embarrassing death note art goes here

On the flight home, Light wakes up from his first full hour of sleep in the last week to find L on the opposite seat, staring at him.

He looks back at him, expectant and irritated - spending the past month almost constantly in L's company hasn't made him any less grating when he wants to be - but then L just turns to look out the window, blank-faced and silent, his chin propped up on his knee. He takes a sip from the teacup he has balanced precariously on the seat next to him.

"Come to America with me," he says, as though they were in the middle of a conversation about it.

"You know I can't do that.”

"Yagami-kun," he says. His jaw is tense and he looks down into his tea instead of at Light. “Don’t be a child.”

Light doesn’t say anything to that. L should be able to tell from the look on his face what the few choice words he’d like to say are. They’ve had this conversation so many times and L only gets more obnoxious about it in his uniquely obnoxious way.

He turns to the window and says, “I have a life there,” as thought it really means anything to him.

He knows it should mean something - but part of him, a quiet voice he’s stopped trying to ignore, knows that he’d be fine with it if he never went back to his parents’ house, that it wouldn’t be any great personal loss.

There’s an unspoken understanding between them that Light appreciated when they first met - that he’d been endeared by in a way that embarrasses him to look back on - but now it makes him uncomfortable to know they have so much in common, him and this brain wearing a person like a costume. It’s not just spite, he tells himself.

L won’t let this die because he never lets things die and he’s infuriatingly patient - he likes to bide his time if he knows it will make someone else even just mildly uncomfortable. The way he looks at Light is openly tired. Light has made the executive decision that he hates him.

“You’re free to do whatever you want, Yagami-kun. But I’m warning you now.” Then L looks at him the way he does, the way nobody else ever has, like he’s seeing Light in his entirety and is not in awe of any part of him. “You’ll be disappointed with your life when you’re not being honestly challenged by it.”

That sits between them for a moment. Watari speaks over the intercom: 20 minutes until arrival, sir.

"I don't want your life," Light says quietly. Once it’s out of his mouth, he knows with certainty that it’s a lie.

“Good.” L’s eyes are unsettlingly black and fixed. His lips curl around the next part, like it’s a joke. "I wasn’t offering it to you."

-

At dinner the next night, his father's guest Matsuda spits his water out all over himself and the side of Light's face.

Light frowns and wipes it off, jaw clenched. It's nothing, he tells himself. Matsuda's perfectly nice. He just happens to be a moron.

"You - you met L?"

It's complicated, Light thinks of saying, but Matsuda is looking at him with childlike amazement and a wet patch on his pants.

"I did," he says, and then he takes a diplomatic mouthful of beef to chew on for as long as it takes for this conversation to die.

"Obviously that's not information I want you sharing with anyone else on the force," his father adds, belatedly. "But work on the Hokkaido case has been what's been keeping me busy - and Light, of course." He smiles. "Him moreso."

Sayu punches Light's arm, grinning. "What a way to spend your summer, big bro."

"So you met him too, Chief?" Matsuda’s face is stuck on that same wide-eyed, open-mouthed look. He may be pushing thirty, but Light's sure that if it wasn't for the suit Matsuda would look younger than he does.

“Not personally,” his father says. “Only Light had the honour of seeing him in the flesh.”

Light makes a vague sound and picks at his food with his chopsticks.

He feels hyper-aware of the time difference between their dinner table and New York - of the fact that while L is meticulously at work pinning down members of a vile crime syndicate in one of the busiest cities in the world, he eats curry with his family and makes idle conversation.

There may as well be stars in Matsuda’s eyes. “What was he like?”

Light picks up his glass of water and thinks.

“Smaller in person than you’d expect,” he settles on, and drinks.

-

His father will be working at the station all night with the way things are going. Light offers to help, but his father shakes his head with a frown, tired lines underneath his eyes and patches of old sweat on the armpits of his shirt.

"We can handle this," he insists when Light argues. "You go on home. You’ve had enough on your plate."

He squeezes Light's shoulder and gives him that meaningful, soft look that Light is never sure what to do with.

"Everyone deserves a break sometimes." He smiles. "Even you, Light."

As they speak, L is on the hunt for the last man involved in the New York operation, the one that got away. The rest were rounded up and arrested last week all at once, after years of carefully gathered intel and planning. Light knows this because he was mailed a copy of The New York Times with all of it slapped across the front page and with his name written in a familiar slanting handwriting on the envelope it came in.

