maneuver with a bag on his head, before moving quite shamelessly and nearly knocking into someone. "Rem, since Ryuk is being kind of a piss about it-" "Hey!" "-I'd like you to do a task for me to help keep Misa and the rest of humanity safe. I need to threaten the Chinese government into cooperating with Kira by moving toward a full democracy. If they think a literal supernatural being is responsible, and not a human, and that they can still retain power by following the carrot, they won't think any more about potentially bombing Japan or assassinating Misa or anything like that. Humans have the capacity to wipe themselves out, and China starting a war because Kira's existence has made them trigger-happy is one of those things. A nuclear world war that killed off all humans would end up killing the shinigami too." Actually it wouldn't necessarily be nuclear, at least to start with, conventional bombs would kill a human just fine after all, but the shinigami didn't need to know that.

"I see," Rem said. "I will do as you say. Are you absolutely certain this is endangering Misa's life?"

"No, it's just a possibility, so maybe you won't turn into sand. In fact, if you end up not having to kill anyone, you probably won't. But even a 1% possibility of extinction is too dire to be ignored. In return, I'll do everything I can to protect Misa." As much as it hurt to say that.

L has gotten close enough Light no longer feels safe talking, though he's still in the distance. He thinks they've gotten all the most important pieces established, so they're probably safe enough.

Then soon L's own phone rings, and he takes it with two fingers to answer, still with a bag over his head. "...yes. Thank you."

'Leave now', he mouths at Misa. She does not get the fucking hint.

"Oh my!" says a passerby. "Is that Amane Misa?!"

Fuck.

Her manager stomped by, looking furious. "You're going to be late! Misa, hurry up and go to the studio!"

Light takes the opportunity to walk over to a grate, holding the phone. But right as he drops it, it is swiped out from the air.

"Hey!" 

"Oooh, look, a free phone," Ryuuzaki says shamelessly. "Light-kun didn't want this, so it's mine now."

"Ugh. Whatever." L probably just wanted his fingerprints on it as proof he and Misa had ever met, since this area wasn't being videotaped. Or maybe it was, Light didn't know.

"This may be good news or bad," Ryuuzaki catches his attention. "But Misa Amane is about to get arrested as a suspect for Second Kira, the official story being for drugs."

Light is slightly surprised, but not that surprised. "Great!" It isn't hard to find enthusiasm even if this does hurt him. Also, wow, L didn't even bother to keep up that lie for one day, did he? "Can I ask what the evidence was?"

"Imagine this. You are Kira. You get the bright idea to have someone else do all the handling of the tapes, however, you still want to watch them so you can ensure they are what your friend says they are. So you stand far back in the same room. Answer me this: can your DNA still get on the tapes, even though you never handled them?"

Light paused. "Skin flakes? Humans shed constantly." Damn. The situation was far worse than Light thought.

"Correct. From there, the problem was the DNA not being on any criminal record. However... the rise of DNA testing companies has given other options. Misa Amane is a natural blonde to parents that are not themselves blonde, a genetic mutant or a result of rare recessives. When she was born, her father naturally wanted to file for a paternity test, though he had to wait a few years before it became cheaper and more reliable, creating a source of tension in her family and causing her darker haired sister to be favored."

Light was a mixture of surprised and thrilled: he could appreciate a good deduction as much as the next person.

"She was Light-kun's assaulter and stalker, was she not?" L is eying his scarf again.

Light frowns and folds his arms, ready to jump back if L makes a lunge for it. He doesn't want to prosecute since that'd get him humiliated (most people wouldn't give a shit a girl had forced a kiss on him), likely completely ruin his future potential to get any kind of job with the police, if not killed outright by Rem. "You've already made your conclusion." He knows he's being too salty, but there's something about taking the mask off that makes it really hard to put it back on. Plus, he wouldn't put it past Misa to have actually stalked him without his awareness at some point (in fact, he's very confident she has - someone like her wouldn't stop at illegally buying his private info, she'd stalk him to find out if he appeared to have any girlfriends and then quietly kill them so she could appear to 'rescue' him from the tragedy of their loss), and then they would have honed in on her as a suspect even without the DNA just from noticing her stalking on camera. "I'm not going to cooperate on something that will just embarrass me and accomplish nothing else. You're barking up the wrong tree."

"We'll see. In order to prevent chaos, we've decided not to publicize our capture. We told her agent she's under arrest for possession of drugs. There was ample additional evidence: her cat's hair matched the tape on the second Kira's video cassette. And traces of make-up powder and clothing fibers. And we have video evidence of her being in your vicinity. This is not the first time she's been on your campus."

Seriously? He thought she'd had a friend make the whole tape in a different location from her own place, which would make the skin flake mistake even more understandable because most humans wouldn't think about that and to catch just a couple or a single flake had to mean some pretty pricey equipment, as older equipment didn't have that level of sensitivity. That was just... eh. Well, at least he won't have to deal with her, even if she tattles and gets him the death penalty or prison for life at least he won't be in the same cell. What a relief. Wait. "By arrested, do you mean brought to the same building you want me to live in?" Light said, not even trying to hide his unhappiness.

"Yes. But don't worry: you will be on completely different floors." L moves closer, and stands straight for once, the combination of which is a bit disconcerting. Then he gets right up inches from Light's face, probably just to test boundaries and watch him involuntarily flush. "If it's a concern, know I won't let her rape you. I do have lines even I don't cross."

Light's face twisted, torn between thanking him for a bare minimum of human decency and wanting to tell him to go fuck himself.

"Light-kun really needs to stop thinking of me as a nice person he can trust," L cautions. "I don't seek out cruel and unusual punishment, such as being hurt by someone you consider a friend, for its own sake. But I won't prevent it either if that's where this ends up. Things will go easier for Light-kun if he confesses now rather than shortly later when I don't need it to win the case."

Light flips him off and walks off back toward the college. Ryuk is laughing, laughing, laughing.

L, of course, doesn't take a hint and starts to follow him, so Light stops.

"There's something I've been wondering. Alive people don't usually give up their names to other people. They usually need them for legal purposes, if absolutely nothing else."

"Perhaps I merely pretended to be other detectives from the beginning," L said shamelessly. "Rather than stealing the names."

"But you're not denying it. So is identity theft your thing or what? Speaking of, I've lately wondered: are you committing tax evasion?" He can't imagine L is signing his bills 'L'. Does the man pay a dime in taxes to anywhere?

"It was a special occasion," L is lying shamelessly, he's sure of it. "Forgive me for forgetting double meanings for a moment. It's interesting, though, I said the same thing to the task force, and it went right over their heads."

L is very clearly threatening that Light is not the only person who can casually confess to murder and get away with it. This should leave Light really frightened, or at least even more mad than he already was, but oddly enough he feels the urge to step closer and laugh, feeling thrilled at being mirrored even if it is in such a terrible fashion.

"I do occasionally donate to charity, it's not like I need the wealth," L admits, breaking from his little troll routine for a moment. Doing detective work for cases with a million in damages or more, the commissions must be pretty nice.

"With a lot of cash, you could go into lobbying to make a genuine difference. Many politicians can be bought."

"We've already established I won't touch politics. Plus, a politician that can be bought probably isn't the best politician to have in the first place."

"I could do that for you, and a politician on your side may be better than no politician at all. We've already established I can handle a bit of torture," he jokes.

It's quiet, and a nice moment of victory as L seems to actually consider what Light would have to offer in a hypothetical partnership rather than turn him down immediately. Light decides to not let the other bit go so easily, though.

"One little problem with that, of course. After bragging about murder, or something you knew I'd interpret as murder, can you really still say you don't want to be Kira or aren't Kira?" Light teases him, leaning very close so he can watch the smugness change to uncertainty. He whispers in his ear, "I don't believe you," then leans away.

L stares, transfixed. Light guesses he's probably thinking to himself right now that he should be feeling more mad that Light was trying to mute the glory of L's victory and gloating.

Alas, Light really does want to leave while L is distracted with his own thoughts, so it's time for mischief. Light is feeling very unhappy, but he still intends to enjoy what may be his last day of freedom. But it won't be as fun if L is following him around everywhere like a damn stalker.

"Don't forget your bag of shame," Light says mischievously, and dumps the bag back over L's head with a muffled protest and makes a run for it.

Light moves away fairly rapidly from L to get around the corner, then breaks into an outright run. He is just so sick of that guy right now, even if his last line made him feel a little better.

"Light-kun!" He nearly walks into the familiar face of Takada, a student senior to him and who had talked about communism the other day. He keeps walking and she moves alongside him, and Light takes advantage of a big crowd. "How are you? You don't look so great. Well, better than when you were sporting a giant bruise on your face and huge bandages on your hand, but still. The scarf in good weather and the new, but smaller set of bandages on your hand isn't exactly that much less provocative. Is everything going on alright?" He wonders if she suspects him to be a victim of bullying.

"Not so much, Takada-san." He glances behind him and then ducks into an empty classroom. "This might be my last day here." And he hadn't even been in college that long!

"I'm sorry to hear that. It isn't like you to drop out."

He laughed. "It really isn't." He feels the strong urge to vent. Should he? Is that safe? Anyone in his position would be frustrated, it isn't criminal in and of its own right to be vexed by the situation. But he'd rather she not spread the information that he's a suspect around.

"You're being pressured to do it," she concluded easily, and pursed her lips.

"Yes," he affirmed, staring at the window in case someone peeped at them. "So how are you? You're graduating shortly and going into the media like your parents, right? This Second Kira nonsense about going after the media didn't scare you off?"

"That was the original plan, though lately I've been thinking of going into politics. For the record, I'm the opposite of frightened, but I really think we should be talking about you instead," she said with concern.

"Actually, since I have little time here, I'd like to talk politics." Light knows he's not qualified to play dictator to all of humanity for eternity, much less write a script for the shinigami to follow to do it for him, but the rewards are... just too tempting, and the downsides of doing nothing with the cart he's already set in motion potentially too extreme. He could use a little help sounding things out from a senior, even if he ultimately ends up disagreeing with her on everything.

"If you're sure. Actually, there's another person who really wanted to meet you after he heard about our discussion, he says he knows you!"

"Really?"

She leads him straight to a familiar dark haired young man the same age as Light.

"Yamamoto?" Light said in shock.

"Hey, Light. Sorry about not sending you a New Years Card. I've been thinking and I've decided to change my mind about only sending it to ladies." Yamamoto winked. "So, you're against communism and anarchy, did I get that right?"

Light is flustered. What on earth is going on? "It's more complicated than that. I'm not a big fan, no, but I've been thinking about it and I think 'communism' as a term actually refers to multiple things and has actually shifted in meaning over time, though both meanings have existed together for a long time."

Yamamoto should not be here. His grades aren't good enough. They were decent, but Light distinctly remembers a time where he helped Yamamoto with his homework. So why is he here? And better yet, why does he seem vaguely flirty?

"You didn't mention the shift over time before," Takada noted.

The real question is, who does Yamamoto work for? There's a simple way to find out.

"If you look at historical trends, far left and communist social groups tended to be pretty supportive of the Soviet Union at first, even though Lenin's writings weren't exactly a secret and you could tell very very obviously that it wasn't some sort of anarcho-communist vision with all the workers collectively direct voting. But if you look at online communities of young people who have been briefly exposed to the idea today, they tend to say things like 'Russia and China were never real examples of communism'. There are a lot of factors that go into this shift, for instance, the United States and its anti-communist crusade," he watches Yamamoto carefully. Not a blink. "I had thought that their over the top hysteria over communism and anything 'far-left' had faded to something more reasonable in the modern day, but I was looking up some things they've done recently and they're still pretty willing to commit coups and the like," still no reaction. Okay, who else could it be? Who is geopolitically next door to Japan? China, but also... "But Australia illustrates the shift best." That got a jolt. Got you!

"How so?" Yamamoto asked.

"The Communist Party of Australia was one of the very first to condemn the Soviet Union. 1968 Prague Spring sparked them to write something that would be uncontroversial today in far-left groups, to quote their paper the Tribune: 'We support socialist democracy and national liberation', but in that year, as far as I'm aware, they were the only Western Communist party to repudiate the Soviet Union at all! Clearly, if some form of anarcho-communism was supposed to be the 'real' communism all along, many actual communists didn't get the memo until the alternative version became too politically inconvenient," Light said dryly. "Oh, and there's another thing." This part was just for Takada. "In the Russian Revolution, there were actually at least three factions. The communist Reds, the traditionalist Whites, and the Greens who didn't have the articulation the other two did because they were mostly poor farmers who sympathized mostly with the Socialist Revolutionary Party. It was the Greens and socialists who wanted land re-distribution. They didn't want a shared land system of collective ownership, they wanted an equitable share of land system."

"It was even more complex than that," Takada argued. "You had the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, the latter of whom thought a more capitalist period of development was necessary and favored nonviolence and full democracy. But I see your point. Our not too articulate friend from yesterday operated very simply, 'people and workers should have more control'. They saw 'the state' as opposed to that. That led them to calling themselves an anarcho-communist. But if we think about what the originals actually thought, then it would almost certainly be some form of group control, not re-distribution to individuals or small farm families. Yet, I have a hard time imagining anyone on the left I've talked to having a negative reaction to taking from the rich to give to the poor. If the end vision is worker control and democracy, then having farmers equally partition the land while workers in factories have group ownership isn't totally incompatible at all, as we can imagine those groups voting for those things and different land use policy winning out in rural versus urban areas. More broadly, perhaps modern audiences sympathetic to communist thought do tend to have more appetite for some sort of hybrid system from the get-go even if they don't often articulate it that way on online forums. Although, I do have to note most people on the left I've talked to call themselves socialists and aren't actual communists in the first place, so it's not like I have a wide pool to consider here." She grew lost in thought for a moment. "Not that I have much experience talking to people of any orientation, mind. I've recently been trying to get out of my 'Ice Queen' reputation and shell. College is meant to be about encountering a variety of experiences, after all, and neither reporting nor politics are jobs suited to someone who never talks to others."

"So," Yamamoto was looking really confused now. "You... don't support communism. Right?"

