DN -- Chocolate Always Loves You Back XI: In Short
Title: Chocolate Always Loves You Back
Chapter: 11. In Short
Fandom: Death Note
Pairing: Light/L
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,669
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: jenwryn owns my soul and most of this chapter. :3 ♥
XI - IN SHORT
Two heads with very big eyes appeared over the edge of Light’s desk.
Fortunately, they were still attached to their respective bodies.
Light smiled distractedly and went back to indexing all the details Naomi had asked for, cross-referencing them with his absurdly meticulous case report.
“Light?” Matt said.
Light kept skimming, running a tally in his head. “Yes?”
The boys were gazing at him imploringly; he heard it in their silence.
“It’s past five o’clock,” Near announced at last.
“That’s nice…”
There was another silence, for the duration of which Matt and Near continued to gaze at him imploringly until he couldn’t stand it anymore and had to put his pen down.
“What’s wrong?” he prompted, significantly more attentively this time.
The faces that had materialized across the desktop blinked piteously.
These two were well-educated in the ways of the puppy eyes.
“It’s five-thirty,” Matt took up, “and Lawliet’s still working.”
Before Light’s brain could embark on too much of a tangent about Lawliet’s inspiring dedication and persistence, Near cut in.
“But we need to pick up Mello,” he pointed out, “and Mr. Aizawa may develop homicidal tendencies if he has to stay here working with that tracking program any longer.”
Light envisioned Aizawa embarking on an anti-technological rampage, taking a sledgehammer to all devices unlucky enough to require computer chips, leaving a trail of sparking wires and shattered silicon in his wake.
It was frighteningly easy to picture.
Light shunted his papers into his briefcase, herded his pens by his computer monitor, straightened a crooked straggler, and got to his feet.
“We wouldn’t want that,” he noted, “would we?”
Matt and Near trailed behind him as Light draped his coat over one arm and made his way through the emptied office towards Aizawa’s and Lawliet’s desk.
Its occupants were still in residence, all right-Aizawa squinting at the screen with a truly priceless grimace, Lawliet perched on a chair beside him, curled up with chin on knees and arms about them, his bent elbows giving the position a bit of a vulture-ish look.
Light wondered if finding vulture poses cute was cause for a psychiatric evaluation.
Lawliet broke off in the middle of an explanation to blink up at Light. “Is it time to go, Light-kun?”
Aizawa looked up, glanced around, flung his files into a backpack, snatched his jacket, and started for the door shouting, “Shotgun!”
Lawliet smiled thinly as he unfolded from his chair. “I suspect Shuichi may be slightly tired of this stage of the investigation,” he remarked, rummaging for his messenger bag.
“I suspect you may be understating for humorous effect,” Light replied innocently.
“I suspect the two of you should elope while the eloping’s good,” Matsuda interjected airily, appearing from nowhere to saunter past them for the elevator.
“How does he do that?” Light managed to demand, staring after his partner, who had apparently spent his lunch break learning to teleport.
Lawliet merely grinned behind his thumb.
-
In just over two hours, Light had driven to the Aizawas’, deposited Shuichi, recovered Mello, shipped the crew back to the house at Pacific Heights, picked up Italian takeout for everyone whose stomach was sound, ferried it to its intended recipients, hit the nearest convenience store for ginger ale, brought that back, retreated to his apartment, and cracked his briefcase open on the kitchen table.
He stared down at its contents. Perched upon the central sheaf of papers was a cheerful and very familiar teabag.
The Post-It note beside it read, Don’t stay up too late.
Light bit his lip on a smile.
-
The first hour after that was easy, the second was a struggle, and Light reluctantly gave in to an incredibly assertive impulse at five minutes to ten.
It was rude to call past ten, after all, and that would have defeated the whole point of his decorous gesture.
It was unsettling that most decorous gestures did not result in him sitting cross-legged on his bed, dressed in his pajamas, gripping his cell phone and staring at Lawliet’s phone number as if it was an encoded message telling him that he was a lovesick idiot.
