Chapter Text
"What are you doing, Ryuzaki?"
"Oh, nothing worth mentioning. It's just - I hear the bell."
"The bell?"
"Yes. It's been unusually loud today." Rain fell as L tipped his head back, gaze climbing from the concrete rooftop to the sky. Grey clouds smothered the stars. His chest ached in a way he had no immediate data to explain.
He swallowed against the sudden thickness in his throat. Interesting. His body appeared to be grieving something his brain hadn't finished calculating yet.
"I don't hear anything," Light said.
L's head turned - just enough. His eyes did the rest of the work, cataloguing the details of his almost-certain killer's face the way he'd catalogue evidence: methodically, and with an unhelpful amount of attention to the fact that Light's shirt was soaked through, his hair dark and wet against his forehead, like he'd wandered in from the climactic scene of a romance drama, right before the confession.
The irony wasn't lost on him. It rarely was.
Well. At least there was this - small, but his, in whatever time remained - the private, petty satisfaction of watching Light look devastating while presumably plotting his death.
"Really, you can't hear it?" L said. "It's been ringing all day. I find it very distracting. I wonder if it's a church. A wedding, perhaps, or a - “
Funeral.
"What are you getting at, Ryuzaki? Let's get back inside."
"...I'm sorry. Nothing I say makes much sense anyway. If I were you, I wouldn't believe any of it." L let out a long breath and decided, with some surprise, that the rain felt good. A final, almost-absolution, rinsing them both clean before the end.
"Now - “ Light hesitated, “isn't the time. Can we talk about this later? We’re getting soaked.”
"Later." L turned the word over like it might mean something if he pressed on it hard enough. Talk about his own death later? Was that meant to be reassuring - a hint that Light wasn't planning to kill him quite as soon as he'd assumed? Except now the Death Note was back in play, Higuchi was gone, and the timeline had never looked shorter.
Kira's plan had executed flawlessly. L could almost admire it, in the detached way he admired any elegant solution that happened to end with him dead.
"Besides, the case has to be the priority right now. We don’t have time to talk about it. You know that."
The case. So Kira intended to keep up the act until the very last second. Even now, with no one else around to perform for.
"Of course. We need to catch Kira." L held Light's gaze, feeling, for once, entirely alone, just him, the clouds, and the rain, his only reliable companions tonight. "If only he weren't standing directly in front of me. Unfortunately, I lack the evidence."
"You know, you're right about one thing, Ryuzaki, most of what you say isn't true. I'd have no end of trouble if I took you seriously all the time. I probably know that better than anyone."
"Yes," L said. "I suppose that's true, Light-kun."
"I do know you better than anyone." Light said it firmly, like he needed L to hear the weight of it. "Which is why I think we should talk later. Right now, you're drenched through."
He lifted a hand, palm up, like he expected L to take it.
L looked at it the way he'd look at a wire he wasn't sure was live. His own hands stayed exactly where they were, buried in his jean pockets, as if the offered hand might bite.
"I don't think," L said, after a pause that felt longer than it was, "that this is a conversation I'd like to reschedule."
Dying. Did Light genuinely intend to discuss his own murder with him at some later, more convenient date? It seemed unlikely. More likely this was another move or an attempt to catch him off guard, to buy time until "later" quietly failed to arrive and the conversation went unspoken forever.
L had no intention of being robbed of it.
"At least wait until we're inside?"
"No," L said. "I'd rather talk about it now."
Light put his hand down. It was clear L wasn't going to take it. He looked the detective up and down instead, like he was running through a thousand questions and hadn't yet settled on which one to ask first.
"Well," Light said. "What size are you?"
"Pardon?"
"If I'm going to make any plans, I need to at least know what size you are."
"So you'll be the one personally buying it."
The box that would enclose him for eternity, six feet under. L supposed it made a grim kind of sense - Light would want to oversee the details. Kira had never struck him as the delegating type.
"Well, who else would? Of course I'm choosing it."
"You'll pick a cheap one."
"I won't."
"You will.”
“Have you seen my salary?”
“Yes, I pay it.”
"So size?"
"Five-ten."
"Huh?"
"Weren't we talking about coffins?"
"What?" Light's voice climbed a full octave. "Are you serious right now?"
"I believe from your reaction we're on different pages."
"Yeah, no kidding." Light's expression collapsed into something between horror and disbelief. "I was talking about ring size, Ryuzaki. You're talking about coffins. Were you not just talking about wedding bells? What am I supposed to think?"
The rain kept falling. It fell and fell, and L's hair went from damp to soaked exactly the way Light's had, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all - just stood there, two increasingly wet people staring at each other across a gap that had apparently, without L's authorization, closed considerably.
"Oh," L said quietly.
He filed the new data. Reprocessed. Filed it again, because the first pass had clearly been wrong.
Not a coffin, then. Not tonight, not by Light's hand, not for the reason he'd spent the last several hours quietly grieving in advance. He should have felt relief. Instead he felt something closer to vertigo - the specific, disorienting sensation of solving for the wrong variable an entire investigation's worth of times and only now noticing the error.