"No," Light said, which was an over-simplification, but exactly the message he wanted this little puppet to take back. To be honest, Light didn't have a firm economic policy at the moment, though he did have some ideas which leaned strongly anti-monopolistic he wouldn't feel comfortable even with his intellect trying to draft up a policy that was meant to apply to the entire world in one week when he hadn't even completed college yet, which was kind of a problem if he was supposed to tell literal gods how to play God and might not have a lot of time to do it before they got annoyed and killed him, or someone else assassinated him. For all he knew, the shinigami king had the ability to nullify all death note paper on Earth into no longer working or something, or to track each piece.

He idly wondered what L had thought about the conversation the other day.

Fuck, did Light actually have to live?

He'd felt so oddly euphoric and free when he finally let go of the idea of living past all this, and the thought of having to fight to live longer now gave him a weird feeling of dread and unhappiness. Ironically, the thought of living made him feel less lively.

"I'm glad. I really wouldn't want to debate you, Light. Let's just all agree to get along, right?" That... just made Light sad for some inexplicable reason.

"...Hai," Light agreed in a polite tone without really agreeing, a 'let us stop talking now' agreement, and everyone there knew it and accepted it. That was just how these things went. "Sorry if I alarmed you. I'm just curious about everything."

"Oh, I know you are Light!"

Friends, he reflected, weren't supposed to make you miserable merely by showing up. But Light had already been miserable, so he supposed it didn't matter.

L's thoughts yesterday:

This man is very obviously high on drugs, and yet Light and Takada are taking him completely seriously. A reflection of their sheltered middle class upbringing, most likely. Their arguing also revealed the two of them, while good test takers, clearly hadn't had all the good habits and notions that college was meant to impart beaten into them yet. Rule number one of a thesis or math proof is to define your terms first, not in the middle or end of your argument.

He was reminded of Light's completely confident wrongness that there was no way the FBI would be in Japan, despite having clearly done no real research on the subject, perhaps because he knew the F stood for 'Federal' and thus logically shouldn't be on foreign soil in a universe of rational actors who kept to consistent labeling schemes. Ah, how L did not miss being 18. Although, he had actually learned the hard way not to behave like that well before then.

"The Native Americans would share their land with each other, they're a successful example of communal living-" the anarchist argued.

L had to interrupt, even though he had planned to stay completely quiet. It wouldn't affect the argument too much, just clear up potential misinformation. "The Native Americans weren't a monolith, they had greater diversity of societial organizations than Europe and Japan combined. They also weren't anarchists to my awareness, though I am not an expert on every single one of their societies. Like I said, there were quite a few of them. Some were monarchies, some were slave owning, some rebuffed slave ownership and excess consumption but had money, some had money only for rituals like weddings or trade with strangers."

"But some of them lived communal-like, right? And their chiefs didn't have the same authority of kings, usually, so it, like, demonstrates there are more possibilities than The Man would have you believe 'n shit, dawg."

"So... you do at least admit nations need laws, right?" Light said uneasily.

"Well... I'm not so sure about this idea of 'nations'."

"Societies, then. Societies need laws. Right? Right?" Light looked so very pained, it almost made up for L's boredom. Should he help out? Hm, no. 

"What's to stop someone from gaining power as a dictator and imposing laws that favor themselves in your hypothetical 'anarchy'?" Takada stated.

"Well, groups should decide things instead of the state, and neighbors would stop each other and help each other out and stuff, y'know."

"Okay, you can't possibly mean mob rule, so, I think I see what you mean." There was no deep meaning, Light. The man was high off his rocker and his pupils were blown wide. He'd probably taken drugs shortly before talking with them as he'd seemed more coherent at the start of the discussion. "You advocate for some kind of direct democracy system with local imposed laws and a volunteer system for the army rather than a standing state army. That would have some pros and cons to it, modern militaries benefit a lot from experience and from the cohesion of seeing themselves as one nation, but I suppose that cohesion of one nation could be swapped for a different cohesion as seeing oneself as part of a broader society... perhaps via some sort of religion or humanist philosophy?" Light lapsed into musing aloud.

"Uhh... Maybe, man. I don't like the idea of armies in general."

Light twitched. "I see, so a sortition democracy or a direct democracy, either would be equally acceptable?"

That's not what that 'maybe' meant, Light. Takada was also restraining a laugh.

L knew you were supposed to iron-man your opponent in arguments if you wanted to come to a true understanding of things, but there was a certain point where this became ridiculous... He also wondered if Light had actually read Marx and Engels at any point or if that was just on Light's to-do list, but was too bored and apathetic to ask. He was pretty sure China did do land reform by redistribution to households after 1978, but definitely didn't care to get into a debate about 'when it became even less or more like real communism', and, again, frankly did not care.

"-while I suppose a direct democracy has some organizational and logistical cons in comparison, it does negate the problem a raffle could get an unrepresentative sample by random chance-" Light droned on.

He wondered if his macaroons ordered from France had arrived yet, or if there was any chance France would sabotage his sweets out of sheer spite... though if they managed to track his sweets and associate them with L he'd be in trouble regardless.

"Well, he needs to work on his skills, but I'm glad someone was willing to debate me."

...That wasn't a real debate at the end, Light. You were arguing mostly with yourself.

God, L needed to kidnap him.

Tomorrow, he'd lure him in a van full of candy tomorrow or the day after. The candy wasn't a lure, it was for L, not Light, Light wasn't allowed to have any. L was the lure. He'd ask nicely and Light would be too polite to say anything but yes.

L's thoughts today:

Fuck. Light was out of my sight for five seconds, how did he squirm away so fast?

Also, he had no macaroons or petit fours, which was clearly a sign he needed to fear the absolute worst.

(Watari told him he was being melodramatic and perhaps suffering from low blood sugar.)

Light had to admit, he'd been thinking of the United States (Japan was one of their biggest creditors, would they really want to mess with that, even over Kira...?) and China a lot lately, but Australia? That country had totally slipped his mind. That was clearly a mistake of Light's.

New question: was this voluntary by bribery, or was Yamamoto being coerced? He shouldn't give away that he knew he was being watched, but, a hint would be worth it considering they had been friends - if barely - and this situation was Light's fault. "Are you having any problems with bullies, Yamamoto? You know you can trust me."

"Bullies?" Yamamoto gapes at him. "No way, Light. I might not be as athletic as you, but this is college. No thug is going around hanging people up by their underwear and throwing them in a locker. I think I should be asking you that - you look the worst I've ever seen you!" Light glared at him, more so that he wouldn't have to bother talking rather than real annoyance, and Yamamoto back-pedaled, "Not that you don't still look better than the vast majority of people here, Light. But, while we're talking politics, how do you feel about Kira?"

"I'm a firm supporter," Takada said.

"I'm neutral but sympathize with some of what they've done and disagree with others," Light said. It was even kinda true.

"How would you feel about a fun project? Craft a list of targets and behaviors you'd engage in, if you could somehow talk to Kira or be a Kira." Ah. So not here for assassination, but baiting the bull. That was a relief.

"That sounds quite interesting, if maybe a bit heretical," Takada said, which dismayed Light.

"I think if Kira really wanted to be worshiped as a God and tolerate no critique, they'd say so themselves," Light disagreed firmly. "I think the Second Kira situation proved that pretty well."

"Oh, please," Takada dismissed. "We all know the response had the hands of the government or L all over it. The chances the real Kira got anywhere close to crafting that messaging is abysmally low. It may be that the real Kira needs help getting power - political power. I intend to fix that."

Light watched Yamamoto's face carefully. If he'd been in Yamamoto's position, he'd have to admit he'd suspect Takada right now far more than Light. It was an unexpected gift, but it made him uncomfortable.

"So, the list?" Yamamoto said, clearly struggling a bit with this conversation.

"Sounds fun," Light agreed. "You have my email. I'm sure we'll see each other around later," Takada looked a little startled, "but I'm going to be pretty busy so don't be bothered too much if I don't reply. In the meantime, speaking of pretty people, Takada and I are going to spend a few moments to talk alone together." He walks toward a currently unused classroom, but first turns his head to wink at Takada. "Alright?"

Her gaze is sharp and suspicious, but she nods.

"Ooh, you still have all the ladies climbing over you, don't you Light? Some people really do have everything!" Yamamoto laughs like it's a meaningless joke, but Light picks up the hint of resentment. So that was the motivation here. He felt deeply disappointed in his old friend, even if they had, again, not been close enough for Light to think of him at all these last few months.

Closing the door, Takada doesn't waste any time, fixing a critical stare on Light's person. "I assume that wasn't a real flirtation."

Light pulled out his radio, using it as a poor man's electromagnetic wave detection device while also physically feeling under desks for electronic bugs and the like. She goes quiet, then helps him look around. They don't find anything, but that doesn't mean much.

"Do you think I'm under suspicion for being Kira?" Takada isn't stupid.

"We both are. Yamamoto shouldn't have been able to get into this place, it's too difficult for him," Light said quietly. "He's the kind of guy who thinks 'feminist' means a man that likes to flirt and holds the door open for women or a woman that hates men." While he hadn't actually talked about it with her, her fondness for suits and the very fact she didn't bother to artificially pitch her voice as high as other Japanese women (which was done to make a person seem more childlike and cutesy) hinted she was probably a feminist herself, so he didn't expect Takada to start attacking him on the issue - though if he misjudged he might be in for an earful, some conservative women viewed feminism as 'practically criminal'... "But he's not the one you need to worry about. All he wants to do is feed Kira appetizing targets to kill and nudge him," he paused, "or her away from others. If he's here... then other people will be as well. I'm thinking of slipping out in disguise." 

"If you flee, that will make you look more suspicious."

"But it will take attention off of you. Do you support the unpopular notion of 'guilty until proven innocent'?" It wasn't an unheard of attitude, but contrary to what some believed, plenty in Japan supported 'innocent until proven guilty'. Article 38 of the Japanese Constitution states that “no person shall be held guilty without having been accorded an opportunity for adequate defense.” As a Kira supporter, though, you could never tell what a person might think. Unfortunately. Sometimes Light was embarrassed to be on his own team...

"I do. I'm proud to be suspected of being Kira," she gives him a shark's smile. "How much of what you said back there was fake?"

"Not fake so much as said misleadingly," he said. Well, obviously the idea he was coming back was probably fake, but who knew, maybe he would get to someday.

The door started to rattle (probably L thinking he'd taken too long to say goodbye), and Light took that as his cue to slip out the window right by a bush, then to slip back in to a different room using a different window and head to the men's bathroom. He'd planned quite awhile ago during the first black out what to do if he needed to skip town for any reason. The first thing he did was dye his hair black, then give himself some fake facial hair. It wasn't the greatest disguise but it would have to do. And then he'd do what he should have done ages ago if he hadn't been so infatuated rather than let himself just get disappeared. And, hm, for Misa too he reluctantly supposed.

If L kept wanting to insist that Light shouldn't care, then fuck it, he was going to make L regret that.

L had won, or would win shortly. It was... not the most satisfying victory. He still wanted the weapon itself. But if the weapon was some invisible being only Light and Misa Amane could see, then that wasn't possible. Perhaps Amane would cave, but he had already agreed not to torture, which would make that more difficult.

But he had run out of time to let those two run wild. From this moment on, there would be no freedom, no moment unobserved for them.

And he had to admit, he'd misjudged Light a bit. He'd hoped initially he could psyche the young man out, but demoralization didn't seem to have the effect on him that L desired. Light was stubborn to the end and likely fully willing to sacrifice himself. As L had also used himself as a chess piece, he could appreciate that, but it bothered him to wonder what that meant: was Light setting Second Kira as the King that needed to be checkmated? In that case, shouldn't he have despaired the moment of the arrest? Something didn't add up. Maybe it was just the irrationality of teenagers, but, it didn't pay to underestimate Light.

"Light, are you ready to go?" L said, pushing past Yamamoto finally, only to find himself with a nearly empty room, only Takada there smirking at him. "Light is in danger, you need to tell me where he went."

"Are you sure the one he's in danger from isn't you?" she said, and folded her arms, unimpressed.

Internally cursing, L headed out and alerted Watari. "It seems Light might be doing a runner."

Why would he think that smart? It just made him look guilty, unless... had the bombing or something else spooked him?

Perhaps he thought if he went off solo, it would draw attention away from his family and they'd go after him instead? Foolish.

Thirty minutes ago:

A number of foreign troops pour into a large newly finished building, illegally heavily armed, and find it entirely empty. Not even a single camera, computer or wire is left. Clearly, it was already abandoned and no one was planning on coming back.

A call reaches their leader.

"Understood. Moving out."

They left the building.

At first, it seemed like Light wasn't identified despite the mediocrity of his disguise. But as he tried to leave campus turf, multiple people moved to intercept. Some of them very clearly illegally armed.

"Trying to leave early while class is about to be in session, are you? Now why might that be?"

Then a different group of people suddenly started moving toward the first, and started shooting. Some of them looked like... Yakuza? What the fuck? Why would Yakuza try to defend Kira? That made no sense. It would make more sense for them to just shoot him, if they suspected him of it.

A large, chubby man with a truly awful haircut and wearing body armor partially blocked Light from view of the others. "We're with Japan. But if anyone inconvenient dies, we're just some criminals controlled by Kira, understood? Just like the Americans are going to pretend those are just mercenaries that happen to speak English." They tried to herd him toward a car.

Oh! Ah, that made sense.

Wait, did Japan lose control of part of its armed forces again? Right wing groups did tend to strongly admire Kira, and he was pretty sure those arms were all illegal... maybe he should be wary of this potentially rogue faction.

"Japanese Defense Forces?"

"Not officially. For obvious reasons, we'll show you no ID. L has dragged his feet about taking suspects in for too long." More people tried to form a kettle around Light, which would make it very hard for him to escape if he let them.

-sooo Light decided to commit grande theft auto, whee.

He grabbed the keys out of one guy's hand and darted forward, opened the car door and slammed it.

"Hey! We're on your side!"

"Sorry, I don't know that!"

Now where could he go? Of course - the police station.

Vehicles chased after him, some of them his 'helpers', some of them very much not so. If Light hadn't carefully checked out different escape routes ahead of time months ago, he'd probably have panicked at this point. He'd mostly considered trains and planes, but roads and movement by car was an important possibility too.