Which he wasn’t, of course, so it was a good thing that it didn’t say that.
He would have ask his physician about the recurring bouts of increased heart-rate, which were presumably the sign of a cardiovascular irregularity, rather than being a side effect of the more mundane illness that he definitely didn’t have.
This was all very stupid, himself most of all.
Light ran his hands over his face, punched in the appropriate numbers, and hit the button with the little green phone on it, calming himself by force of will as the line rang once… twice…
“Hello, Light-kun.”
“I hope I’m not calling too late,” Light began. “Do you have a minute?”
“I have a series of them,” Lawliet rejoined, smirking slightly by the sound of things. “What can I do for you?”
Matsuda’s commentary about equal exchanges of services chose that moment to return to Light, who attempted to push the thought from his brain-and then to kick it viciously down the stairs for good measure.
In the meantime, he settled with responding, “I just wanted to see how Mello was doing. Is he feeling better?”
He imagined Lawliet nodding amiably, and the fact that he could already interpret the other man’s silences was more than a little unnerving.
“He says he feels better than he has in days,” Lawliet explained. “He was watching Matt play video games for a while, and they’re all sleeping now.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Light said, and he could have sworn he actually felt one of the knots in his shoulders unravel at the news. “I also wanted to thank you for the tea.”
This time, he visualized Lawliet grinning like a contented cat.
He was much too good at this.
“I expect that you must have enough coffee to flood a mid-sized river system,” Lawliet was remarking, “but I wasn’t sure about the state of your tea supplies.”
“They’re pitiful at best,” Light answered. “I appreciate the help.”
“You’re welcome to it.”
There was a pause, the entirety of which Light passed in wondering if this situation was awkward or not.
He supposed that if he had to ask, it probably was.
“Are we not going to have phone sex?” Lawliet inquired.
Light changed that probably to a definitely and threw in some dear God what the hell just happened.
“…excuse me?” he coughed up after a few seconds of battling his vocal cords.
“I thought that might be what this was leading up to,” Lawliet mumbled, having the grace to sound embarrassed. “It’s a bit late, and you wanted to know if I had time, and the boys are asleep, and Quillish is still away…”
It took Light a moment to realize that the sound currently issuing from his own mouth was laughter.
He had assumed that it was a horrified wail that would segue into a eulogy for his lost dignity, concluding with an agonized crescendo into complete hysteria, but apparently that wasn’t the case.
“Who do you think I am?” he asked, the pointed query somewhat undermined by the detail that he hadn’t stopped laughing yet.
“Hopefully still Light Yagami,” Lawliet returned. “Or I’m in even deeper trouble.”
“You’re not in trouble,” Light retorted. “You’re just insane. I mean, I don’t even know how to have phone sex, so-” Light had never learned how to quit while he was ahead. Or while he was behind. Or at all. “-ah-that would be-a setback.”
It took him another moment to notice that he had not said that he wouldn’t have wanted to engage in telephonic carnality if he had been versed in its ways.
Perhaps this was why you weren’t supposed to call people late at night.
“We’re both very intelligent,” Lawliet mused. “Most likely we could figure it out.”
“What if Near comes asking for a glass of water?” Light inquired. “He seems to have perfected his timing.”
“That would be unpleasant,” Lawliet murmured in agreement. “Perhaps we should postpone this conversation until a better opportunity arises.”
It was not Light’s fault that ‘arises’ sounded a great deal like another applicable word.
The English language had it out for him tonight.
“Good plan,” Light decided before his vocabulary could throw any other punches. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” He elected not to add and have great difficulty looking you in the eyes. “Goodnight, L.”
Lawliet paused, and Light had time to hope desperately that he hadn’t done something wrong.
“It sounds nice,” Lawliet told him, somewhat haltingly; “when you say it.”
He hung up-which Light had to admit was a surefire strategy for getting the last word.
Finding, very oddly, that he didn’t care, Light set his cell phone on the nightstand and flopped down on the bed, pressing the heels of his hands over his eyes and trying not to grin like a fool.
