DN -- Chocolate Always Loves You Back VII: Pink Shirts
Title: Chocolate Always Loves You Back
Chapter: 7. Pink Shirts
Fandom: Death Note
Pairing: Light/L
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,575
Warnings: AU
Summary: Light Yagami is not having a good Valentine's Day. Between the new guy with the candy fetish, his partner, Matsuda, and the unsettling new case... the chocolate may be the only thing that loves him at all.
Author's Note: Light's dubious color choice comes courtesy of the much-too-wonderful icequeenrex. 8D
VII - PINK SHIRTS
It was only when Light was already in the elevator that he realized that he was wearing a pink shirt.
Sadly, he couldn’t even say the pink shirt, due to the possibility that he… might have owned more than one.
Maybe.
Which did not change the fact that he had somehow suffered such an egregious lapse in judgment as to select one to wear to work when half of his colleagues were accusing him of being a flaming homosexual-and when the odd whims and bright eyes of another of his associates were making it seem frighteningly plausible.
In a grave somewhere in Germany, Freud was howling with laughter.
Though he thought he’d read somewhere that Freud had been cremated.
In any case, all of this anxiety, sleeplessness, and general trauma was markedly impacting his decision-making, and he needed to tread very, very carefully.
Consciously and judiciously, he elected not to shoot the breeze with Aizawa this morning, knowing quite well that Mr. Matchmaker would have something pithy to say about the color of his raiment, and instead retreated quickly to his desk to nurse the rest of the day’s second cup of coffee.
He was trying not to think about the eventual yield.
In fact, he was trying not to think about anything, which was, as he had discovered on various occasions, virtually impossible for someone of his intelligence.
More was the pity.
Matsuda arrived precisely at nine and strode directly up to Light’s desk, looking about as cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat as Light felt.
But at least he wasn’t wearing pink.
Brandishing a new manila folder, Matsuda shook his head.
“This one’s different,” he announced.
Light snagged some absent loafer’s desk chair and pushed it opposite his desk for Matsuda to occupy.
“Female,” he recalled as he attempted to coax the ornery wheels over the carpet, “unlike the last two.”
Matsuda set the folder down before him and flicked it open.
“And older,” he pointed out.
Angela Avery, Light read. Blue eyes, blonde hair, and, sure enough, the date of birth made her just over nineteen-whereas Sander and Billy had been respectively fifteen and fourteen and a half.
“Expanding the parameters?” Light hazarded. “Maybe they assumed it was a younger boy that they were after, but-”
“How do we know it’s not random now?” Matsuda cut in impatiently. “Must there be a specific intent?”
Light wrinkled his nose. “There has to be a motive; some sociopaths enjoy the process, but no one kills just for fun-”
Matsuda massaged his temples, grimacing. “Maybe it’s a hate crime,” he suggested. “There are people who view the homeless as societal pests. Maybe somebody thinks he’s a new-age Jack the Ripper.”
Light fidgeted, toying with the nearest available pen. “We can’t exactly determine what someone’s going to do at random.”
“Why stop at cutting them open?” Matsuda demanded, pressing his fingertips to his sinuses now. “If you’re that sick, why not spread their organs around and bathe in their blood a little, right?”
Light stared at him.
Matsuda dropped his face into his hands. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m just frustrated, and scared, and I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since Monday. It feels like there’s nothing we can do.”
Light dropped his pen on the first page of the file and nudged the end, but a wobbly spin didn’t encourage Providence to point to the answer.
It wasn’t too surprising, given that his college-gathering Ouija board experiences had tended to lead to such revelations as “FXALGI.”
“Did you talk to anyone about getting more officers involved?” he asked.
“Almost everyone here is swamped,” Matsuda explained, “but if this gets big enough, the FBI might get interested.”
Light rubbed his forehead and pushed at the pen again. “How many people have to die before they find it ‘interesting’?” he inquired.
Helplessly Matsuda shook his head. “I’m going to see if we can convince Mogi to help us on the side,” he noted. “The man’s a machine. He eats paperwork for breakfast and red tape with afternoon tea.”