He took an evasive detour, assuming they might guess his end destination and try to block him off or already have people lying in waiting along the straightest route there. Or, in fact, some police vehicles were likely already heading down the road toward the campus. Actually... could he trust the police? That wasn't a thought he enjoyed, considering he knew many of them, but a lot of them had been very frightened of Kira. Fear and bribery could do unfortunate things to people.

One of his 'helpers' bumped into one of the other vehicles and knocked them off-course, causing a crash, and Light was able, at least temporarily, to ride off out of sight.

"Hey!" he greeted a random punk-ish looking fellow who was drinking, guessing they weren't an arbiter of fine judgment. "You wanna trade your motorcycle for a car?"

"Did you take that for a joy ride?"

"Yup," Light 'admitted'. "I'll pay you for your jacket and helmet, too." He held up a wad of cash. He was committing so many crimes today, his dad would be so ashamed... Stealing a credit card from L's pocket, holding weed, and now driving without a license.

"Eh, sure, -hic- why not." The guy hiccuped as he traded keys and a helmet.

Light changed into yet another disguise and drove off on the motorcycle. Carefully, because he had no real experience on a motorcycle, mind you.

"Raito, can you stop and get an apple?"

"And here I thought we weren't friends anymore, Ryuk."

"Don't be like that, Light-o. We were never friends, and I was never on your side. I told you: I was always planning to kill you in the end. This is just to end my boredom. Don't be unreasonable."

"You really don't comprehend how much a pain free life is worth to a human, do you?"

Light decided the best thing in this situation was to be unpredictable. So he headed toward a place he'd been thinking about lately, and where no one would ever expect him to go.

A specialist store for entomology fans. Ants, stag beetles, roaches and best of all... Termites.

"Why are you buying termites?" Ryuk was completely baffled.

"L has this entire building he's not using," Light said completely reasonably. "I dunno if anyone is expecting him to still go there, so we'll give it a few hours maybe. L is probably pretty pissed at me, but, if he's just out to hurt me, then I should really do what I shoulda done ages ago in this sort of situation."

"What's that?"

"Get a lawyer."

Thinking about it more, Light convinces himself L's 'other detectives' bit was probably just fucking with him to scare him. L was the 'good guy', he wouldn't really kill someone, right? Well, other than the assassin he mentioned once. And Tailor, indirectly.

Okay, maybe L would kill somebody.

...okay, maybe his affections would never be returned, in the worst possible way. If he didn't have to consider Misa, maybe it would have been best to just leave.

He could set up basically a perpetual motion machine of Kiras using the Death Note's control mechanism, simply having the criminals pass the note from person to person and make use of the infinite pages to create a fuckton of Kiras, and go scott free since there would still be no concrete evidence tied to Light. But Misa was a problem, and plus, Light didn't really want to kill criminals anymore for the most part. He felt that particular experiment had been a miserable failure.

So, maybe he should confess to framing Misa? That wasn't a completely terrible move if, as he suspected, L wasn't satisfied into letting Misa go with some fake Kira taking the blame for framing her. L would take the victory and kill or lock him up quietly, he was sure, and he could manipulate Rem into doing whatever Light wanted out of sheer gratitude; with an immortal being on his side, Kira could last forever. It was the perfect plan, except...

He still didn't quite understand what to do about societies where simply putting in place sortition democracy wouldn't be enough to fix things, and he didn't trust Rem to discern when a war wasn't black and white. Was it really worth it to just... kill the leadership of any country the moment they tried to start a war?

And if there was no leadership, then just off random people who voted for the war?

It felt like a waste to 'just' stop World War if he could do more, but, he'd take that victory if it was all he could get. He just. Wished he had more time to think things through. Complete school and figure out more about how the world really worked.

But there was no more time, was there?

There's screaming suddenly.

L had officially run out of time on his delays, and he feared, suddenly, that his stubbornness may have just gotten Light killed. Why hadn't he just grabbed Light and carried him off into the car? Light probably would have thought it a funny revenge for L getting picked up before, he could have gotten away with it. Instead he'd gotten distracted and flustered.

"There were shots fired at a different side of the campus than the way we came in," Watari informs him.

"L," Naomi abruptly calls as well. "I'm with the arrested Second Kira suspect. We've been evading a tail that we picked up. We were just intercepted by a heavily armored car. I'm armed but I don't think I can take all of them."

Fear shoots through him, his victory suddenly seeming out of reach. They must have had an additional tail that hadn't been listed in any of the servers. Naomi's bribe offering contact, most likely. He had hoped Naomi's alertness to possible tails would have alerted her sooner, but it was possible they had hung back and simply utilized street cameras, waiting for the moment she drove by. But wait, that didn't make sense - L had been very careful to take control of all the street cams that went along streets he was likely to use to and from headquarters, and after missing the original meeting with Second Kira and Light Yagami, he also took control or placed his own street cameras along several roads leading from the Yagami house. It shouldn't have been physically possible for a tail to get past all that. What had gone wrong?

The simplest conclusion was that they had a mole, maybe multiple leak sources. But he hoped it had simply been a competent hacker and security specialist.

At the urging of the Task Force, L had reluctantly decided to get a warrant for their drug cover story, which was approved recently.

This was in hindsight a mistake: it may have tipped off other parties that things were about to go down by misfortune of talking to the wrong judge. The alternative was all of their movements were being closely watched despite L's attempts to control security feeds in the area. If not cameras, then human watchers could be the source, especially if ridiculous amounts of money were being poured into this. There was only so much L could do about something like that. He really, really hated the idea of picking fights with entire nations. He hoped Light was still alive, for all that was seeming unlikely right now.

"Tell them you're an American," L advises. "Don't get yourself shot for this. It isn't worth it."

"I recognize one of them by voice! Agent Halle Lidner. I don't think she'll shoot me." Having his theory confirmed isn't satisfying this time. "Hello again, Halle. I'm guessing you didn't stop me for a friendly chat." Pause. "No, I don't regret not taking your offer, betrayal sits poorly with me, but I am open to a different job."

"Be careful," L cautions as a goodbye. Then he calls Ide who has been waiting at the van not too far away, but stops as he sees armed men headed toward him. Their faces are completely masked and it's difficult to read any details off of them, but he doesn't need to in order to guess they're American mercenaries here to take what they want by force now and make political apologies later. What he doesn't get is why *he* is on that list!

Watari's sniper skills take out the first man. L ducks for cover, forced to trust in Watari's skills. The man isn't a bad shot, but he is still only one man and hadn't come equipped for a military seige, nor is he still a spry young man. People are running and screaming.

"Kira, you will come with us," a man addresses L, and L's first thought is:

For fuck's sake. How could these dingdongs be so utterly incompetent? Did L really look that untrustworthy, that he could stand right next to Kira and people could go, 'hmm, no, it is the weird creepy guy'? (don't answer that.)

"I work for L, you absolute ninnies," he tells them off in perfect English and his poshest accent, which he normally doesn't use. He barely refrains from calling them bloody wankers. "L! You know, the one working to catch Kira?"

There is a brief moment of hesitation. Then there is a horrible series of bangs as someone goes after Watari, and then there are hands all over him, yanking him, grabbing him, tossing him and his ringing ears into a vehicle.

"I have dual citizenship!" he tries a different tack.

L miscalculated. He hadn't thought they'd be so brazen to do it in front of the college, thought that he would have one more day to move all the pieces together. Hadn't thought they'd be so stupid to suspect him and yet not Light, even though there had been a tentative suggestion about it on the servers he had thought they'd just abandon that as readily as the hypothesis that it was sonic weapons. Hoped that since To-oh had a limited enrollment period that they wouldn't already have agents here watching ready to alert that the target was here, but they surely must have bribed some students to keep watch, though that still offered up the question of why L here was being targeted rather than Yagami which pointed more toward a mole. Thought unconsciously despite knowing better that they would have higher standards than knee jerk suspicions. It was one thing to know others are not like you, it is another to know it emotionally. This felt just like the moment he learned Kira could kill him and the task force would likely let it slide.

He had gambled recklessly and was now paying for it. If he'd just chosen one day earlier to move everyone...! Or, no. They may have simply been waiting, just like L had been waiting. Well played on that part at least, then. L had originally intended to move things around much more quietly and quickly. It was his fault for getting distracted.

Just as quickly as Misa Amane had been captured by L, she was lost.

Just as quickly as L had thought he had won the game, he had lost.

Light, wearing a disguise he had prepared right around the time of the black out when he first scouted things out and realized things could turn to shit at any moment, and had taken care to store at school, is currently completely blissfully oblivious to everything that just happened and thinking of heading to Mikami Teru's place after he plays with termites. He's willing to bet on his ability to charm people that even though they've never met and his mother has only talked about hiring him rather than actually doing it, he's sure the upright lawyer will help him at least a little bit, give him a place to crash for the night, and if not, well, Light is resourceful. He's already thinking about how he can sneak into another country if he absolutely has to. He stole Ryuuzaki's credit card when L wasn't paying attention, and he's sure the guy is the type to take out large amounts of cash regularly just to buy candy.

...then he belatedly remembers that, yes, Rem absolutely will kill L if she has to. So he can't actually just leave. But he wants a break, damn it.

...he can't actually take a break, can he?

With a sigh, he removes his phone from its cheap handmade Faraday Cage and texts his mother to let her know he's going to stay over at a friend's so she won't worry, but he will be at the new address soon enough.

The response he gets back instead makes HIM worry:

LIGHT DO NOT COME HOME. TURN OFF OR GET RID OF YOUR PHONE.

what the fuck.

What happened?

Although it hurts, he can't imagine his mother would tell him this if it turned out he was Kira and everyone was holding up his arrest warrant. She would say something like 'turn yourself in' instead.

Was Sayu okay? Were they just mass arresting everyone?

Or was it another bomb threat?

His mom wouldn't be able to talk at all if she wasn't alright, right?

"You absolute nitwits!" Agent Halle Lidner berated the men once they arrived safely at base. "The deal I had is that we were supposed to go after Kira, and ONLY Kira. You grabbed the wrong man!"

"You said L wouldn't be Japanese. The suspect standing near him and interacting would likely be full Japanese and young. The kid had brown hair and looked more mixed race than he does from a distance!" One of the man jabbed their thumb in L's direction. L, who did a very good sad panda impression with a gag over his mouth. "Plus he just plain looks suspicious. Are you really telling me this hobo-looking weirdo," he paused for dramatic effect, "is L?"

"One of the individuals hired to play his role, at least. Well," Halle sighed. "I suppose we'll just have to roll with it. It was never ruled out if L was Kira, was it?"

"Those two did seem awfully chummy as well, ma'am. I'm sure we could also use him as bait, and if nothing else, we can have him tell us who all his suspects are and then bring them in."

"Remove that, I want to speak with him."

"He kept demanding his rights and insisting he was an employee of L's and that we're going to face international backlash. Said he was a honeypot for a suspect and wanted to go back to work so he could get something more concrete or confirm innocence of his target."

"An act. No one would choose someone so strange for a mere honeypot," she dismissed. "Set up a room, tie him up, and then leave us."

They secured L to a chair in a stark, bare room with a nearly blinding light.

"You seem oddly unafraid of Kira retaliating," L said simply, forced into correct posture by the bindings but choosing to hold his head high. If he'd known he'd be kidnapped today instead of the kidnapper, he would have, ugh, worn nicer clothes.

"My analysts think there's a good possibility he's a coward. He backed off when you confronted him the first time for awhile, he backed off again after the Russians and the media blackout in names before gathering his courage to strike back."

"You have to be careful with analysis. A misunderstood analysis is worse than no analysis at all," L said with faux-calm, almost sounding bored. "I remember quite a case, and maybe you do too, because it was your people that fucked up. A serial killer was on the loose, and they came back with a character profile that said 'this man will try to get close to the case, maybe even insert himself into the investigation'. And so they hounded the wrong man, an attention seeker, until DNA evidence pointed to a complete unknown who hadn't even been on their radar.(^) The proper way to interpret a character profile is to treat it as one of many possible profiles, and a probability, not a certainty. You must update it with new evidence and keep in mind that it may be wrong at all times. In other words, the correct way to use profiles is to walk down all paths, like a photon. Or, possibly that every drawn profile, every previously seen path, is wrong too. It burns, but you need to keep that in mind as well." 

"I don't need a lecture on how character analysis works," she hissed. "If he retaliates, that's fine. The President is basically a puppet already. Killing him in a fit of rage could be very convenient for us. Temporarily controlling him would be more inconvenient, but it would be easy to remove a president clearly out of his mind."

"For your real employers, you mean," L deduced. "Lovely. I assume some far right wing nutjobs that would love to declare martial law and no more elections? Or an oligarch that has kept their head low and knows they can bribe the replacement round of politicians pretty easily." It was a fact that there were other people besides L that hid their immense wealth, though most of those were crime lords. Whammy actually did pay taxes however, unlike many of them, and there most of L's wealth lay. Light was only half correct about his guess of L not paying taxes.

(L wasn't completely evil, just a little bit evil, thank you very much.)

"We're not here to talk about me," Lidner stated. "Tell me about your main suspect."

"He's sickeningly sweet," L said. "And I hate sweets." That got no emotional reaction from her.

"Even if he gives you diabetes, I want every detail, you hear me?"

So. In one move, that narrowed down immensely where the information had come from, though it didn't totally eradicate the possibilities that it was someone on the task force (perhaps Aizawa) it made it very unlikely as his quirks were likely to be the subject of rants, especially if this was done out of some sort of resentment about L. Naomi Misora would have treated it as a potential weakness rather than rant about it. It also likely meant his camera network hadn't been totally compromised, and that he hadn't been spied on 24/7, because his sweets addiction was one of the very first things you'd notice about L, unless their informant was hiding that info.

He'd hidden just how much observation he was doing from his team explicitly in case of a leak, dividing up who got what information. Misora, Ide and Mogi didn't know about all the street cameras (and might have resented the extremely exhausting 24/7 watch detail on Misa more if they had) or exactly when the tape evidence against Misa had actually been fully processed, and Matsuda, Soichiro and Aizawa didn't know much of anything about Misa's tails, but they still all knew he liked sweets.