-
“You’re happy again,” Aizawa observed as Light made a distinct effort to stroll inconspicuously past the other man’s desk.
How did Aizawa get here before him every day, anyway? That took superhuman punctuality, to say the least.
“I’m miserable,” Light countered, refusing to slow his stride. “I’m putting on a brave face.”
“Keeping it together for the kids?” Aizawa asked innocently.
Torn between rolling his eyes and slapping his forehead, Light settled for tossing himself down in his desk chair to wonder whether Aizawa was an accomplished sadist or a masochist with an elaborate death wish.
Maybe both.
He didn’t have much time to contemplate the matter, however, as Naomi was evidently an early riser as well: she stalked into the room as if she owned it and took a seat across from him.
“There’s a pretty distinct pattern here,” she concluded of the thick folder in her hands, the one he’d given her the day before. Laying it open, she began to spread crime scene photos across his desktop. “Adolescent boy. Adolescent boy. Young woman, blonde. Three more boys: blond, blond, brunet. They’re looking for someone in particular-a boy with yellow hair.”
Light pushed his bangs out of his face. “Have you met Mello?”
Naomi shifted, crossing her legs. “Who’s Mello?”
Light offered a thin smile. “A boy with yellow hair.”
Naomi twirled her pen. “One of your witnesses?”
He nodded. “If Lawliet’s here, you can talk to them for yourself.”
Decisively, Naomi clicked her pen shut. “I might see about that. Is Matsuda in?”
Naomi’s departure bestowed on Light three hours of precious peace-an allotment he used wisely, tying up more than a few loose ends from older cases and designing a very intuitive chart of the possibilities for the weapons employed in each of the murders.
Two minutes after noon, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. One glance at the caller ID confirmed that Lawliet wanted his attention.
“Hello?” Light prompted, trying to keep his head down.
“Do me a favor?” Lawliet asked.
Given the tenor of their previous phone conversation, Light wasn’t entirely sure how to respond.
Slightly frantically, however, he reasoned that they were in the office-even Lawliet, who had the social sensitivity of a housecat, would know better than to make an inappropriate request in these circumstances.
He would at least wait until lunch hour.
Light tried very hard not to feel like a hopeless victim of his own infatuation as he answered, “Name it.”
-
Light wanted very badly to chew on the end of his pen.
Nobody would notice a little nibble.
Except for Matt, Mello, and Near, whom he was supervising while Aizawa and Lawliet staged a raid of a warehouse in the city, the final destination of the chemicals shipped to the bomb-maker central to their case. Lawliet had called Light the moment they’d beaten their tracking program into long-awaited submission, and by the time Light had ventured to his colleagues’ desk, Lawliet had been holstering his gun.
Light had been determined not to find the image as attractive as Mello did awe-inspiring.
He had not succeeded.
In the hour since Lawliet had left, casting reassurances over one shoulder, Light had pushed the attractiveness problem to the backburner in favor of fiddling with his office supplies and struggling to focus once again. He had given Near all of his spare change to stack and sort on the desktop, and Matt and Mello were on the floor, Matt playing with Mello’s hair where the blond had laid down with his head in the other’s lap, so his only real distractions were… his own personal hangups, silver fishhooks snagging at the back of his mind.
He set his pen down, picked it up, and aligned it next to its varicolored brethren.
How was it that, in one week, he and Lawliet had gone from ignorance of each other’s very presences to questionable late-night conversations on the phone? It was almost the fluidity of it-the ease of falling into Lawliet’s company, of acculturating to his habits, of being in his house-it was almost this bizarre naturalness to the whole thing that frightened Light the most. Sure, there were butterflies and fireworks dueling in his stomach (the fireworks had been winning the last time he checked), but glorified moths and a couple sparks were no guarantee of anything.
He was waiting for something to go wrong. He was waiting for the heady flavor of it to sour; for the road to take a disastrous turn; for insect corpses and sulfurous smoke.
He was waiting for himself to take something wonderful and fuck it up.