Light mustered an unenthusiastic smile.
“There is one thing,” Matsuda remembered suddenly, turning page of the file until he reached a blurry photograph. “Somebody snapped this with their cell phone yesterday. It’s hard to tell, but this is our killer.”
“Angela’s, at any rate,” Light mused, squinting at the unrevealing mess of shadows, a hazy crowd having parted on either side to open an avenue for a solitary figure dressed in black, half-turned to look behind him, ski mask hiding everything but a strip of white broken by a pair of calculating eyes.
“There were also three pictures taken of Lawliet,” Matsuda informed him, “and six of you.”
Light sighed. “Bystanders,” he lamented. “Can’t trust them to pay attention to what’s important.”
“‘Important’ is a subjective judgment,” Matsuda countered. “Evidently the majority of bystanders think you looking like James Bond is a much better photograph than some masked man on the run.”
“I didn’t look like James Bond,” Light maintained.
Matsuda pantomimed holding a gun above his shoulder, looking dramatically first one way and then the other, and hummed the theme.
Light grinned despite himself. “No, Matsuda,” he said.
“Yagami’s Angels?” Matsuda asked hopefully.
“God, no.”
-
Light needed more coffee.
He could almost invariably use more coffee in his day, but after having argued with the director on the phone for the better part of forty minutes in an attempt to get more units out on patrol-predictably, to no avail-he was even more desperate than usual.
Besides, his throat hurt now.
Taking up the You Have the Right to Remain Permanently Silent mug that Sayu had sent him when he’d first made it onto the force, he headed for the break room.
Noticing Lawliet’s insanely fluffy hair bobbing over his and Aizawa’s desk, Light paused en route to the Fount of Glorious Mostly-Adequate Caffeine.
“Hey,” he managed, striving to stay calm-and to ignore the way Aizawa perked up like a hungry dog smelling steak. “We’ll be needing to talk to Matt, Mello, and Near again to see what they know about the latest victim. I don’t think she was another friend of Sander’s, and they may not have known her, but they’re our best source of information as of yet, and they might be able to refer us to other people out there who might know more.”
Lawliet nodded. “Quillish is actually leaving later tonight,” he reported, “for an invention convention.”
Light blinked.
“They call it that deliberately,” Lawliet assured him. “But it means that we’ll have very few plans this weekend, such that you would be very welcome to visit for as long as you liked, Yagami-kun.”
The answer was pleasing; Aizawa’s extremely evident glee was not so much.
“That would work,” Light emphasized in Aizawa’s direction.
Aizawa was very deliberately pretending to be occupied, and Light was not buying it.
Furthermore, he wasn’t even borrowing it to return it later.
Lawliet smiled and popped a grape into his mouth.
Wait a second.
Something other than Light’s dignity, composure, and sanity was conspicuously missing from this scene: Lawliet’s candy bowl.
“Mello has been feeling ill,” Lawliet explained before Light could even ask, “and Quillish blames an excess of chocolate.” He tucked another grape between his lips and spoke around it. “Which I think is an impossibility at the most basic level…” He sighed. “But it falls to me to be a role model.” He ate another grape. “And Quillish would take my sandals away if I rebelled.”
“A fate worse than death,” Aizawa commented.
“By far,” Lawliet confirmed morosely. “Only Quillish would make me choose between sugar and shoes.” He selected another specimen from his bunch, looking resigned.
Light shrugged and displayed his mug. “I can’t talk; I get the shakes after a while.”
“But people expect that of an adult,” Lawliet pointed out. “Caffeine addiction is more socially acceptable.”
Lawliet really didn’t have any right to make distinctions about what was or was not socially acceptable when he was peeling a grape with his teeth while he responded.
“Well,” Light hedged, “I’d better be off to commit some socially-acceptable substance abuse.”
Lawliet smiled blithely. “I shall see you soon, Yagami-kun,” he replied.
Light smiled back, eyed a painstakingly innocent Aizawa suspiciously, and retreated.