That meant the judge was a strong candidate for the information leak, but a corrupt judge asking L to not be hurt seemed odd.

They almost certainly had someone on campus, so if not for the comment about a deal it could have been that alone... L had shown up before. Had she really simply ID'd him as L from his sheer strangeness making him an unlikely choice of employee of anyone?

Who would care to keep L from being harmed but also want him kidnapped? Kira? That seemed... too risky for his style, to be honest, even with how ballsy he was he had no way of guaranteeing which of them would have been ID'd as L from such a description. Second Kira? That seemed too aware, and also too risky.

There was one party that would have a guess of what L looked like, and could make an educated guess about what his suspect looked like, but wouldn't necessarily actually know the fine details and who might be motivated to do this, but L didn't want to consider that possibility unless he absolutely had to... Actually, there was more than one person who fit that.

It could be Director Kitamura or his secretary. The man must be terrified of Kira right now, yet also perhaps feeling intense guilt that he would sacrifice L to save himself-

Smack!

"Hey! I said talk! Don't get lost in thought."

L narrowed his eyes.

"You assume that Kira isn't immortal like he or she hinted when they apparently controlled the Russians."

"It's hard to take any actions with that, so we're forced to assume it's some sort of lethal drug or the like. Kira has shown a strong unwillingness to go after the media in any way, they don't want to stifle critique, and in any scenario we can use that to our advantage."

"If you want to perform a coup against the world, you must seize the media," L stated. "You believe Kira doesn't know this, and that's why you're so confident you can control the situation if he does kill the US President in a fit of anger, or tries to control the President, or even tries to introduce a new form of government by killing bought-and-sold politicians en mass. You can have Fox News howling about how Sortition Democracy is the worst thing on Earth, a mob rule, and millions will believe them and vote against their own interests in a heartbeat. You can even pressure for a war with Japan that Japan is completely unprepared for except via economic retaliation unless Kira caves, and voters are too stupid to permanently swear off a party or policy just for getting them into a recession. And if you get the weapon successfully, you can run a fear campaign the likes the world has never seen before. No need for death squads if you can make dissident citizens disappear themselves. In almost every scenario, you believe you can come out a winner."

"We know Kira doesn't know this. They're a naive idealist. You're not the only one that can make a deduction, L." Cocky.

"Kira is more complex than you think," L stated flatly. If it had been even a month ago, they would have been right, but Light had grown since then. Admittedly he couldn't blame them for not predicting that L would, uh, just tell Kira he was doing things naively out of an inability to completely ignore a logic puzzle, but still. "If you're going to abandon my profile and assume Kira is just a coward, then you can't use the part where I gauge Kira to be intelligent, for where you saw cowardice, in all of those moves, I saw wit. If you take all of those away, Kira could be a young high schooler rather than a college student. There's no reason for you to fixate on Yagami. I had to start somewhere, even if the probability was low. It's only a 1% chance."

"Except for the fact he ran."

L sighed. "Because he's not stupid and realized people wanted to kidnap him, maybe disappear him without a trial. That doesn't prove anything whatsoever. Anyone would run in that situation. Let me go so I can go back to doing my job, Lidner."

"I'm wearing a mask and never told you my name," Lidner said.

"It was a simple guess."

"Naomi told you," she said flatly. "Well, no matter. To continue, the analysis doesn't deny he has some intelligence. He randomized the killing lulls and spikes pretty well, but that doesn't counter the idea he was afraid as well."

"You don't really want my analysis, you want to gloat," L concluded.

"You've been up close to him, you know personal details we don't. Is he in love with you?" What was with people getting obsessed with L's love life lately?

"Depends, do I die if I answer wrong?" L said dryly.

"Be serious and no harm need come to you. Lie to me on purpose, though..."

"I was working on it," L said. "We are friendly, sure, but he would be foolish not to be if he has any suspicion he's being investigated." He paused. "Of course, I have no reason to think I'm leaving here alive after I'm done being bait. You basically told me yourself that your more 'official' bosses have no idea you are willing to throw their lives away. The American President is a coward, he's not willing to die," for the country he stole even if you ignore the recount controversy in Florida, he thought but didn't say. "What did you tell him?"

"We still think officially that he's unwilling to go after democratically elected leadership unless they're a very obvious dictator. It's not that big a risk," she dismissed. "Someone who admires free speech and the media isn't going to try to stifle the people's vote."

L laughed, deliberately deepening his voice into a darker tone.

"What?"

He kept laughing. She slapped him. He smiled at her with slightly wet eyes.

"Crazy bastard."

"All I've ever cared about is solving the case. I could care less about your petty political bullshit. You know I've worked for many governments of the world at some point, yes? Even ones drastically politically aligned against each other?"

"That is true," she admitted. "But I have no reason to think you'd give the 'shinigami' power to us. Especially after we hurt you."

"If there is no other way to work on the case. Why on Earth would I want to make an enemy of the US government? Do you think I'm completely stupid?" L argued. "Do you think there's any way he's going to trust any new faces after all of this? But if he knows I'm just some poor innocent sod they roughed up, someone who now has reason perhaps to resent the same enemies he has, well, that could be the very breakthrough I've been hoping for. He's already been tortured once, you were never going to get anything out of him that way. Yagami, if he is guilty, requires a much softer touch. And a conventional honeypot would immediately make him suspicious. I am genuinely your best option."

"...fine. But we're using you as bait first."

L closed his eyes.

Light, don't take the bait. Even with Watari likely dead, L could save himself.

Watari...

In this place, it wasn't safe to mourn. That was fine. He hadn't decided what to feel about it, in any case. Maybe what bothered him most was that he didn't feel more about it, that they perhaps should have been closer but they weren't.

"Hm. We've just identified Quillish Whammy's body. We can't seem to figure out who you are, just a bunch of fake IDs that I don't buy for a second, but if you've burned all your real records, that just means you're undocumented, does it not?" For a moment, he feels relief, because even with removed records you never know if that will actually be enough. All it takes is one doctor or nurse relating the 'funny story' of the baby named L. "And you probably know what we Americans do to the undocumented."

Shit.

Then she frowns as she seems to get other news. "Our lead detective was apparently murdered by the Chinese." Ah. L's frame job had worked. "So it seems you may have some use beyond bait after all. Tell me, where would your main suspect would go?"

So Light really was free. That was... a strange relief.

"He thinks a lot like me, therefore, I can safely say I have no idea at all," L stated. He is slapped again.

"Be serious!"

"I was. I would choose a completely random location as my next move. You can't predict that." Actually, there was a decent chance Light had headed straight for the police station as a perceived place of safety and comfort, but if it had been that, they'd likely have known it already and in any case L didn't like them enough to tell them.

If they capture Light and don't think Light will cave under torture, they'll might torture L in front of Light instead. It's a logical choice. They may just be letting L think he won't be for now because they'd want L to be more cooperative, want L to delude himself into thinking there is some escape for himself out of all of this.

If they let L go, it'll be under watch and because they're frustrated by lack of progress trying to chase down Light. In any other scenario, his political inconvenience makes him too tempting to simply kill or disappear permanently.

But, new question: how was Misa Amane doing? Could she hold up under torture too? Was fortitude under such things a general feature of Kiras?

He supposed he was glad he'd get to have his unspoken question of whether torturing Misa would actually work, after he'd thought he'd tabled that permanently. But it was hard to feel actually chipper about it. Her caving and giving them Second Kira's power... that would turn Light from capture to kill on sight, and make L disposable.

He had to hope Light was right that torture was the wrong option even for purely logical reasoning, and that his earlier blatant confidence in face of an enemy who knew exactly who he was, wasn't pure suicidal thinking talking. The irony wasn't lost on L.

A few hours later, Light entered L's abandoned new building with a paper shredder, and then again with a cage full of termites. It was really good he was physically fit because he was carrying both these and his backpack.

"Fly FREE, my pretties, fly free!"

Sometimes it felt good just to be destructive. In the name of science, of course.

"Today, you bravely destroy L's building. Tomorrow? World hunger," he solemnly intoned, and saluted the termite queen.

He'd already committed so many sins, what was property damage on top of that?

Now, most of the building was actually made of metal and concrete. That was fine (and desirable, because it meant Light wasn't going to actually collapse a building on anyone or anything like that). This was what the death note was for, properly shredded into itty bitty pieces so nobody could write on it.

Hm. He needed to buy more termites or find some in the woods. This wouldn't make a sustainable breeding population on its lonesome, even with infinite food.

He wondered how L was doing. Would he ever step in this building again, and if so, what would his face look like when he saw the infestation? Would he manage to keep an infuriatingly straight face and make some deadpan remark? That would be just like him.

He is anxious about his family, so he does stop to watch the TV by a bar.

"There was a shoot out today between multiple parties, with several casualties," the news reporter narrated. "The police have arrived and are re-assuring everyone that they have it all handled."

"Were there any other terrorist attacks today?" Light asked a bystander watching the TV.

"Not that I'm aware of," they said to his relief.

Then Rem melts through the wall, and Light has to still his reaction to prevent seeming startled for no reason. He leaves to go back toward the building so he can talk to her properly, and when she sees the chaos she is, uh, not impressed, but too anxious to focus on it right away.

"Light, they have Misa!"

Omake / Joke Ending:

"Since you dislike sweets, we're going to force feed you cake."

"Oh no, anything but that," deadpanned L.

Chapter Text

"I still think you're being rather uncautious, as he could easily go after many people who aren't the President and make things inconvenient for you-" L stated, stopping as the power suddenly flicked off and on, emergency power kicking in. "Ah. I see."

Lidner grins. "I have to thank you, L. We never would have thought of this tactic without you."

"You're gambling an awful lot on low suspicions." Taking out an allied nation's power grid was a pretty brutal thing to do.

"Our contact seemed convinced your suspicions are always right." She shrugged. L hid how much pain that statement caused him. Mello, please tell me it wasn't you. "And who says we're stopping at just one target?"

"You're still being very uncautious. A rogue President is a lot more dangerous than you seem to think, but more importantly," he paused, "whatever psychos you are working for are going to dispose of you."

Lidner doesn't look too bothered yet, merely raising a brow. She's hard to ruffle.

"You're a woman, possibly lesbian, working for wannabe dicators who are almost certainly rightwing leaning," L said dryly. "You are an inconvenience, to be used up and dried out, then destroyed for not meeting their purity tests when they run out of other enemies to murder and look to cleaning up their own internal potential rivals and their tools. At your luckiest, they'll plan to turn you into a little housewife. At your unluckiest, a witch for the internal purges."

Lidner looked angry, then laughed.

"What makes you think I plan to ever give up the shinigami eye weapon to my superiors?"

"You'd be assassinated very quickly," L said, wondering what the chances were she'd thought of that plan only just now that L had mentioned the risks of being obedient. That anger had looked genuine.

"Only if they realize I have it. When I get Yagami, I'll interrogate him alone."

His mind was full of many thoughts before Rem arrived.

His first disguise had been pretty useless, only working up until he had tried to leave the campus, so he ponders if his second disguise is at all worth it. (Had they even identified him as Yagami Light at that point of interception, or were they jumping at ghosts of probabilities? He cursed himself for getting impatient and not leaving with a crowd - although yes, L would be a nuisance the entire time and he'd have to slip away yet another time, a third time was probably a bit much to hope to get away with admittedly...) It's probably better than nothing, so for once he actually wore a wig. Since he had more free time (hopefully) after evading his pursuers, he also tried a fake nose and ears: that makes this disguise look much more convincing, although it takes a lot of effort of painstakingly painting the prosthetic to match a real skin complexion (it was cheaper to buy a medium quality one and then modify it to movie standards if you had the skill - the lowest quality ones were too bulbous, obviously fake and thus useless unless you wanted to be a gnome or goblin) and blend the edges seemingly seamlessly.

 He could pass as a cousin of Mr. Anarchist with the long hair, maybe.

 When he approached L's building, he was mindful of street cameras and made sure to avoid any streets that crossed a direct route between L's old building and his house.

 Light can use the death note to trade in his motorcycle for yet another vehicle, using a criminal (he may have mixed feelings about his effectiveness as Kira right now, but he still doesn't feel any real guilt going after criminals statistically highly likely to reoffend). He's had a very long time to plan this out, and thought of two plans before.

 Pros and cons of having a criminal just come directly with a vehicle: he doesn't have to store the vehicle, but if the criminal dies after giving up their vehicle, even if it's a whole month later, that's going to look hella suspicious.

Pros and cons of having a criminal just come in with a plate and doing a swap: Light can keep a plate in a convenient spot for ages that no one is particularly likely to look at. Downside is he has to acquire a vehicle, and he has to make sure the plate reads as clean to the police but with his ability to get into databases that's quite easy for him.

 He ultimately went with the plate with the idea of using the first plan as a backup, and he was glad for that now. He spray-paints the motorcycle a new color and does a swap. This is probably extremely unnecessary if his newest plan to move even more freely works thanks to his research on the death note and what it implied for the world's metaphysics, buuuut, better paranoid than dead.

Light thought he'd have to break in to the garage of L's building, buuut, someone apparently already did. Light buys some new locks - he doesn't want hobos wandering in and bothering his beautiful termites or his final and potentially most revolutionary death note experiment yet.

As for his final touch for the termite paper, to make absolutely certain no one will want to touch the bug infested paper with their bare hands, he dumps a lot of dirt over all of it and gets a lot of it soggy. The termites won't care if it's filthy or if some of it has mold and mildew, in fact fungi would make a nice tasty bonus as termites vastly prefer rotting wood, but a typical human would care quite a bit.

He's just about to cave and go call his dad on a pay phone (which might be a dumb idea if his dad had gone evil and arrested Sayu as well as a bunch of other 0.1% probability suspects, but he had a hard time imagining that seriously; Sayu was always the sheltered baby, and Light didn't resent that because she was also his favorite and that would just make him a hypocrite) when abruptly, Rem phases through a wall with a panicked shout that "They have Misa!" Light widens his eyes and ignores the brief look of disgust she gives his glorious termite kingdom creation.