And where would all of it end up then? He’d have gambled on a hand full of useless cards, disconnected hearts and diamonds to mark another bitter failure in the world outside of work.
And yet… Lawliet wasn’t like the people who had come before-he wasn’t like anyone, and he knew it, and he didn’t mind. Lawliet was brilliant and smug and irretrievably eccentric, and he didn’t bother to hide any part of himself. What Light saw of him was what he would be getting, and, if the foreign objects metaphorically bouncing around in his internal organs were any indication, he was liking what he saw.
He was just… scared. And scared of the fact that he cared enough to be scared at all.
This was all presuming, of course, that Lawliet survived the encounter towards which he had so merrily frolicked from the premises.
Light needed coffee.
And a lobotomy.
-
In short, Lawliet survived.
Furthermore, he burst back into the office looking so pleased that the spritely aspect of his being, prominent in the pointed chin and the wide, bright eyes, was magnified even more intensely than was usually the case.
Light did not find that attractive either. Not at all.
“Did you get ’im?” Mello wanted to know, leaning on Matt to sit up and rub his eyes.
“No,” Lawliet said cheerfully.
Light opened his mouth to ask.
“But we did apprehend a young man who claims to have worked for him,” Lawliet declared, “who may be able to lead us to his home.”
“It’s looking excellent,” Aizawa reported, grinning as though he’d uncovered pictures of Light and Lawliet consorting in a sketchy club. “Which is why we’re all going out tonight, drinks on me.”
Mello looked inordinately excited.
“Well,” Aizawa amended hastily, “all of us who are legally allowed.”
Mello pouted.
Light considered the merits of doing the same.
“Shuichi promises me that it will be fun, Light-kun,” Lawliet coaxed.
“I bet you’re a hilarious drunk,” Aizawa put in. “Just imagine yourself without any inhibitions.”
That, of course, was precisely what Light was afraid of.
He would be finding a way to get out of this one, and anything short of faking his own death did not sound excessive.
Come to think of it, faking his own death was starting to sound appealing.
[Chapter X] [Chapter XII]
Chapter: 11. In Short
Fandom: Death Note
Pairing: Light/L
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,669
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: jenwryn owns my soul and most of this chapter. :3 ♥
XI - IN SHORT
Two heads with very big eyes appeared over the edge of Light’s desk.
Fortunately, they were still attached to their respective bodies.
Light smiled distractedly and went back to indexing all the details Naomi had asked for, cross-referencing them with his absurdly meticulous case report.
“Light?” Matt said.
Light kept skimming, running a tally in his head. “Yes?”
The boys were gazing at him imploringly; he heard it in their silence.
“It’s past five o’clock,” Near announced at last.
“That’s nice…”
There was another silence, for the duration of which Matt and Near continued to gaze at him imploringly until he couldn’t stand it anymore and had to put his pen down.
“What’s wrong?” he prompted, significantly more attentively this time.
The faces that had materialized across the desktop blinked piteously.
These two were well-educated in the ways of the puppy eyes.
“It’s five-thirty,” Matt took up, “and Lawliet’s still working.”
Before Light’s brain could embark on too much of a tangent about Lawliet’s inspiring dedication and persistence, Near cut in.
“But we need to pick up Mello,” he pointed out, “and Mr. Aizawa may develop homicidal tendencies if he has to stay here working with that tracking program any longer.”
Light envisioned Aizawa embarking on an anti-technological rampage, taking a sledgehammer to all devices unlucky enough to require computer chips, leaving a trail of sparking wires and shattered silicon in his wake.
It was frighteningly easy to picture.
Light shunted his papers into his briefcase, herded his pens by his computer monitor, straightened a crooked straggler, and got to his feet.
“We wouldn’t want that,” he noted, “would we?”
Matt and Near trailed behind him as Light draped his coat over one arm and made his way through the emptied office towards Aizawa’s and Lawliet’s desk.