Sure enough, when he glanced over his shoulder, Aizawa was holding a hand out for a high-five.
Lawliet appeared to be pretending that he thought this meant that Aizawa wanted a grape.
-
Light was trying very hard to think like a mass-murderer.
The problem was that he was not such a despicable creature and never had been-the idea of systematically slaughtering homeless orphans, for any reason, made him sick to his stomach.
Besides, if he was going to go around killing anyone-which he wasn’t, of course, but if he was-it wouldn’t be the orphans; it would be the killers themselves. It would be the victimizers that he would victimize-the blameworthy, the bloodthirsty, the aberrant; the ones who made it unsafe to walk the streets and unadvisable to brave the dark. The people who disrespected justice, who devalued humanity, were fittest to have it introduced to them whether they liked it or not.
Wasn’t there a show on Showtime like that?
Light only had as much cable as was necessary to provide the History and Discovery Channels.
At any rate, he wasn’t making progress here, and the only thing that there really was to do was to sit and wait for Matsuda to get off the phone with the reporters who had gotten their sticky fingers on a picture of the body.
Light was beginning to think that cell phone cameras should be outlawed.
For the record, he had looked nothing like James Bond.
-
Saturday morning, Light slept in until nine-thirty.
It was extravagant.
Light had been a failure as a college student; he had never been able to justify to himself being in bed past ten. There was something supremely unsettling about losing one’s grasp on the morning, and it made his internal clock do strange, sadistic things.
His academic peers had in general tended to regard him as One of Those Asian Kids-and perhaps he was, in some ways, perhaps in all the ways that counted. He wanted to do right by his parents, for the opportunities they’d given him; and by his professors, for their dedication to their work; and by himself, because he had seen from a very tender age just how much he had the potential to be. He had always wanted to help people, to help the world, to change it for the better, and, over the course of countless hours making silent acquaintance with the library regulars, he had come to realize that the process began with changing himself.
It was Gandhi-approved; you couldn’t go wrong.
Lawliet, however, seemed as though he might be the type to utilize of his weekends for recuperation-or, at the least, he was almost certainly the type to stay up obscenely late entertaining a trio of hyperactive teenagers, only to have to make up the sleep the next morning.
Assuming one, the other, or both, Light went about acquiring coffee, reading the newspaper, and doing some housecleaning, and by the time his peace-offering cookies were cooling, it was past noon, which hopefully made it safe to journey into allied territory.
At the top of the driveway, he hefted his Tupperware, took a deep breath, thought purely professional thoughts, and braved the brisk air to head for the door.
No one answered at his knock, but, upon detecting the strains of a piano from within, he hesitantly tried the handle, and it gave.
“Hello?” he called, setting his own flip-flops neatly next to Lawliet’s in the entryway.
“In here!” a young voice yelled enthusiastically back, so he followed the sound to an open, airy, beautiful living room, one wall devoted almost entirely to windows, offering a breathtaking view of the neighborhoods sprawled out below, rooftops ushering the eyes all the way to the sea-and before which a grand piano stood in all its glossy, gleaming majesty.
The boys, who were sprawled on the settee (and, in Matt’s case, the rug), looked incredibly clean and contented, their hair sleeker, their eyes brighter, their smiles wider-everything had fallen into place, and actual care was treating them wonderfully well. It was a terrible cliché, but Light actually thought he felt his heart swell, the whole of his chest suddenly warm.
Lawliet, of course, was perched on the piano bench, legs unbent for once to make his feet reach the pedals, though his posture hadn’t particularly improved. It was funny that Light hadn’t noticed-he had a pianist’s hands, long-fingered but strong, and deft, and graceful. They looked natural curved over the keys, and if the music he was coaxing from it was any indication, the instrument agreed.
Given Lawliet, it was less than a shock that it wasn’t Mozart or Chopin this fine afternoon: it was A Flock of Seagulls.
And then he realized that Lawliet was singing softly, in a voice that was low, gentle, and much more passable than Light would have predicted.