"Tell me everything," he insists. Rem is his backup plan, so it would be highly preferable for Misa to get out of this happy and healthy. There's so much evidence against her, though, it's going to be like swimming against a flood. He takes out his death note and starts to set up a criminal to make a fake Kira confessing (via a sent in tape of course, mirroring Second Kira's previous standards of lettering and style) to framing her and mocking investigators for falling for his trap; it won't fix everything, it won't remove L's suspicion, but it gives her a fighting chance and will make her look innocent as long as they can't successfully find the criminal. Which, they won't.

"Misa... I am trying to coax her to give up her Death Note," Rem tells him, sounding really upset. "They had her bound so she couldn't see or take her blindfold off, and she was so miserable being asked over and over what she knew and how she knew you... It's all my fault. 'The Human Who Takes The Death Note will suffer misfortune', that's what we're all taught..."

Light tilts his head, thinking. "There might be a way to get around shinigami rules, if suffering is one of them. Just like, or even exactly like, the fact there's a way to get around the fact the king makes-"

"Light-o, be careful," Ryuk warns. He's been sulking a lot some distance from Light, but on seeing Rem he'd flown close. "You've caused me trouble enough."

"Ryuk knows what I'm talking about," Light says, and is very satisfied to see Rem focus her unnerving attention on Ryuk instead for a moment. But it doesn't last.

"This is all because of her love for you!" she shouts. Love? Sure, go with that. "I offered to help her escape, but she shook her head, knowing showing special powers might implicate you. Then when she was at her limit, realizing she couldn't think of anything to say that would improve things instead of make them worse for you, she started begging me to kill her to seal her mouth. I couldn't bear to see it any more, and I couldn't bear to kill her. The only way to relieve her is to make her forfeit the note. When you do, it makes you forget everything about the note, and also lose the ability to see shinigami."

"Good job, Rem. If you can do that, Misa should be released soon, as L wouldn't be satisfied with that." Unfortunately for him.

"Light," Rem is very still, but he doesn't think much of it because shinigami are often very still. "It wasn't L that captured Misa."

"What?"

"They captured L too," she adds. "I think it was American military personnel. A female agent of L's recognized one by her voice and gave her name away, but I'm not sure I can tell you what it is. It isn't that helpful, regardless, because she's wearing a mask now."

And Light is instantly pissed. He feels some of his last inhibitions ebb away, and a conviction that someone was going to die.

"I can't write down that many names at once without turning to sand after the first few, and many are wearing masks," Rem states with frustration. "I need your help."

At first, Light thinks aloud, "I can try using the internet to look up some soldiers that have been careless with their information and use them as puppets, or threaten the lives of some rich corrupt American politicians, not too hard at all-"

The power once again chooses to black out. Or more likely was taken out on purpose, precisely to thwart him from making such a move. He could control the President in a fit of anger, it was easy enough to remember his name, but they'd probably planned for that too (though he found himself thinking they might be over-estimating how easy it would be to remove an insane president, as historically even presidents suffering from dementia aren't removed; however, such arrogance of thinking you can control an insane or corrupt leader is pretty common among the social elite across the world; in Hitler's rise to power leaders of industry thought he was a clown they could control, which might be a clue who his real enemies here were if it wasn't just a miscalculation by the President as it was true they had nearly nabbed Light so if things had gone slightly different you could call it competent). Wonderful.

Rem sucked in a terrified breath, despite likely not needing to breathe. "Is Misa doomed?"

"No, no!" Light waved his hands and made an X. He just needed to think for a moment. Unlike previous times he dealt with this, this time, he had a helpful shinigami and that resource had to count for something. "Can you write them down on a normal note, as long as you don't show it to me?" Light suggests. "I want to kill them for you. I need to kill them." He's never felt this sustained level of viciousness in his entire life. Even when he wrestled L and bit him, it hadn't been hard enough to draw blood, which perhaps summarized their relationship in a nutshell. And when he went after the rapists, he had to admit ashamedly that a lot of that had been a poor attempt at coping with his own internal terror and feelings of helplessness. "Maybe you could follow them to the shower."

"Yes, provided they are unmasked," Rem says, with quick comprehension as to where this is going. "But if I die or am punished in some other way, waiting until I've written down all the names to break the rule to give them to a human, who will protect Misa from you? Who will ensure you strive to prove Misa's innocence? And who will kill L for you to save you from being captured as Kira?"

"I'll do it," says Ryuk. "Well, partially."

Both Light and Rem look at him in shock. "It isn't like you to be altruistic," Rem says, which was an understatement.

"Hah! I'm not. I'll just provide a lil' incentive, which won't be enough to save Misa, but will ensure Light doesn't just roll over and become boring, playing house all day with L. If I think Light is being too boring... since I can't kill Light right now, I'll kill L instead, but leave all the evidence in place so if Misa was on the verge of being caught, she will be." Fuck. Angry Ryuk was a nasty piece of work. Mind, he had always been a nasty piece of work, but now he was being transparent about it instead of hiding it behind humor. "And, actually, I've been thinking: why don't I have L announce he figured out you're Kira? Then I can kill both him and you, and take care of the little Chinese problem at the same time."

Light stiffens.

"You thought you were so safe, weren't you? I could see it in the way L made you relax," Ryuk gloated. "But I just held off because we couldn't have a proper conversation there, and it wouldn't very entertaining if I couldn't hear your full response just because he was there, now would it?"

 "I thought about it and I realized I was wrong to be so cocky before. Even if L was too careless at first meeting, he's had plenty of time to think about it now and the idea I might kill him at any time, so he almost certainly has some kind of deadman's switch to release important information in the event of his death OR him being controlled, since he's also had plenty of time to come to terms with Kira being able to control others before death too. If you just kill him outright, the information that he believed Light," okay, now he's talking about himself in third person, clearly his 'if Kira' habit is getting to him, "suddenly conveniently dying after a confession could be an indication he was being controlled by Kira to look like a good suspect would almost certainly be released. He's too smart not to keep multiple possible angles in mind even if he hates them. Plus, there's Watari. You still don't know his face and name."

"...that's true," Ryuk admits. "I bet L knows his name. Though, if L has been captured, is that old man even still alive?"

Light would have stiffened again, except he was already tense. Fuck, did his actions lead to an innocent man getting killed? Someone L cared about?

"Anyway, I'll just make L write he realizes you only have a few months, and use your plan about having L kill all the other investigators." Light was regretting bragging to Ryuk so much now. "You said you could set up an infinite Kira machine, but I know you haven't. Yes, I took my eyes off you for a little while to sulk but you would have bragged about it if you really had-"

"You went to go look at the lifespans of some Chinese officials instead of talking to the shinigami king like I hoped you would," Light said flatly. "Didn't you? That's why you aren't more panicked. You know nobody is dropping dead tomorrow. But someone does die within the next few months and you don't know enough about humans to know if that someone is that important or if it'll be likely to be a heart attack, which is why you're still talking to me about these hypotheticals instead of laughing it off at me. You said death was nothing personal, but it seems to me you took the prospect of my maybe killing you VERY personally," Light went straight on the offense. Playing too nice with Ryuk just straight up didn't work. He respected a bit more aggression. But Light still needed to not piss him off too much, so it was threading a needle. "I made you mad. But you said it yourself: what's a little murder attempt that's nothing personal? It's not like I really intended to kill *you*, Ryuk. I always imagined you'd find some way to squirm out of testing directly if it would really kill you or not to perform an act that would both save your own hide and save human lives, just like you found a way to keep from testing how humans react to a note with your own by substituting a different shinigami's book."

Ryuk laughed. "That does sound like something you'd think, although I don't trust you to not have simply thought that up on the spot to make yourself sound better."

"Ryuk," Light put a hand over his heart and gave his most dishonest seeming smile on purpose, a Liar's Paradox of smiles. "Are you doubting my ability to scheme? For shame."

"But, uh, hypothetically..." Ryuk scritched at his nose. "How would you act if the Shinigami King potentially got mad at you and ordered you to carry out all the threats and official killings yourself?"

So Ryuk was scared. That made sense.

"I guess I'd find a way to frame doing it as a favor or trade to another shinigami when the king isn't paying attention. Preferably one that doesn't know saving humans turns them to ash. And if the killing isn't something I have to do right that instant, I'd have my nice human accomplice help me out with writing down a few names."

Ryuk's eyes gleamed. "Yeah... I might be able to do that."

"So what's this about playing house?" Rem's gaze turns toward Light. "You're... in love with your own natural enemy?" She sounds fascinated, which is the most friendly she's ever been to him.

"Love is a strong word, I think I'm a bit young to call something love instead of infatuation," he awkwardly defends himself. It occurs to him having a friendly shinigami to balance out the angry one might be useful, and she is his best backup plan for Kira if the shinigami king proves to be a dick, so he offers up something: "Maybe you won't even need to write the names. I have another idea."

"Oh?" Ryuk looks amused again.

"You can't take just anything to the shinigami world, right? But you can take a death note."

"Where are you going with this?"

"What if I *was* a death note?" He pinched his flesh and stretched it slightly. "Human skin is something you can write on. Some of the oldest writing was on vellum, bone and parchment. Paper came later. I've done experiments with recycling paper to see if a diluted death note is still usable... and it is, up to a certain percentage. At a critical line, the ability to kill is vastly weakened, but it can still influence slightly and inconvenience, so technically, it's still a shinigami note, yes?" Light had created his very own mild heart burn note. For annoying people who didn't quite deserve to die, but sure as hell deserved something!

Alas, the heart burn note did not grant immunity, otherwise, it would actually be very useful. It seemed among the things weakened was the ability to confer to other death notes that a target was off limits. He intended to test later if that meant the heart burn note could be re-used perpetually to give a victim stubbed toes once every day for the rest of their life or something equally sinister.

There was this annoying kid in high-school who chewed gum and stuck it to the underside of desks. When he had the free time, he absolutely was going to make them get gum stuck to the underside of their shoes by random chance for months every time they went outside before getting mild heart pains. Was that petty? Yes. Did he care? No.

The gum chewers of the world deserved to suffer. SUFFER.

"So that's why you were eating death note paper and doing all that paper making," Ryuk realizes.

Light holds up the dried pomegranate from his bonsai, and eats of the rest of the seeds of the underworld.

The original forbidden fruit was never an apple. Unlike Persephone, he doesn't know if he will ever be able to return. At least he knows the air won't instantly kill him.

"If we need somewhere high up, then let's go to the top of L's abandoned tower."

"Being here seems a bit ballsy. It is technically enemy territory, after all. And the enemy of your frenemy might come here."

"If they checked it out once and found it empty, they won't be expecting anyone to come back," Light guesses.

"You still need to make a portal."

"That's easy, isn't it?" Light said. "All you need... is Death."

He clapped his hands, and two criminals entered the room. One to die sacrificially at the top of the tower, the other to carry the dead one out and dispose of the evidence, including themself.

"I take it back. You're still entertaining, Light-o," Ryuk compliments, but Light doesn't smile. He just takes out a large spool of thread and, once they reach the top of the tower, begins to unwind the long line like he's about to enter a maze with a minotaur.

---

The shinigami air is extremely thin and hard to breathe. The inhabitants all gawk at them, but the real unnerving thing is that for some reason, Light can see them! Was it because he had passed into their world, or had he really passed that percentage point where he wasn't quite entirely earthly anymore? His eyes definitely aren't the normal traded-for eyes, because those don't let you see all shinigami. Maybe the accidental deal was worth it.

Something glinting in the dusty ruins of their world catches his eye, and he pulls out a massive golden scythe. It's pretty useless, and yet it appeals to him viscerally, like he was always meant to have it.

The cautious, self serving thing to do is to do the kills from a distance, and simply gift the information of the location to L's allies. But... what if it was one of L's allies that was the information leak? And he wants to make them all scream. He wants their terror.

He doesn't want to be a god. He's met gods, and he's convinced they're all horribly immoral.

He thinks of all the ways he's fucked up being Kira.

Killing rapists thinking that would help, only to be told by L, no, that could make the rape problem worse as many people stop reporting it entirely.

Trying to be nice to the lives he ended by doing things like letting Ryuuga Hideki produce one last incredibly great song, only to create sympathy for said rapist and an outpour of victim-blaming. 'If so and so hadn't been such a slut wearing such provocative things, Hideki would still be alive!'

Killing criminals as a warning not to commit crime, only to get criminals citing him as inspiration for their vigilantic crime, which turned out to cover a surprisingly large portion of crime. Wife disobeying you? Clearly, she's flounting natural law, and so you're a gracious husband punishing her before Kira can get her. Those immigrant bastards don't know their place? Clearly, they're all illegals and deserve to die in Kira's name. Kid bully you at school? 'Clearly', Kira would want you to shoot up the whole school!

People are insane and very, very stupid.

But he's so fucking tired of the hypocrisy, of war, of the rich getting off with a few well placed words by well paid lawyers. And this might be his last time free, or alive, in this maleficent putid world.

So one could not blame if he gave into temptation to be a little... theatrical.

With a cooperative shinigami, he can have them get information for him from vast distances away. With the shinigami world itself before him, he can just look through their strange portals, some of which are aimed at TVs in a way that feels deliberate.

The American right wing was a lot of things, and one of those was deeply superstitious and religious, though that like in all other demographics had been decreasing over the years they were still vulnerable to it. Their most dangerous factions tended to be ultra-religious, sometimes of different denominations, so if they ever did get power, they'd probably descend into infighting eventually; there was a good reason even very religious men once agreed with separation of church and state. The Supreme Court was slowly but steadily getting dominated by extreme Catholics, though Light wasn't quite familiar with the whole story behind that yet (he bet L knew).

The problem was how was he going to kill the soldiers if they masked all the time? Apparently the lot of them were so terrified (or had been ordered by paranoid superiors) that they were even masking in the bloody shower. Humans were superstitious creatures, and for once that was benefiting them since the threat in question was genuinely supernatural. He couldn't use the note to make them kill each other, the note was limited in that way, although he could if he found and unmasked a superior who knew all of their names and got them to write things down the base was large enough there was a good chance no superior present actually knew their names, and if they were using basic operational security here then probably no single superior had direct access to all of their names right now either.