Its occupants were still in residence, all right-Aizawa squinting at the screen with a truly priceless grimace, Lawliet perched on a chair beside him, curled up with chin on knees and arms about them, his bent elbows giving the position a bit of a vulture-ish look.
Light wondered if finding vulture poses cute was cause for a psychiatric evaluation.
Lawliet broke off in the middle of an explanation to blink up at Light. “Is it time to go, Light-kun?”
Aizawa looked up, glanced around, flung his files into a backpack, snatched his jacket, and started for the door shouting, “Shotgun!”
Lawliet smiled thinly as he unfolded from his chair. “I suspect Shuichi may be slightly tired of this stage of the investigation,” he remarked, rummaging for his messenger bag.
“I suspect you may be understating for humorous effect,” Light replied innocently.
“I suspect the two of you should elope while the eloping’s good,” Matsuda interjected airily, appearing from nowhere to saunter past them for the elevator.
“How does he do that?” Light managed to demand, staring after his partner, who had apparently spent his lunch break learning to teleport.
Lawliet merely grinned behind his thumb.
-
In just over two hours, Light had driven to the Aizawas’, deposited Shuichi, recovered Mello, shipped the crew back to the house at Pacific Heights, picked up Italian takeout for everyone whose stomach was sound, ferried it to its intended recipients, hit the nearest convenience store for ginger ale, brought that back, retreated to his apartment, and cracked his briefcase open on the kitchen table.
He stared down at its contents. Perched upon the central sheaf of papers was a cheerful and very familiar teabag.
The Post-It note beside it read, Don’t stay up too late.
Light bit his lip on a smile.
-
The first hour after that was easy, the second was a struggle, and Light reluctantly gave in to an incredibly assertive impulse at five minutes to ten.
It was rude to call past ten, after all, and that would have defeated the whole point of his decorous gesture.
It was unsettling that most decorous gestures did not result in him sitting cross-legged on his bed, dressed in his pajamas, gripping his cell phone and staring at Lawliet’s phone number as if it was an encoded message telling him that he was a lovesick idiot.
Which he wasn’t, of course, so it was a good thing that it didn’t say that.
He would have ask his physician about the recurring bouts of increased heart-rate, which were presumably the sign of a cardiovascular irregularity, rather than being a side effect of the more mundane illness that he definitely didn’t have.
This was all very stupid, himself most of all.
Light ran his hands over his face, punched in the appropriate numbers, and hit the button with the little green phone on it, calming himself by force of will as the line rang once… twice…
“Hello, Light-kun.”
“I hope I’m not calling too late,” Light began. “Do you have a minute?”
“I have a series of them,” Lawliet rejoined, smirking slightly by the sound of things. “What can I do for you?”
Matsuda’s commentary about equal exchanges of services chose that moment to return to Light, who attempted to push the thought from his brain-and then to kick it viciously down the stairs for good measure.
In the meantime, he settled with responding, “I just wanted to see how Mello was doing. Is he feeling better?”
He imagined Lawliet nodding amiably, and the fact that he could already interpret the other man’s silences was more than a little unnerving.
“He says he feels better than he has in days,” Lawliet explained. “He was watching Matt play video games for a while, and they’re all sleeping now.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Light said, and he could have sworn he actually felt one of the knots in his shoulders unravel at the news. “I also wanted to thank you for the tea.”
This time, he visualized Lawliet grinning like a contented cat.
He was much too good at this.
“I expect that you must have enough coffee to flood a mid-sized river system,” Lawliet was remarking, “but I wasn’t sure about the state of your tea supplies.”
“They’re pitiful at best,” Light answered. “I appreciate the help.”
“You’re welcome to it.”
There was a pause, the entirety of which Light passed in wondering if this situation was awkward or not.
He supposed that if he had to ask, it probably was.
“Are we not going to have phone sex?” Lawliet inquired.
Light changed that probably to a definitely and threw in some dear God what the hell just happened.
“…excuse me?” he coughed up after a few seconds of battling his vocal cords.