“With auburn hair and tawny eyes… the kind of eyes that hypnotize me through…”
Something in the area of Light’s already-abnormally-responsive heart went flup.
He chose to ignore the detail that the preceding line hinged on the phrase “a girl like you.”
“I like your shirt,” Matt commented cheerfully, shattering the spell, and Light’s brain obediently returned from the stratosphere.
Instinctively, realizing slightly too late how slapstick it must have looked, Light glanced down at his selection, which was white with very thin blue stripes, mostly-buttoned over a black tee-shirt, coupled with a pair of khakis that had always served him well.
Matt was, at the moment, wearing a rugby-striped polo, and Light hadn’t forgotten what he’d sported the first day they’d met.
There was a pattern here.
“Thank you,” he said, attempting not to be distracted by the fact that Lawliet had turned to face him and drawn both knees up onto the piano bench for company.
Mello was eyeing the Tupperware.
“Do those have chocolate?” he asked.
“They’re oatmeal cookies,” Light answered, “but they have semisweet chocolate chips.”
Mello scrambled up from where he’d draped himself somnolently over the couch, stepped forward as if baiting a rabid animal, and waited expectantly.
Light forked the container over. “They’re even better with milk,” he remarked to Mello’s back, as its owner was well on his way to the kitchen by the time the sound waves left Light’s mouth.
The mention of the beverage perked Near up fast, and Matt popped up to trail his companions, the goggles draped around his neck bouncing cheerily, and then Light and Lawliet were alone.
“They’ve also got a truckload of cinnamon,” he added, dodging an arrow of awkward silence, “and half the sugar of the original recipe, and whole-wheat flour, and applesauce in place of much of the butter-though I left the walnuts out in case there were any allergies.”
Lawliet smiled the smile that underscored the mischief in his eyes.
“Excepting the caffeine addiction, Yagami-kun seems to be a health fiend,” he concluded. “Quillish may just give you a medal and promote you to his second-in-command.”
“A certificate would suffice,” Light replied, unable to stifle a grin.
[Chapter VI] [Chapter VIII]
Chapter: 7. Pink Shirts
Fandom: Death Note
Pairing: Light/L
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,575
Warnings: AU
Summary: Light Yagami is not having a good Valentine's Day. Between the new guy with the candy fetish, his partner, Matsuda, and the unsettling new case... the chocolate may be the only thing that loves him at all.
Author's Note: Light's dubious color choice comes courtesy of the much-too-wonderful icequeenrex. 8D
VII - PINK SHIRTS
It was only when Light was already in the elevator that he realized that he was wearing a pink shirt.
Sadly, he couldn’t even say the pink shirt, due to the possibility that he… might have owned more than one.
Maybe.
Which did not change the fact that he had somehow suffered such an egregious lapse in judgment as to select one to wear to work when half of his colleagues were accusing him of being a flaming homosexual-and when the odd whims and bright eyes of another of his associates were making it seem frighteningly plausible.
In a grave somewhere in Germany, Freud was howling with laughter.
Though he thought he’d read somewhere that Freud had been cremated.
In any case, all of this anxiety, sleeplessness, and general trauma was markedly impacting his decision-making, and he needed to tread very, very carefully.
Consciously and judiciously, he elected not to shoot the breeze with Aizawa this morning, knowing quite well that Mr. Matchmaker would have something pithy to say about the color of his raiment, and instead retreated quickly to his desk to nurse the rest of the day’s second cup of coffee.
He was trying not to think about the eventual yield.
In fact, he was trying not to think about anything, which was, as he had discovered on various occasions, virtually impossible for someone of his intelligence.
More was the pity.
Matsuda arrived precisely at nine and strode directly up to Light’s desk, looking about as cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat as Light felt.
But at least he wasn’t wearing pink.
Brandishing a new manila folder, Matsuda shook his head.
“This one’s different,” he announced.
Light snagged some absent loafer’s desk chair and pushed it opposite his desk for Matsuda to occupy.