But, these guys had to be hired. They probably had it all on paper if it was too sensitive for computers. So he merely needed to figure out where all the paperwork was, and have Rem dig through it. Tedious, but simple enough: some of it was bound to be at the base itself, and if not then back home at another base.

He bribes Ryuk to help her out with the promise of apples in the future, but it's still going to take hours. The base they've been taken back to apparently has thousands of people in it.

"What's with the human?" a shinigami asks while hiding behind another shinigami, peeking out timidly at Light. "Ryuk, gimme my book back."

"I dunno where it is, Sidoh." A blatant lie. "And stop being so scared of humans. You're pathetic."

"Ryuk!"

Ryuk gets chased around before fleeing out through a portal to do a task he'd previously decried as boring. "Gotta go look at paperwork, bye-o!"

A part of him didn't want to send a message, but to keep this from ever happening again? And to convince them attacking Japan really wasn't a good idea and that the blackout was ineffective because Kira had been merely 'faking' an inability to get around it?

Light would put the terror of God into them all.

But first, he needed to meet a god himself, and outplay them in their own terrain.

If he doesn't succeed... well, he'll just kill all the shinigami, a final revenge, and that will be that.

Rem and Ryuk have no idea the monster they've just unleashed into their own world.

Light has no intentions of telling them that Sidoh, the weird shinigami who showed fear the moment he saw Light, a mere human, was completely right rather than a joke.

In a realm full of immortal monsters, you know who the scariest being there was?

That's right.

It was Light Yagami.

Chapter Text

Light isn't sure why the shinigami king didn't show up immediately when he appeared in their world, but he's thankful for the extra time to plan and, most importantly, test how these damn portals work. Can you move the position of one after creating it? (yes) Can you make it disappear? (yes) If Light left a newly made one that was created only by a single death, would it slowly evaporate up and cut in half, say, a piece of cheese (or living thing) he left lying half-way in to the portal? (Unsure, inconclusive due to the small time frame.) Did portals have to be high up? The answer to the last one was a happy resounding no. Can he step in and out of the portal without a shinigami pushing him? Yes, with some difficulty, it felt like molasses, like he wasn't supposed to be able to move through there.

If he went death note first, it let him in easier, which was... interesting and suggestive.

Light only did the experiment first at the top of a tall tower just to be sure, but the next experiment he controlled for that variable to see if it's completely irrelevant.
Or mostly irrelevant - he still wants to know why the natural ones are apparently at tall heights, but maybe birds and butterflies that die in the 'heavens' are particularly appealing to portals, or maybe the shinigami manipulate them and move them up there over time for convenience: it's certainly a nicer view from far above. But he's getting sidetracked by science.

He's about to try to go stir up shit, maybe turn some of the shinigami against the king, when he realizes he may have almost just made a huge error. What if the shinigami king is spying on his every move right now and can hear everything?

Plus, the more he thinks about it, the more he realizes how narrow his current back up plan to get revenge on the shinigami in the event they murder him is. He can't really threaten with it, because they could control him if they knew about it. He needs to somehow modify his plans so that even Light Yagami couldn't stop the plan from going into motion if he was controlled, but at the same time he doesn't actually want to kill all shinigami if they can prove useful to him so it also needs to be stoppable by him - a seeming contradiction, but not insurmountable if people can only be controlled for 23 days. (It occurs to him his dilemma is similar to the dilemma faced by opponents of Kira, except the king almost certainly knows his name and face.)

Backup option one: he almost writes his full name in the note, so he only needs to complete a little bit, meaning if it comes to a duel between him and a shinigami in a contest to write his name he could probably win given any forewarning and give himself a full couple of months uncontrolled, or, huh... How are shinigami born? He is pretty sure they don't count as alive. If he writes 'becomes a shinigami', is that a valid method of death?

Realizing that he has technically just misspelled his name, he wonders if it counts to write down your own name multiple times 'technically wrong' if you intend to potentially finish it and make it correct later. He'd like to have different options open quickly for his death, but becoming accidentally immune to the note from this form of scheming would be a nice bonus. He's pretty sure it'll kill him if he does intentionally with the purpose of getting his name wrong and becoming immune, but that's not why he's partially writing down his name. For one, he suspects that while this would work against a normal shinigami, it wouldn't work against the king.

...what really bothers him is the implication that this rule may have been set by the shinigami king, who might, just might, have the power to just will him dead if he wants to, or extend the time frame a person can be controlled for. Without full knowledge of how the constants may actually be variables, he can't plan around things like 'he/she can only control you for 23 days' and 'death notes cannot over-ride the written deaths of other death notes'. What rules are arbitrary and what rules are dictated by nature?

He was fairly sure the king was ignorant about the full nature of the portals. There was absolutely no reason to think the shinigami had some deep understanding of electromagnetism or had done the 'Faraday cage over a death note user' experiment. But if they did control portals that took another option out of his small arsenal.

Fortunately, the death note actually could handle conditionals.

So that gave him a tentative second plan, backup option two. It required a willingness to threaten his own life, but that was okay, Light was crazy enough to do that. The main left-over nervousness was could the king somehow inactivate death notes entirely? What -

oh!

Light still had some hand made paper pieces. Ones he hadn't tried to dilute the killing power of. They didn't have the weird infinite paper power trick, but that meant they probably didn't have a full set of the arbitrary rules binding them either. And that meant the king probably couldn't cut them off from working, say because he decided 6 notebooks in one space was too many.

Sometimes, Light thought he saw weird little strings coming from the notebooks or from people, and rubbing his eyes, he wondered: did the shinigami king have special eyes that let the king see the relationships between things, their rule-sets, and manipulate them? How did he enforce '6 notebooks in the human world is too many'? 6 seemed a very arbitrary number. Was there a magic throne he sat on while he manipulated some great tome of rules?

What was a death note, really? It killed people, yes, but that was actually the least impressive of its powers.

"Human! You need to leave!" one shinigami tells him. "This darting in and out of portals stuff is getting old! Do something more interesting!" Wow, were they mad he was here, or were they mad he was starting to bore them?

"Yeah! You're breaking the rules by being here! The King won't be happy!"

"Did you know there are tiny micro-organisms living in your world? You can see them with a microscope. They could be crawling all over you right now."

"T-there are?" the shinigami is taken off-guard. He thinks he's squicked them out, which is pretty funny. It soothes some of his desire to watch them scream.

"Is there anything any of you would like from the mortal world?" he asks, because he knows in the long term he'd like to be as endearing as possible to all of them, some of whom are muttering very dark and angry mutterings about him being here. Plus, it will make his plan to do trades seem all the more enticing. He would rather be loved than feared, but if he can't be loved, he'll take fear. Light has to admit there is a part of him that finds dark satisfaction in that idea, in giving these monsters terror after they've inflicted it for so long on others. (He keeps his malice successfully off his face.)

Immediately, most of the muttering stops, and an eager outpouring deluges him: "A teddybear!" "A nintendo!" "A catgirl!" "Gold!" and many more.

He can do most of that. Not... the catgirl, he really doesn't want to know what strange thing was going through that particular shinigami's head, but he can get a cute little cat eared doll and all the rest. Just like that, he's ensured he is the most interesting and fun thing that's happened to them all millennium. He's wooed basically all of them, except...

"My name is Armonia Justin, Mason of the Beyond. You don't belong here." A shinigami encrusted in jewels with insect wings is speaking to him, moving to sit upon a throne. Was this the King?

Light's breathing is already ragged from the thin air. He must take care to not exercise or get excited too much. 
"I-"

"You may have duped Ryuk," Ryuk looks very offended at that, "who has always been too easily distracted to focus properly on details, but you'll find I'm far harder to fool, Light Yagami. I hope you've all had your fun," the male-sounding shinigami addresses the crowd rather than Light, "because this nonsense ends now."

"Yagami Light has paid a price for his actions, though he knows it not," a new, androgynous voice interrupts, and, oh.

That must be the shinigami king. It is bigger than the rest of them, and most shinigami are already 6-7 feet tall, though 'height' almost seems the wrong word to use for such a strange spherical being. They're all staring at it with respect, and Justin is kneeling.

The King has a skull within an even larger skull with ornate and strange protusions coming out from it, embedded  into a large, globe-like body mass that is suspended in the air with chains. He or she has four bony arms or legs that hang from his body, each with only three claws on each of his... you might call them hands, but the anatomy of the arms was all wrong, the singular bone segments not complex enough. After a moment of examination, he realized even higher up on the globe there were even smaller faces, frozen screaming in apparent agony.

"I'd love to bargain with you. There's a lot I can offer in trade-" and just like that, his rolling upset stomach betrays him and vomits up the extra seeds he last consumed, all the ones past the first six. What an awful start to negotiations. He's relieved, though: for a second he'd thought the king had decided to kill him on the spot with his mind or something. Or maybe the price the king spoke of was his name already being written down, though he suspects it's really the seeds.

"I too once ate of a forbidden fruit, and with it, sacrificed six months of every year to the underworld." That was a fancy way to say half his lifespan.

"You were human once," Light said, raising a hand up to his eyes. So. It had been poison he'd ingested after all, in a way. "Persephone. It's the only thing that really makes sense. Books are a profoundly human thing, and they're relatively recent, too."

"You may call me that if you like, but I never had a name. I laid in a field of ruin, all my countrymen dead, a combination of war, famine and disease. A shinigami even older than I, gone mad with power. My survival marked me as an accidental bride of death. That was when the rule that even humans without a name will be assigned one came to be." And how did that work, physically? Light was almost dying to know. (Later he wondered: Could he secretly rename L to something less ridiculous? Bob. Admittedly, L did not look like a Bob. Laurence, L could be a Law-rence maybe, having Law in his name suited him. Or more ridiculous. Like Backyard Bottomslash. That was definitely a 100% real and not made up English name his parents, who were secret American animation fans, would think up. Larry Lemming. Landshark Launcher. Lolipop Licker. Liar Pantsfire. Loopy Lancaster. Lil' Looter. Lily Longstocking. Lelouch Lamperouge. Could he just make L's name the entire dictionary and overflow the database, did names have a cosmic character limit? If not, could you become immune by making your name infinitely long? Light was becoming more and more convinced there was some Life Book hidden somewhere full of arbitrary designations for people.)

"The immense devastation in one place had an unintended side effect," Light deduced, forcing himself to focus on topic. "It opened a portal to the other realm for a brief moment. You saw the forbidden garden, and you were hungry." He was a touch disappointed that apparently the real origins of the shinigami were still lost to him. The previous shinigami king might have known it, but he suspected he was an accident of an entirely natural portal in pre-history. The very first bout of Black Plague or an exploding comet, perhaps.

"Oh so hungry," the shinigami agreed. "It was the worst thing I'd ever tasted, but that doesn't matter when you're starving."

The other shinigami were staring in shock. They'd clearly never heard this story before.

"Because you ate the fruit, when you die, you will become the thing you hate most instead of going to Mu: a selfish killer who cannot save anyone without causing their own death. There is no worse punishment I can think of for you," the shinigami king said. "It will twist you. You will kill for every life you have saved. You will be lucky to keep your mind, which I know you cherish. I did not lose my name, for I had none to lose."

"You were a slave," Light said faintly, trying to keep some tiny control over the conversation. "Ripped from your mother's hands on day one. That's why you had no name."

"Enjoy your freedom while you can, little Yagami. It will not save you. You've been entertaining, but you are tipping precariously close to becoming more trouble than you are amusing."

Light took in a deep breath that somehow still wasn't enough. "I never needed or wanted to be saved." He didn't know if it was a lie. "If I broke your rules, you can take my life in the bargain, first just take my advice on how to de-escalate the tensions that could lead to world war and thus the end of all shinigami in return, and let me act to save L and Misa who only became in danger because of my acquiring the note."

"Your life means absolutely nothing to me, little mortal." He'd sort of suspected that, but that still bothered him.

The idea that all of this could just be some giant fucking game that meant nothing, the scales destined to rebalance, bothered him deeply. But if he had to fight destiny itself, so fucking be it. He was already convinced real change was not so much about how many lives on the 'black' or 'white' side of the board were lost, but institutions, this just made that notion even more urgent to test if he was not to lose absolutely everything. 

"So you won't trade? Fine." And then he turned around and got down to business, attempting to dismiss the king of an entire world like they were a speck, a minor scratch in the record. "I want to test something. Do any of you have spare material you can lend me, particularly clothing? Scraps of cloth will do."

"I have a scrap," said Rem.

Another thing needled at his mind. How could he trust the shinigami king was honest? Maybe they had another reason not to kill him right away, in front of this audience they didn't want to know too much.

Maybe there was a reason Light had never figured out how to make infinite pages, or how the note cared about names.
Light hadn't been trying to turn himself into a shinigami.

He had been trying to turn himself into a living death note.

What if... all proper death notes had originally come from human beings? What if they had been people, all along?
Almost all paper is made from what once used to be living things.

"Ryuk, I give you full permission to leave Yagami Light's side. Rem, I will not forbid you from dying for a silly little human girl," the King (queen?) says with disdain. Will Light be skinned alive the moment the two of them leave his side? He'll have his own cards to play if so. "I will let you threaten the Chinese and borrow as many of my shinigami to do it to as many officials simultaneously as you feel you need to. But know this. Saving lives is fundamentally against our purpose and our nature. This is a one time deal, made only because the Death Note is not meant to lead to more deaths than written in it, yet you've made such an immense impact upon the world you've threatened to break that."

No, no no no! One time?

"But if humanity wipes itself out in nuclear warfare, you'll die too! As long as nukes exist unmanaged by a force like Kira, you'll always be at risk of dying out. There are other problems too, like global warming, or engineered viruses." All his imagined threats had required the shinigami king giving a fuck if the shinigami died. How could you threaten a being that didn't seem to care about anything? Or was the point?

The other shinigami are looking incredibly uncomfortable. "Yeah, that's right!"

Ryuk seems to be trying to manage a flicker of smugness, but can't manage to actually be happy about this situation either. Maybe he's back on Light's side now, in as much as he ever was (Light can't find it in himself to be thrilled about it, only resigned). Light has to admit it is a little karmic to see Ryuk's disregard for other being's lives being put upon him in a role reversal for once.