“I thought that might be what this was leading up to,” Lawliet mumbled, having the grace to sound embarrassed. “It’s a bit late, and you wanted to know if I had time, and the boys are asleep, and Quillish is still away…”
It took Light a moment to realize that the sound currently issuing from his own mouth was laughter.
He had assumed that it was a horrified wail that would segue into a eulogy for his lost dignity, concluding with an agonized crescendo into complete hysteria, but apparently that wasn’t the case.
“Who do you think I am?” he asked, the pointed query somewhat undermined by the detail that he hadn’t stopped laughing yet.
“Hopefully still Light Yagami,” Lawliet returned. “Or I’m in even deeper trouble.”
“You’re not in trouble,” Light retorted. “You’re just insane. I mean, I don’t even know how to have phone sex, so-” Light had never learned how to quit while he was ahead. Or while he was behind. Or at all. “-ah-that would be-a setback.”
It took him another moment to notice that he had not said that he wouldn’t have wanted to engage in telephonic carnality if he had been versed in its ways.
Perhaps this was why you weren’t supposed to call people late at night.
“We’re both very intelligent,” Lawliet mused. “Most likely we could figure it out.”
“What if Near comes asking for a glass of water?” Light inquired. “He seems to have perfected his timing.”
“That would be unpleasant,” Lawliet murmured in agreement. “Perhaps we should postpone this conversation until a better opportunity arises.”
It was not Light’s fault that ‘arises’ sounded a great deal like another applicable word.
The English language had it out for him tonight.
“Good plan,” Light decided before his vocabulary could throw any other punches. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” He elected not to add and have great difficulty looking you in the eyes. “Goodnight, L.”
Lawliet paused, and Light had time to hope desperately that he hadn’t done something wrong.
“It sounds nice,” Lawliet told him, somewhat haltingly; “when you say it.”
He hung up-which Light had to admit was a surefire strategy for getting the last word.
Finding, very oddly, that he didn’t care, Light set his cell phone on the nightstand and flopped down on the bed, pressing the heels of his hands over his eyes and trying not to grin like a fool.
-
“You’re happy again,” Aizawa observed as Light made a distinct effort to stroll inconspicuously past the other man’s desk.
How did Aizawa get here before him every day, anyway? That took superhuman punctuality, to say the least.
“I’m miserable,” Light countered, refusing to slow his stride. “I’m putting on a brave face.”
“Keeping it together for the kids?” Aizawa asked innocently.
Torn between rolling his eyes and slapping his forehead, Light settled for tossing himself down in his desk chair to wonder whether Aizawa was an accomplished sadist or a masochist with an elaborate death wish.
Maybe both.
He didn’t have much time to contemplate the matter, however, as Naomi was evidently an early riser as well: she stalked into the room as if she owned it and took a seat across from him.
“There’s a pretty distinct pattern here,” she concluded of the thick folder in her hands, the one he’d given her the day before. Laying it open, she began to spread crime scene photos across his desktop. “Adolescent boy. Adolescent boy. Young woman, blonde. Three more boys: blond, blond, brunet. They’re looking for someone in particular-a boy with yellow hair.”
Light pushed his bangs out of his face. “Have you met Mello?”
Naomi shifted, crossing her legs. “Who’s Mello?”
Light offered a thin smile. “A boy with yellow hair.”
Naomi twirled her pen. “One of your witnesses?”
He nodded. “If Lawliet’s here, you can talk to them for yourself.”
Decisively, Naomi clicked her pen shut. “I might see about that. Is Matsuda in?”
Naomi’s departure bestowed on Light three hours of precious peace-an allotment he used wisely, tying up more than a few loose ends from older cases and designing a very intuitive chart of the possibilities for the weapons employed in each of the murders.
Two minutes after noon, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. One glance at the caller ID confirmed that Lawliet wanted his attention.
“Hello?” Light prompted, trying to keep his head down.
“Do me a favor?” Lawliet asked.
Given the tenor of their previous phone conversation, Light wasn’t entirely sure how to respond.
Slightly frantically, however, he reasoned that they were in the office-even Lawliet, who had the social sensitivity of a housecat, would know better than to make an inappropriate request in these circumstances.