“Female,” he recalled as he attempted to coax the ornery wheels over the carpet, “unlike the last two.”
Matsuda set the folder down before him and flicked it open.
“And older,” he pointed out.
Angela Avery, Light read. Blue eyes, blonde hair, and, sure enough, the date of birth made her just over nineteen-whereas Sander and Billy had been respectively fifteen and fourteen and a half.
“Expanding the parameters?” Light hazarded. “Maybe they assumed it was a younger boy that they were after, but-”
“How do we know it’s not random now?” Matsuda cut in impatiently. “Must there be a specific intent?”
Light wrinkled his nose. “There has to be a motive; some sociopaths enjoy the process, but no one kills just for fun-”
Matsuda massaged his temples, grimacing. “Maybe it’s a hate crime,” he suggested. “There are people who view the homeless as societal pests. Maybe somebody thinks he’s a new-age Jack the Ripper.”
Light fidgeted, toying with the nearest available pen. “We can’t exactly determine what someone’s going to do at random.”
“Why stop at cutting them open?” Matsuda demanded, pressing his fingertips to his sinuses now. “If you’re that sick, why not spread their organs around and bathe in their blood a little, right?”
Light stared at him.
Matsuda dropped his face into his hands. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m just frustrated, and scared, and I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since Monday. It feels like there’s nothing we can do.”
Light dropped his pen on the first page of the file and nudged the end, but a wobbly spin didn’t encourage Providence to point to the answer.
It wasn’t too surprising, given that his college-gathering Ouija board experiences had tended to lead to such revelations as “FXALGI.”
“Did you talk to anyone about getting more officers involved?” he asked.
“Almost everyone here is swamped,” Matsuda explained, “but if this gets big enough, the FBI might get interested.”
Light rubbed his forehead and pushed at the pen again. “How many people have to die before they find it ‘interesting’?” he inquired.
Helplessly Matsuda shook his head. “I’m going to see if we can convince Mogi to help us on the side,” he noted. “The man’s a machine. He eats paperwork for breakfast and red tape with afternoon tea.”
Light mustered an unenthusiastic smile.
“There is one thing,” Matsuda remembered suddenly, turning page of the file until he reached a blurry photograph. “Somebody snapped this with their cell phone yesterday. It’s hard to tell, but this is our killer.”
“Angela’s, at any rate,” Light mused, squinting at the unrevealing mess of shadows, a hazy crowd having parted on either side to open an avenue for a solitary figure dressed in black, half-turned to look behind him, ski mask hiding everything but a strip of white broken by a pair of calculating eyes.
“There were also three pictures taken of Lawliet,” Matsuda informed him, “and six of you.”
Light sighed. “Bystanders,” he lamented. “Can’t trust them to pay attention to what’s important.”
“‘Important’ is a subjective judgment,” Matsuda countered. “Evidently the majority of bystanders think you looking like James Bond is a much better photograph than some masked man on the run.”
“I didn’t look like James Bond,” Light maintained.
Matsuda pantomimed holding a gun above his shoulder, looking dramatically first one way and then the other, and hummed the theme.
Light grinned despite himself. “No, Matsuda,” he said.
“Yagami’s Angels?” Matsuda asked hopefully.
“God, no.”
-
Light needed more coffee.
He could almost invariably use more coffee in his day, but after having argued with the director on the phone for the better part of forty minutes in an attempt to get more units out on patrol-predictably, to no avail-he was even more desperate than usual.
Besides, his throat hurt now.
Taking up the You Have the Right to Remain Permanently Silent mug that Sayu had sent him when he’d first made it onto the force, he headed for the break room.
Noticing Lawliet’s insanely fluffy hair bobbing over his and Aizawa’s desk, Light paused en route to the Fount of Glorious Mostly-Adequate Caffeine.
“Hey,” he managed, striving to stay calm-and to ignore the way Aizawa perked up like a hungry dog smelling steak. “We’ll be needing to talk to Matt, Mello, and Near again to see what they know about the latest victim. I don’t think she was another friend of Sander’s, and they may not have known her, but they’re our best source of information as of yet, and they might be able to refer us to other people out there who might know more.”
