[private]

[curtainwizard]

It's another day, and the third time Light has been hit over the head with an age reversal. This time, he's a little older than the place has made him before - twelve years old, and more reserved and serious than you'd expect him to have become in just two years

Comments

[refractings]

[Light has been looking for a new outdoor room, and while this isn't quite what he had in mind, at least it'll save him a trip to the library.

--is what he thinks at first, but then he spots his alternate, small and strangely solemn. It's only the second Light he's met that's younger than him (he thinks). Both of them have been children, and he finds that when he's not in an embarrassing reindeer costume, he's inclined to fascination, or even protectiveness.]

Hello. Are you new?

[curtainwizard]

[The voice is alarmingly familiar; more like his mother's than his father's. He's heard it before. As far as he's concerned it's been two years, but still, hearing his older self cuts through the miserable rumination like little else could.

Casting an oblique look towards the doorway and the voice and the face, Light draws his hands out of his pockets, innocent, and rests them flat against the wall. A standard lamp bobs between the two of them.]

Not really. Are you?

[There's something adult and flat about his voice, and the set of his jaw is mulish. It could be disapproval, or it could be curiosity, or it could be the bastard child of both. He remembers meeting three adult Lights, but there's no way to know he met this one - and he's never seen one since he learned the things he'd done.]

[refractings]

[It was never as difficult to read Light's doubles as it could have been, never as difficult as perhaps would have made Light more comfortable with the security of his own thoughts. Over the course of months in the Mansion, it's gotten easier still, and so right now he can tell from several feet away that the boy doesn't trust him. That he knows what they tend to be -- or to become.]

No, I suppose you're not.

I've been here long enough. I don't believe I've seen you before, though. I met another younger version of us once, but you look a bit older than he was.

[He leaves the doorway and crosses to a nearby couch. The furniture brings him no closer to his double than he was, but it faces him, and is less awkward than hovering in the doorway. The sofa's floating movement doesn't unnerve him, exactly, but it makes him suspicious; he pauses in front of the couch, eyeing it.] Do you think these are safe to use?

[[[ooc: ::facedesk::]]]

[curtainwizard]

[Polite and careful, and a little more subdued than he ordinarily is, Light offers a grudging response.]

They're as safe as anything else around here, I guess.

[Which hasn't convinced him sitting on one is a good idea. His eyes don't move from his alternate; every centimetre between them feels essential. You're not very nice, when you're grown up. We killed them. It feels just as if time has passed normally, as if he's never forgotten, as if this other, older him is the awful thing he's meant to grow up to be.

There's nothing to say this is the one who was dressed as a reindeer, though he knows it could be, and he knows it's not the scary one, or the one who spoke English. He's not just trying to be nice. What does he want with me?

Sadly, Light's judging his alternate entirely by himself, by his own utilitarianism.]

Maybe it was me. I was ten when I was here before.