He would at least wait until lunch hour.
Light tried very hard not to feel like a hopeless victim of his own infatuation as he answered, “Name it.”
-
Light wanted very badly to chew on the end of his pen.
Nobody would notice a little nibble.
Except for Matt, Mello, and Near, whom he was supervising while Aizawa and Lawliet staged a raid of a warehouse in the city, the final destination of the chemicals shipped to the bomb-maker central to their case. Lawliet had called Light the moment they’d beaten their tracking program into long-awaited submission, and by the time Light had ventured to his colleagues’ desk, Lawliet had been holstering his gun.
Light had been determined not to find the image as attractive as Mello did awe-inspiring.
He had not succeeded.
In the hour since Lawliet had left, casting reassurances over one shoulder, Light had pushed the attractiveness problem to the backburner in favor of fiddling with his office supplies and struggling to focus once again. He had given Near all of his spare change to stack and sort on the desktop, and Matt and Mello were on the floor, Matt playing with Mello’s hair where the blond had laid down with his head in the other’s lap, so his only real distractions were… his own personal hangups, silver fishhooks snagging at the back of his mind.
He set his pen down, picked it up, and aligned it next to its varicolored brethren.
How was it that, in one week, he and Lawliet had gone from ignorance of each other’s very presences to questionable late-night conversations on the phone? It was almost the fluidity of it-the ease of falling into Lawliet’s company, of acculturating to his habits, of being in his house-it was almost this bizarre naturalness to the whole thing that frightened Light the most. Sure, there were butterflies and fireworks dueling in his stomach (the fireworks had been winning the last time he checked), but glorified moths and a couple sparks were no guarantee of anything.
He was waiting for something to go wrong. He was waiting for the heady flavor of it to sour; for the road to take a disastrous turn; for insect corpses and sulfurous smoke.
He was waiting for himself to take something wonderful and fuck it up.
And where would all of it end up then? He’d have gambled on a hand full of useless cards, disconnected hearts and diamonds to mark another bitter failure in the world outside of work.
And yet… Lawliet wasn’t like the people who had come before-he wasn’t like anyone, and he knew it, and he didn’t mind. Lawliet was brilliant and smug and irretrievably eccentric, and he didn’t bother to hide any part of himself. What Light saw of him was what he would be getting, and, if the foreign objects metaphorically bouncing around in his internal organs were any indication, he was liking what he saw.
He was just… scared. And scared of the fact that he cared enough to be scared at all.
This was all presuming, of course, that Lawliet survived the encounter towards which he had so merrily frolicked from the premises.
Light needed coffee.
And a lobotomy.
-
In short, Lawliet survived.
Furthermore, he burst back into the office looking so pleased that the spritely aspect of his being, prominent in the pointed chin and the wide, bright eyes, was magnified even more intensely than was usually the case.
Light did not find that attractive either. Not at all.
“Did you get ’im?” Mello wanted to know, leaning on Matt to sit up and rub his eyes.
“No,” Lawliet said cheerfully.
Light opened his mouth to ask.
“But we did apprehend a young man who claims to have worked for him,” Lawliet declared, “who may be able to lead us to his home.”
“It’s looking excellent,” Aizawa reported, grinning as though he’d uncovered pictures of Light and Lawliet consorting in a sketchy club. “Which is why we’re all going out tonight, drinks on me.”
Mello looked inordinately excited.
“Well,” Aizawa amended hastily, “all of us who are legally allowed.”
Mello pouted.
Light considered the merits of doing the same.
“Shuichi promises me that it will be fun, Light-kun,” Lawliet coaxed.
“I bet you’re a hilarious drunk,” Aizawa put in. “Just imagine yourself without any inhibitions.”
That, of course, was precisely what Light was afraid of.
He would be finding a way to get out of this one, and anything short of faking his own death did not sound excessive.
Come to think of it, faking his own death was starting to sound appealing.
[Chapter X] [Chapter XII]