"So be it. We are Gods of Death, not midwives to life's next generation. Without the living, we have even less purpose," intones the King. "If it is our fate to crumble into dust, then perhaps only then will we truly be Death Gods."

So Light's gamble... was for absolutely fucking nothing. Pissed off Ryuk. Tipped off L his suspect was unstable because he kept asking questions like he didn't expect to live. Probably had the King fantasizing about skinning him even if the notes probably weren't really made of people usually (they did seem to piggy back off of the user's sentience which they wouldn't need if they had their own, right?). Great. Just great.

He can't even commit suicide correctly. Not that he's feeling particularly eager to die at the moment, mind you - the science of it all is far too interesting. But dying for humanity would be one of the more satisfying deaths he could think of.

On the plus side, he still had Rem and the chance to convince all the non-royal shinigami. And it seemed like there were limitations to the rules imposed on or by the death note, a point where things became so absurd even the rules started to break down which might apply to shinigami dusting for saving another too. He was fairly sure, by changing the fates of countries, that he'd actually already impacted who would live and die many times over. In Russia, there was talk of prosecuting people for corruption who would otherwise never have been prosecuted. That meant he hadn't just saved extra lives not mentioned in the note, he'd definitely caused some to die too.
And the time he wore the Faraday Cage had broken the clause that a name and face were all that was needed to kill, by failing to make a kill under those conditions.

Light had broken the rules multiple times over by making them, even for a magic notebook, physically impossible. And wasn't that incredibly interesting to know?

Alas, it wasn't like he could put on a Faraday cage and risk writing his own name just to try to make himself immune. There was a good chance a shinigami would notice and declare they were sick of his shit and just kill him on the spot themselves for that. Shinigami were the only death note users he really had to worry about, and he doubted they'd be impressed by his loop-holing if even the King became determined to kill him as the names thing struck him as one of those arbitrary rules. (Although, maybe he should try it the once since even a delay before death was useful.)

Even if the notebooks weren't exactly sentient, it was possible the King was lying his/her butt off because feeding off the death world by a living thing like a cotton plant was a pre-requisite to making a death note, and she/he didn't want to share that or tip anyone off if holding the secret of making the notes was part of how they held power over the others.

In fact... souls didn't exist, right? His Faraday cage experiment seemed to indicate there was no soul magic nonsense going on here. So how on earth could he come back to life after death? Maybe it was really a species of parasite? He could get himself scanned for brain worms.

 It was hard to think of how else the shinigami might come to be, when so many of them were clearly clueless and yet so human. It all screamed of something like the death note induced memory loss. Maybe it actually required staying alive and eating of the shinigami fruit repeatedly over time. One good alternative he could think of was that there was a way to make a deal to not just take on the eyes, but the full body of a shinigami in return for losing everything that made you human, including all your memories. Or maybe both ways worked: you ate the right things, or you made a deal. If it was a deal, there didn't seem to be much reason to keep it a secret if only the king could do it.

There was an obvious experiment to try, now that he could see all shinigami: he could kill poor Mr. Spiky and see if he turned into shinigami Mr. Spiky. Or kill one of Mr. Spiky's grandkids, it was very hard to tell the difference between them and Mr. Spiky. (sorry, Mr. Spiky. Light loved you, really.) A second experiment was really simple: Light could try writing names on himself and see what happened. If he acted like a heart burn note, then he was probably turning into a notebook and not a shinigami, which meant the King was lying.

Oh!

There was one really good reason the king would lie, come to think of it. If he/she didn't want Light to suspect the *real* method of becoming a shinigami, and thought Light might over-throw the King given immortality.

Light easily imagined the following story:

A pitiful mortal falls through a portal to a forbidden garden. They create paper from one of its trees, or vellum from an animal that fed from a plant there. They wrote, as so many humans in history did when writing was heavily restricted to the upperclass, of their own Godhood and ascent to Godhood upon death.
And astonishingly, it became truth.
And so the first shinigami was born.

If Light was convinced Light was already going to become a shinigami, he wouldn't try to become one via the note. That modern humans don't tend to write shit like 'dies and becomes a god' would be irrelevant, because this was an ancient being used to how ancient humans think. And ancient humans wrote a lot of 'so and so became a god'. Ascending to the 'heavens' was a form of death. Death didn't mean the same thing to ancient cultures as it did modern ones. That meant he couldn't assume the 'death' title of the 'death note' meant the same thing, either.

It made a lot of sense.

If one was being literal and sticking to modern meanings, and if one accepted Light's experiments that seemed to indicate there was no soul, then you couldn't become a shinigami after a modern death. There would be nothing there to turn into anything. But shinigami probably didn't literately measure their victim's heartbeats or anything like a modern doctor would, just looked for a vanished name which could have any sort of conditional causing it. (heck, hadn't Light's name done some funny flickering apparently? a point toward some kind of transformation, though not necessarily to a shinigami; animals were alive and could learn their own names but they didn't have vulnerability to the death note for some reason) So, unfortunately, with that interpretation he couldn't rule out that the king was telling some form of the truth, and if so perhaps if he kept eating pomegranates he'd turn into some horrible monster and appear to 'die' just beforehand.

"Sidoh, I'll trade you pieces of death note paper in return for you watching the king for me and giving me a signal if he starts to write down my name," Light bargains.

Sidoh trembled. "Uh..."

"Do that and I kill you, Sidoh." Lovely, that confirmed the King could kill shinigami, which meant there should be yet another way for Light to do it. The King turned and started to leave, floating off like a putrid blimp.

"Since you've been so incredibly cooperative," Light said sarcastically. "I'd like to give you all an example of how things can go if you decide to anger me. And no, controlling me with the note will not cause it to end, by the way, I've taken care of that so it will get worse if you do that. I can turn your entire fucking world into Swiss cheese with a flick of a pen." He wondered what spacetime shenanigans would happen if he tried to open a portal inside a portal. "I can flood you with fucking lava." Man, to think his original plan had been as simple as infinite termites eating their death note paper? This was so much more satisfying. (Well, okay, the other one would also be satisfying, but it would take an awful long while to build up that many termites, and he couldn't threaten them with it directly because then they might search out some way to hurt his termites before he built up a really overwhelming population of them.)

And with that, Light finished a letter on a criminal's name with a flourish -

and Care Bears and thousands of t-shirts started falling out of the shinigami sky. Many of the t-shirts were on fire.

"What the fuck?" Ryuk said, unsure if he was delighted or horrified by this newest bout of property destruction.

"Did you know that a common method of dealing with excess unsold products is to simply burn or destroy them, even if someone in the world is cold or hungry? Millions and millions of t-shirts get produced by high fashion and then destroyed."

Sidoh screamed as a care bear dropped on his head. Other shinigami showed a confused, sluggish alarm.

"The sky is falling! I warned you humans were scary and none of you believed me!"

It went flying right through his body and announced to the world as it hit the ground: "I love you!"
One of the shinigami was laughing at all this - until a flaming t-shirt hit her death note. Which was not immune to fire. "Fuck!" she screamed.

Rem seemed horrified, but reluctant to act against her ally.

Ryuk was laughing, and more careful to evade the flaming wreckage than some of the others who hadn't had to move their lazy rears in decades if not centuries. "Oh, man, Light-o, you're fantastic. I take it all back. I hope you become a shinigami. This is absolutely priceless. Just between you and me, I think the shinigami king thinks you're entertaining and wants you to stay alive for awhile, so try to not piss off absolutely everyone to the point they won't even care if you come back from the dead to haunt them, okay?"

Really?

That gave a different interpretation for why the king might lie. Could it actually have been for Light's own benefit? That seemed hard to believe when the king was so apathetic to his (her?) own race ending, but she did seem to care a lot about the rules and that the death note not affect humanity too much. If her viewpoint was 'just enough chaos from the note to be entertaining, not so much to end everyone, and if humans wanted to end themselves with their own weapons then that was their business' then she probably wanted Light alive long enough to fix his own mess, didn't actually care if he lived forever or not, and was overall apathetic instead of the monstrous opponent he'd dreaded having to try to outwit.

In which case, his writing a conditional 'if the human writing this note has their name written in a death note, this criminal dies jumping into a volcano and spawns a death world portal, living just long enough to go through with their burning up body and falling from the shinigami sky with tons of lava as the portal moves downwards on the human world side and upward on the shinigami world side; if this does not happen within 23 days the criminal instead dies near the t-shirt dumping ground via the death note portal there moving and decapitating them before it disappears ending the reign of t-shirt induced terror' in his hand-made note was probably overkill... But better safely avenged than sorry.

The sheer apathy of the king explained why their world was literately rotting.

But that was enough playing around with pathetic immortals for now. He had a raid to plan.

The real question was: did he fake dying and coming back to life, or was that too much?

Chapter Text

Halle grew frustrated with her interrogations of Misa, who suddenly was calling them all... stalkers?

What on earth?

"Since she's being so uncooperative, remove one of her eyeballs and have it implanted in a blind soldier," she orders. Eyeball transplants didn't at this time period have any sort of success rate at restoring vision, but if these were perhaps magic eyeballs that granted the holder perfect vision, then it was worth a try.

"NO!" Misa screams. "You can't do this!"

"So you'll confess?"

Misa falls silent, her lip sticking out in a pout. It's as if she thinks if she looks cute enough, they'll let her go.

"Do it. Remove her eyes," Lidner orders and walks out of the room.

Lidner decided to torment someone more fun and experienced:

Misora.

While she's distracted, utter chaos ensues on the base.

A short time ago:

Light 'successfully' got pages of paperwork from the base.... only to learn:

"These are fakes," Rem declared. "The photo doesn't match the name."

"Fuck," Light swore. He rubbed his eyes. "Okay, I think I got at least one real name by digging through the internet." The names of top military officials tended to be public information. He had to be careful of fake websites put up, but wikipedia was surprisingly useful here: it kept old edits stored in its history. "I'll control him to listen to all commands given by Kira or shinigami, and we can use that to get more information even though he's probably arranged things so he doesn't know all the names himself, he knows how the arrangement works. We can steadily work through the chain of command all the way to the damn DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) where the soldiers have their driver's licenses if need be. I just hope it isn't too late."

"Is there nothing I can do in the mean-time?"

Light considered this. "There is."

Soldiers walked into the bathrooms only to find blood drenched all over the walls:

OBEY NOT UNLAWFUL ORDERS.

Eerie music and skittering noises, laughs, screams played from nowhere. Anyone who tried to sleep found themselves promptly drenched in ice cold water. Anyone who tried to go to sleep a second time found themselves drenched in even worse substances.

The halls began to write out, in real time right before their eyes:

KIRA SEES ALL. HE KNOWS THY SINS. REPENT.

Many of the men spooked and began to pray.

A human being could only survive so many days without sleep. If this kept up for any length of time, there would be mass desertions.

...unfortunately, Misa didn't have that kind of time before she was hurt.

Rem dumped a bucket of blood on Misa's would-be 'surgeon', causing the man to retreat to the bathroom to wash off but not to give up entirely. "We must be getting close to the source of the power," the man mused aloud.

"Misa, we will get you out of this, I swear," Rem fretted, and flew back to Light Yagami for an update.

She found him with a blood and ink soaked hand.

He writes, and he writes, until his hand cramps and he switches to his bad hand.

He writes a thousand names.

He writes a thousand more.

He writes until he bleeds.

And some more, using the blood to make up for his exhausted ink, dripping darkened blotches in his haste.

It can't make up for his exhausted, nonexistent soul.

(he tries to not think about what it means he lives in one of the worst possible worlds, one with the shittiness that is having gods and their petty whims able to end your life like a puppet in a play, yet without the wish fulfillment of having souls or an afterlife. he doesn't succeed, another failure to add to his growing list.)

Because it does take an awfully long, boring time to get all the names to write with (even with bribed shinigami help), Light found himself doing other things while thinking of a plan B in case the names never come. He starts going after targets he was a little hesitant to before, fearing this might be his last chance and also feeling really pissed off and wanting to demonstrate what a fucking mistake this was.

He goes after America's rich and corrupt. The heads of several corporations, to be blunt. And a couple of real estate tycoons and white collar criminals known to have ripped people off and gotten away with a slap on the wrist, although there's only one American that fits that description that he knows off the top of his head due to their fame (his parents are American Animation fans who fought over whether a show like the Simpsons should be dubbed or subbed, not that you would ever guess it by looking at them, which explained Light's embarrassing name that they pronounced Raito but insisted was really meant to match the English word for Light; in other words, Light's name was a lot like a Westerner naming their kid Tsunami or Akatsuki and then proceeding to pronounce it wrong). A small selection of politicians in both parties who were openly lining their pockets with corporate money, just to show he could (but also because he just wasn't familiar enough with their politicians to do more in a mere day confidently). Some judges suspected of rape. That sort of thing. The sort of thing, in hindsight, he realized he should have been doing from the start if he wanted Kira to make a real difference.

'_____ obeys Kira's commands and wishes for a better world, and then dies at    '. is his go-to time borrowing tactic once the list gets larger than he expected even with minimal effort.

He doesn't quite spend all the time he normally does researching, in part because he'd already been contemplating many of these targets before, and in part because, fuck it, he's angry. He almost writes the President's name or the Vice's down for being a war criminal, but stops because he knows that needs more thinking out than he's actually capable of doing at the moment and this has a great deal of permanence even with the time-borrowing tactic. (He's already regretted writing names down with far too much viciousness in anger and hurt once, he doesn't want to feel that regret again.)

If they can be controlled to make the world a better place in some way then he only has one chance to do it right (alas for some of these monsters, they can only die once and after that everyone will be suspicious) and he doesn't want to screw that up. He remembers how L had cautioned him that not everything would work out so simply and luckily as they had in his first two tries, and he suspects America is a pretty screwed up place that would need just as careful a hand as the Chinese; maybe long term secretive threats that the public had no idea about would go a much longer way no matter how much he wants to kill the fuckers right now. Plus, if they try something, be it now or in many months time, he can do a last-ditch effort at control to avert whatever it is, and mind control will work better if everyone is off-guard and convinced that, since Kira didn't do it to the USA when he was provoked the hardest, he'll never do it at all. Or, hm, maybe he should exert control over the media and leave many of the politicians afraid, just go completely hardball and don't soft peddle it at all. He's certainly mad enough for that.