Lawliet nodded. “Quillish is actually leaving later tonight,” he reported, “for an invention convention.”
Light blinked.
“They call it that deliberately,” Lawliet assured him. “But it means that we’ll have very few plans this weekend, such that you would be very welcome to visit for as long as you liked, Yagami-kun.”
The answer was pleasing; Aizawa’s extremely evident glee was not so much.
“That would work,” Light emphasized in Aizawa’s direction.
Aizawa was very deliberately pretending to be occupied, and Light was not buying it.
Furthermore, he wasn’t even borrowing it to return it later.
Lawliet smiled and popped a grape into his mouth.
Wait a second.
Something other than Light’s dignity, composure, and sanity was conspicuously missing from this scene: Lawliet’s candy bowl.
“Mello has been feeling ill,” Lawliet explained before Light could even ask, “and Quillish blames an excess of chocolate.” He tucked another grape between his lips and spoke around it. “Which I think is an impossibility at the most basic level…” He sighed. “But it falls to me to be a role model.” He ate another grape. “And Quillish would take my sandals away if I rebelled.”
“A fate worse than death,” Aizawa commented.
“By far,” Lawliet confirmed morosely. “Only Quillish would make me choose between sugar and shoes.” He selected another specimen from his bunch, looking resigned.
Light shrugged and displayed his mug. “I can’t talk; I get the shakes after a while.”
“But people expect that of an adult,” Lawliet pointed out. “Caffeine addiction is more socially acceptable.”
Lawliet really didn’t have any right to make distinctions about what was or was not socially acceptable when he was peeling a grape with his teeth while he responded.
“Well,” Light hedged, “I’d better be off to commit some socially-acceptable substance abuse.”
Lawliet smiled blithely. “I shall see you soon, Yagami-kun,” he replied.
Light smiled back, eyed a painstakingly innocent Aizawa suspiciously, and retreated.
Sure enough, when he glanced over his shoulder, Aizawa was holding a hand out for a high-five.
Lawliet appeared to be pretending that he thought this meant that Aizawa wanted a grape.
-
Light was trying very hard to think like a mass-murderer.
The problem was that he was not such a despicable creature and never had been-the idea of systematically slaughtering homeless orphans, for any reason, made him sick to his stomach.
Besides, if he was going to go around killing anyone-which he wasn’t, of course, but if he was-it wouldn’t be the orphans; it would be the killers themselves. It would be the victimizers that he would victimize-the blameworthy, the bloodthirsty, the aberrant; the ones who made it unsafe to walk the streets and unadvisable to brave the dark. The people who disrespected justice, who devalued humanity, were fittest to have it introduced to them whether they liked it or not.
Wasn’t there a show on Showtime like that?
Light only had as much cable as was necessary to provide the History and Discovery Channels.
At any rate, he wasn’t making progress here, and the only thing that there really was to do was to sit and wait for Matsuda to get off the phone with the reporters who had gotten their sticky fingers on a picture of the body.
Light was beginning to think that cell phone cameras should be outlawed.
For the record, he had looked nothing like James Bond.
-
Saturday morning, Light slept in until nine-thirty.
It was extravagant.
Light had been a failure as a college student; he had never been able to justify to himself being in bed past ten. There was something supremely unsettling about losing one’s grasp on the morning, and it made his internal clock do strange, sadistic things.
His academic peers had in general tended to regard him as One of Those Asian Kids-and perhaps he was, in some ways, perhaps in all the ways that counted. He wanted to do right by his parents, for the opportunities they’d given him; and by his professors, for their dedication to their work; and by himself, because he had seen from a very tender age just how much he had the potential to be. He had always wanted to help people, to help the world, to change it for the better, and, over the course of countless hours making silent acquaintance with the library regulars, he had come to realize that the process began with changing himself.
It was Gandhi-approved; you couldn’t go wrong.