"You thought," Light said slowly, like he was double-checking his own hearing, "that they were funeral bells and I was about to murder you."
"The evidence was compelling."
"There was no evidence. I asked you your ring size.”
"Which, until roughly four seconds ago, sounded like the opening line of a very efficient murder."
"You thought I was about to kill you. Didn't you? How many times do I need to say it - I'm not Kira. We are going to need therapy after this. Seriously."
"But Higuchi's notebook. Your plan. It all worked."
"Ryuzaki - if you genuinely think I'm about to kill you, I regret to inform you that you're stuck with me instead. And that notebook? You snatched it out of my hand so fast I barely got a look at it. I'm still not convinced it's really what Kira used."
Light lifted his hand again. Rain slid down his wrist, off the tips of his fingers, and waited there.
And somewhere behind the sound of it, the bells went quieter.
L raised a hand of his own and took it. Slowly. Almost shaking, though the cold had nothing to do with that particular data point.
So quickly. That was the detail his mind kept snagging on, turning over, unable to file. Had Kira needed the notebook longer?
He studied Light's face the way he studied everything: for the crack, the tell, the version of the truth hiding underneath the presented one. Had the plan failed after all? Was this - whatever this was - simply Kira's next move, dressed in gentler clothes?
"Light-kun,”
Light's hand was warm. Uncomfortably, distractingly warm.
"I'm not convinced," L said. "Some part of me still believes this is a trap, even though I'm fairly certain I've already lost regardless. Please. Tell me the truth."
"The truth is something I can show you. One day, when all of this is over." Light's mouth curved, small and almost helpless. "You and me, side by side, working on cases." A pause. "Driving each other insane."
He pulled L closer. Close enough that L could feel his own pulse hammering against the wet fabric between them, entirely unauthorized, refusing every instruction his brain was attempting to send it.
"You'll probably get so absorbed in a case you'll forget I exist for hours at a time." Light's voice had dropped, low enough that it barely competed with the rain. "And I honestly won't mind. I think I love that about you, actually."
L's heart moved faster. Which was inconvenient, and inexplicable, and entirely at odds with how tense the rest of him remained.
"You work yourself half to death every day so the world's a little safer by morning."
Something warm landed on Light’s shoulder. Not rain - rain was colder than this, and rain didn't have a source he could trace to L’s face.
Light drew back just enough to look at him properly.
"Ryuzaki..."
"If this is a trick, Light-kun, it's a cruel one."
"And that's exactly why we're going to need therapy. Let's go inside. Come on. I'll dry you off."
Light reached for his hand again and led him in. They ended up on the stairs, and L came back a few minutes later with an armful of towels from the nearest bathroom, one draped over his head like a monk's hood, his expression as solemn as if he were heading to his own sentencing.
Was he not, in fact, about to die.
It seemed like an optimistic conclusion. Statistically premature, at the very least. He wasn't prepared to believe it - not yet.
He sat on the step while Light worked the towel through his hair, unhurried, methodical, in a way that made L acutely aware of how rarely anyone touched him. When he'd been judged acceptably dry, Light leaned in and hugged him instead.
"Okay," Light said, muffled against his shoulder. "I did lie."
L's head snapped up so fast it was almost audible.
"I already know your ring size."
"How could you possibly know my ring size?”
"I measured it while you were asleep. Out of curiosity. It didn't mean anything."
"Who," L said slowly, "casually measures a person's ring size for no purpose?”
"Who handcuffs their prime suspect to themselves with a six-foot chain, day and night, for months?”
"That holds up. Surveillance."
"Ryuzaki. Have you heard of CCTV."
"I needed you close."
"Needed me?" Light mused, clearly delighted by the phrase, turning it over like he intended to keep it.
"Don't take that out of context."
Light only smiled, and let his head drop into the crook of L's neck, settling there like he had every intention of staying.
L sat very still. Ran the numbers again - Higuchi, the notebook, the timeline, the ninety-nine percent probability he'd assigned to Light being Kira only that morning - and found, for possibly the first time in the entire investigation, that he had absolutely no idea what to do with the answer he was getting.
Slowly, he leaned back. The sound of the bells was gone now - vanished so completely he wondered if it had ever really been outside him at all, or if it had just been his own pulse.
The staircase stretched out below them, empty, quiet, lit by nothing but the hallway light spilling weakly from around the corner. And Light's arms were around him.
L catalogued that too, because he didn't know how to stop: the weight of an arm across his shoulders, the steady rhythm of breathing that didn't match the erratic thing his own chest was doing, the faint smell of rain instead of anything resembling a threat.
He'd built an entire case, brick by careful brick, around the certainty that closeness to Light Yagami was a countdown to his own death. He had not built any contingency for the possibility that it might simply be closeness.
"You're thinking very loudly," Light murmured, not moving.
"I'm recalibrating."
"Recalibrating what, exactly?"
L considered several answers. The percentage. The evidence. The last several months of his life. He settled, finally, on the only one that was fully true.
"Everything."
Light huffed something that might have been a laugh, and tightened his arms, just enough to make clear he wasn't planning on letting go anytime soon.
L let him. Filed that, too, under evidence he wasn't yet ready to name.