Further, if there's something really wrong with that democracy, simply giving the leadership heart attacks maaaybe isn't the best idea. Going after a few openly gives a clear threat, but, Americans are a rowdy bunch, they don't necessarily tend to respond well to that. They certainly didn't with Pearl Harbor. Simply killing one person might make them batshit rabid about 'terrorism', especially so relatively fresh after 9/11. The leadership was more cowardly behind closed doors, but he didn't know if private threats would really be a guarantee when someone braver might get elected.
(Although, a president is easily replaced by their vice president, aren't they? If he just kills the President, maybe he could make the President confess to all of his crimes, like whether or not he really stole an election and about all his war-crimes, and control him at the same time to give up L... No, that's still a bit hasty for the moment, he needs to think it through some more. People might accuse Kira of forcing the President to lie.)

Hence his newest plan: Make them think he can be literately anywhere, or even that he's literal God or Jesus. Impersonating a deity leaves a bad taste in his mouth, but it's not like he's gone out of his way to deny such associations.

And the base is an opportunity to show off new powers.

"Light! Misa is in severe trouble. They're going to maim her! Is the plan almost ready?"

"I'm making my moves, Rem, don't worry. But even I can only write names so fast, okay?"

Light knew the soldiers weren't the primary source of blame here. That's why he was giving them a chance to find their sense of honor and walk out in protest.

But their superiors also weren't the initial source.

No, someone was funding or politically maneuvering this. Someone powerful, rich and well connected who nonetheless thought they were immune to any Kira-induced consequences. And Light was out for blood.

"Hello, ambassador of Russia? This is an agent of Kira. I'd like any criminal dirt you have on the American upper echelons, the rich and the political class. To prove my identity, I can tell you there are about to be a large number of Americans suffering heart attacks. Yes, turn on your TV. Good, thank you."

And that's how Light found himself holding a list full of pedophiles. A certain real estate scammer he'd already put on his kill list previously for having multiple felonies and not paying workers caught his eye, but so did multiple politicians who hadn't been on his first 'corrupt targets' list. He wrote that the politicians confessed to their sins and revealed any crimes or acts against voter interest or even just basic human decency committed by any other persons that they were aware of, a political bombshell that was bound to reverberate throughout both political parties and leave, depending on the level of corruption, very few unscathed. He'd been unsure about the confessing sins bit and how it would play in the media (he guessed both political parties would try damage control and fail miserably, but keep power because it was a two party system which meant he'd have just pissed off both power holders equally), but with the reveal of more players he could clean house, and that mattered more to him than a minor setback like having the entire elite of the USA pissed off at him.

Then, after that, just to be thorough and to increase his chances of having hit one of his major enemies?

He went after billionaires. The Koch family, who controlled a lot of right wing media, went first.

Just to make things agonizingly clear that he wasn't as innocent and soft as they thought he was, and that he wasn't fucking around anymore. Even the media, or more importantly media owners, needed to be scared, he had brazenly declared to anyone with half a brain.

Was there probably a better plan that involved controlling them to do his bidding he could have used? Probably. But Light was too pissed to care right now.

His most likely culprits for those sponsoring this attack on him and L were going to drop dead.

The names of soldiers who didn't flee were soon to join them. And maybe some who did. At this point, with thousands to go through at fast speeds, it was hard to be discriminating.

Light had never killed thousands of people in one day before.

This was going to be a bloodbath.

Naomi wasn't happy to be called up by Halle Lidner.

"You're right, Halle. With L gone, so goes my employment. I still won't betray old loyalties, but if there's anything else you want, like good old fashioned detective work, I can do that."

"Loyalty is admirable, but you chose the wrong horse. I want you to admit that."

"I... chose the wrong horse. I'm sorry."

"If you can bring Yagami Light back to me, I'll forgive you completely. But don't you dare mention my full name aloud again, mask or no."

Lidner had let Misora go almost immediately, perhaps out of some misplaced fondness and belief she could still make some use of Misora with her employer now gone (she did outright suggest Misora could apologize and take up other work with her, which Misora has just made a show of grudgingly accepting), or perhaps because Misora was an actual US citizen. The very first thing the woman did with her freedom (after checking her phone for bugs, though that wasn't necessarily enough if the state tried to intercept her calls her hope was Japan would be the one to do that and would try to intercept any interception) was call up Soichiro Yagami. While Light may or may not be guilty, Sayu almost certainly wasn't. The man's family deserved to know about the potential compromise and then, provided that wasn't where the leak was, guided to somewhere with a lot of armed guards - like a forewarned police station.

"I suggest talking to Director Kitamura. Depending on his level of preparation, that could give away whether he was the leak," Misora states over the phone to Soichiro. "He may be unhappy but prepared to accept L potentially disappearing, and a couple of high potential suspects, but he'd find entire Japanese families getting disappeared likely completely unacceptable. So if he seems oddly prepared for all of this, you can immediately tell he must be the leak or that they managed to get some kind of forewarning from movements of others and didn't bother to tell us, either of which is problematic but in different ways."

"I see. I already talked to him because of the shoot-out and because someone tried to intercept my wife and daughter so they fled to the police station." Ah, it seemed they didn't need her warning after all. "He seemed surprised that happened, so I don't think it was planned on his part."

After that, she focuses on trying to track down the missing Yagami Light. For that... she meets up with his mother in a secure location and uses her best Japanese, and feels very thankful she's spent enough time in both Japan and America to speak without a noticeable foreign accent in both locations.

"Light might not have full awareness of the growing situation. I don't think he knows his friend Ryuuzaki was taken."

"Ryuuzaki?" his mother sounds very alarmed. "Whatever you do, please don't tell Light about that. I can't imagine how recklessly he might act."

So his mother knew about the crush. Interesting. Some part of Naomi had hoped it was faked, but if anyone would know that, it would be his mother.

"Or is he going by Ryuuga now? Or L, perhaps?"

That... was not the only thing she knew, apparently. Did he inherit his intelligence from his mother?

"I just want to keep Light safe. Do you have any idea of where he might have gone? Did you mention someone to him, or is there a family friend he might feel he can go to for help?"

Sachiko paused for a long time. "To be honest, I don't see how I can possibly know if you are trustworthy."

"That's fair. As evidence that I am indeed from L's team, I brought a still photo of myself taking a turn as one of his watchers and protectors, and another photo of the man that tried to set up the bomb on your house just before we intercepted him. I had many opportunities to hurt Light and I did not."

"That isn't actual proof you aren't a double agent." His mother is actually rather sharp. Light didn't get his wit from nowhere, it seemed.

Naomi has one last move to pull.

"I am..." she hesitates. "Also a mother." Naomi puts a hand to her belly, feeling awkwardly vulnerable for bringing attention to that part of herself for some reason. It isn't like Sachiko is going to get a fit of rage and strike her there.

"Oh, your poor dear! Why on earth are you doing something so stressful when you should be taking maternity leave? Do they not have that where you are from? Alright, I'll talk. Mikami Teru. Light might have gone to the lawyer if he thinks those were just a gang of assassins and his biggest problem is still L. The fact they've never actually met makes the meeting even more appealing if you think about it, as he won't want to visit a known connection right now."

"Thank you for your time."

It turns out to be a complete waste of time. If Light actually is at the lawyer's place, the man is hiding the fact and Misora does not have a warrant.

Where could young Yagami have gone?

(as a reasonable human being, 'into thin air' and 'to the underworld for a quick vacation and some world domination plotting' never crosses her mind...

'to a building of his intellectual rival to unleash hordes of termites' also does not cross her mind, but for a different aspect of reasonable, namely that that sounded batshit insane and she hadn't profiled Yagami as quite that nuts yet.)

It is just as she is leaving she sees a black van and masked men in all black try to go into Mikami's place, and despite herself, she feels a jolt of alarm.

What madness has everything come to, that random people who vaguely fit the profile are just getting kidnapped from their own homes and off the street?

While her American high school education might not have been the best (in her own opinion), she still clearly remembers them covering one day something that feels very relevant:

Witch trials.

She also remembers living through 'Satanic panic', which still hadn't totally faded to this day but was most prominent in the 80s and early 90s. And in both cases there had been zero evidence of anything supernatural.

It seemed a very real possibility that the terror of Kira had caused a lot of people with power to lose their god damned minds.

"Bait is no good if no one knows it's there," L said tiredly. 

"We're transmitting a simple radio message now." After Lidner had left, a man had taken over the interrogation.

'IF YOU WANT SECOND KIRA ALIVE AND UNHARMED, TURN YOURSELF IN AT THE FOLLOWING ADDRESS,' the radio sounded.

"We've got a JSOC Team positioned there at the meetup, willing to do anything to succeed," said the stooge. Hm. How long had they had that team of hunter-killers waiting? The JSOC team had probably gotten completely shitfaced drunk and complained they'd kill someone if they didn't get a mission soon, so this all must feel like a godsend for the rest of the poor bastards who had to work with the war criminals. He idly wondered if they bought the lies or if they just took the job so they could kill people.*

"He's not going to show," L said dismissively. Or at least, he hoped Light wouldn't.

"Then we'll hunt him down. There will be nowhere on earth for him to hide, unless he wants to live in a basement somewhere for the rest of his life."

That, unfortunately, might be true.

"Our attempts to hack L's encryption haven't been very successful. The stuff he's using is better than what the usual public uses. We're not going to be able to learn that way if he knew for certain who Kira was or not. We're going to continue to try to figure out where all the physical machines are for a direct attack."

"Understood, and you?"

he addressed the second individual reporting to him.

"The interrogation isn't working well."

"It's unfortunate we didn't capture Quillish Whammy alive, but perhaps he has other loved ones. Capturing children from an orphanage would be a horrible look, but a caretaker would be far more forgettable. Put someone on it." His conscience could handle harassing an old man. Even one that had committed no greater sin than care-taking.

"Understood."

The Americans had systemically worked to weaken the world's encryption efforts, even going so far as to have certain encryptions classified as munitions and treated as dangerous weaponry and to ban encrypted ham radio at home (encrypting radio gives a very easy, low cost way of very private communications between citizens, and the government didn't like that; if, hypothetically, you are living in a fascist government putting spyware in your phones you might want to look into that). It was very unfortunate that encryption regulations had been recently relaxed a bit for the sake of the internet, in Boyd's opinion. It might have told him right away if L was a state actor.

But there were very different and more pressing immediate problems.

The base commander Boyd was deeply unhappy. If Kira could control people, that meant there was no real chance of using an operational decision loop that updated on a real time basis per American military tradition: everything would be decided before Kira arrived, depending on whether Kira got their information or not and made the right decisions.

They had tried to set up dead-man's switches, plans that would activate if someone died suddenly, but what if Kira had planned for that?

What if Kira didn't even bother to show up?

The broadcasted location that Kira was supposed to arrive at was near but not actually at the base. With Kira's intelligence, however, it could be well assumed that he may very well come straight to the base, in which case this stupid plan (which he had wanted no part of, they were not crime scene investigators and further how did they expect his soldiers to shoot at a potentially supernatural being?) may have just put all his soldiers in danger.

He paused, suddenly alarmed at what his own hands had been doing absent-mindedly.

When had he decided to go down this hall and start dismantling his own booby traps? To set up a looping feed so the Defense Intelligence Agent they were working with wouldn't realize anything was going on?

With a terrified jolt, Boyd realized:

He was already dead.

He tried to speak, to cry out.

But his mouth was no longer his own.

Two guards of the military complex turn in shock as a masked figure holding a scythe suddenly appears right in front of them. They shoot, but somehow miss. The figure raises a hand up to heavens, and a bolt of lightning flashes down from the barely cloudy sky and strikes them and the others outside dead.

It leaves the earth scorched with an angry, jagged message:

L IS MINE TO JUDGE.

The lone remaining figure walks right in, and men fall like flies from a simple look or a flick of a hand.

The death note apparently makes some sort of spacetime manipulation. Hence his experiment with the two criminals, which worked perfectly. The death note is thus perfectly capable of opening a portal between the shinigami world and the human world, which means that once you actually get into the shinigami world, you just need a sacrifice on the other side to get around the 'portals are usually at tall heights' limitation: he only did the experiment first at the top of a tall tower just to be sure, but the next experiments he controlled for that variable and see if it's completely irrelevant. It was.

Or mostly irrelevant - he still wants to know why the natural ones are apparently at tall heights, but maybe birds and butterflies that die in the 'heavens' are particularly appealing to portals, or maybe the shinigami manipulate them and move them up there over time for convenience: it's certainly a nicer view from far above. But he's getting sidetracked by science.

Having Kira literately appear at the base is ridiculously risky. There are so many chances to leave DNA evidence, like if he gets shot.

But... if he writes names in the death note, he can puppet an entire play out. He can make the risks nearly zero.

The biggest risk, as always, is really L or someone he missed the name of. But the fun thing about the note? It can exert some degree of control on people not even named in it.

So that left Light most afraid of L. Would he reach up and rip Light's own mask off? He thinks of using tape, but that would only buy a few seconds at best.

It is only at Rem's urging that he remembers he is also here for someone else.

The blindfold is yanked off her face. She gets the joy of seeing the sharp implement go straight at her face, an image that will haunt her nightmares for the rest of her life.

Then, a miracle.

Men crumple to their knees all around her. The base is sounding alert and guns are firing, men are losing their minds, but no matter how much they shout "Shoot Kira!" none of the rapid fire seems to be taking down the target.

"Kira," she breathes, excited but also very thirsty and aching.

In her heart, she knows the strange figure is Light.

Misa always knew her idol would save her! She's so happy -

and a second later, Light dumps her in some dark realm where she can barely breathe and shadowy figures whisk all about her, whispering.

She's been hallucinating ever since the blindfold, so she's not even sure if the faces she occasionally makes out are real monsters or entirely in her mind.

Misa is not super happy with this.

But at least they didn't have time to remove both of her eyes. Just the one.

 To be continued...