Lawliet, however, seemed as though he might be the type to utilize of his weekends for recuperation-or, at the least, he was almost certainly the type to stay up obscenely late entertaining a trio of hyperactive teenagers, only to have to make up the sleep the next morning.
Assuming one, the other, or both, Light went about acquiring coffee, reading the newspaper, and doing some housecleaning, and by the time his peace-offering cookies were cooling, it was past noon, which hopefully made it safe to journey into allied territory.
At the top of the driveway, he hefted his Tupperware, took a deep breath, thought purely professional thoughts, and braved the brisk air to head for the door.
No one answered at his knock, but, upon detecting the strains of a piano from within, he hesitantly tried the handle, and it gave.
“Hello?” he called, setting his own flip-flops neatly next to Lawliet’s in the entryway.
“In here!” a young voice yelled enthusiastically back, so he followed the sound to an open, airy, beautiful living room, one wall devoted almost entirely to windows, offering a breathtaking view of the neighborhoods sprawled out below, rooftops ushering the eyes all the way to the sea-and before which a grand piano stood in all its glossy, gleaming majesty.
The boys, who were sprawled on the settee (and, in Matt’s case, the rug), looked incredibly clean and contented, their hair sleeker, their eyes brighter, their smiles wider-everything had fallen into place, and actual care was treating them wonderfully well. It was a terrible cliché, but Light actually thought he felt his heart swell, the whole of his chest suddenly warm.
Lawliet, of course, was perched on the piano bench, legs unbent for once to make his feet reach the pedals, though his posture hadn’t particularly improved. It was funny that Light hadn’t noticed-he had a pianist’s hands, long-fingered but strong, and deft, and graceful. They looked natural curved over the keys, and if the music he was coaxing from it was any indication, the instrument agreed.
Given Lawliet, it was less than a shock that it wasn’t Mozart or Chopin this fine afternoon: it was A Flock of Seagulls.
And then he realized that Lawliet was singing softly, in a voice that was low, gentle, and much more passable than Light would have predicted.
“With auburn hair and tawny eyes… the kind of eyes that hypnotize me through…”
Something in the area of Light’s already-abnormally-responsive heart went flup.
He chose to ignore the detail that the preceding line hinged on the phrase “a girl like you.”
“I like your shirt,” Matt commented cheerfully, shattering the spell, and Light’s brain obediently returned from the stratosphere.
Instinctively, realizing slightly too late how slapstick it must have looked, Light glanced down at his selection, which was white with very thin blue stripes, mostly-buttoned over a black tee-shirt, coupled with a pair of khakis that had always served him well.
Matt was, at the moment, wearing a rugby-striped polo, and Light hadn’t forgotten what he’d sported the first day they’d met.
There was a pattern here.
“Thank you,” he said, attempting not to be distracted by the fact that Lawliet had turned to face him and drawn both knees up onto the piano bench for company.
Mello was eyeing the Tupperware.
“Do those have chocolate?” he asked.
“They’re oatmeal cookies,” Light answered, “but they have semisweet chocolate chips.”
Mello scrambled up from where he’d draped himself somnolently over the couch, stepped forward as if baiting a rabid animal, and waited expectantly.
Light forked the container over. “They’re even better with milk,” he remarked to Mello’s back, as its owner was well on his way to the kitchen by the time the sound waves left Light’s mouth.
The mention of the beverage perked Near up fast, and Matt popped up to trail his companions, the goggles draped around his neck bouncing cheerily, and then Light and Lawliet were alone.
“They’ve also got a truckload of cinnamon,” he added, dodging an arrow of awkward silence, “and half the sugar of the original recipe, and whole-wheat flour, and applesauce in place of much of the butter-though I left the walnuts out in case there were any allergies.”
Lawliet smiled the smile that underscored the mischief in his eyes.
“Excepting the caffeine addiction, Yagami-kun seems to be a health fiend,” he concluded. “Quillish may just give you a medal and promote you to his second-in-command.”
“A certificate would suffice,” Light replied, unable to stifle a grin.
[Chapter VI] [Chapter VIII]