“Dad -” he starts, but his father shakes his head, hands raised, and he knows it’s pointless.

I'd work better on this case alone than every one of your men together, he thinks suddenly, viciously. 

His father should want his help. He should prostrate himself at Light's feet when he gets cases like this, should be thankful he at least has a son that can do his job for him.

Stop, he tells himself, and then he unclenches the fists at his sides and swallows.

"You're right," he agrees. He feels tired, worn out on his own brain. It's becoming hard to contain himself at times. It's becoming harder to see people, even people he knows that he loves, and not react viscerally to their failings.

He leaves his father to it. The office is bustling around him as he walks out, phones ringing and men yelling and nothing getting done. Right now, L will be sipping tea in New York and closing in on the last man - some awful bastard that Light half-hopes will get away, despite himself.

It doesn’t matter. Light is here. Light has been here for the past six months, attending university and collecting dust.

It's cold when he steps outside the station. The air nips at his cheeks and the sky has already gone dark, and there sitting on the frosted steps is Matsuda, rubbing his hands together and shivering.

He looks over his shoulder and blinks. "Oh, Light-kun! I didn’t know you were here."

He gets to his feet too hastily and almost slips on an icy patch, but Light instinctively catches his arm before he can fall back, his grip a vice around Matsuda's knobby elbow.

Matsuda finds his balance again. "Th - thanks."

Light regards him from three steps above. Matsuda rubs the back of his neck, smiling that anxious way he does around Light when his father isn't around.

"You should be more careful," Light tells him.

"These shoes don't have any grip." Matsuda gestures to them - a cheap pair of scuffed loafers. "I'll fall on my butt tomorrow when you aren't around."

He laughs, self-conscious sounding, and gives Light that flustered smile. Everybody deserves a break, Light thinks.

"Do you want to go out for a drink, Matsuda?" He glances at his watch, quirks his mouth just so. "It's fine if you can’t, I know it's late, but...” He shrugs, laughs. “I don't have anything to do."

Matsuda's eyes widen. He smiles belatedly, like he only just remembered that was the polite response.

"Why not?” His eyes catch on the corner of Light’s mouth and flick away again. He shrugs. “I don't have anything to do either."

-

They drink a few blocks away from the station, not at the bar Light knows officers normally hang out at after shifts, but a smaller one where people thankfully appear to keep to themselves.

It's alright. He's never been much of a drinker and he's always had a sense of unease in bars, maybe a distaste, but it’s fine. At least it’s quiet in here. On some level he even finds Matsuda entertaining when he talks about the job.

"What about you?" Matsuda asks after his third glass of whiskey (Light's still slowly making his way through his first). His cheeks are slightly pink. "What was it like working with L?"

Light’s hand tightens around his glass. The question burns its way through him every time one of his father’s colleagues or his criminology professors ask it - rattles at something in his chest, something ugly that needs to be kept caged.  

"It must have felt nice when he picked you," Matsuda adds a moment later, trailing his thumb around the rim of the glass. He gives Light that awkward smile and shrugs. "It must be nice knowing you're so good at what you do, I mean."

There were days in the compound in Hokkaido where Light felt like the work they were doing was more important than anything else, than anyone else’s. There were days when he sat with L at the computer screens, watching them blindly, and wondered if this was a life. What kind of man did it make him to enjoy living that way, surrounded by horrible stories and fixated on horrible men? 

He regrets that he didn’t go to New York now, and that’s how he knows it was the right decision.

"It's not everything,” he lies.

He remembers sitting with L in that room, speaking to each other with such intense clarity and understanding, and feeling as though he’d been finally found. He’d never recognized parts of himself in anyone else before, not even his family. They had undone evil together: they had done god’s work.

Matsuda doesn’t say anything. He touches Light's back, light and careful, and Light downs the rest of his drink and lets him.

They pay and leave. It's late, Matsuda says, and it is, but Light doesn't expect him to be making excuses to go home early. Light knows Matsuda just from a few dozen instances of meeting him, knows him intricately - intimately, even.

"It was nice to spend some time with you, Light-kun," Matsuda tells him as they wait for taxis, not-quite looking at him. "University is keeping you busy these days."

Light watches him and says nothing. The next time Matsuda gives him that nervous look, he reaches out to cup his cheek and kisses him on the corner of his mouth.

It's the noise Matsuda makes when he does it, that's the really interesting part - a keening, desperate sound that tickles Light's lips. It’s the way he fists his hands in Light's jacket and clumsily kisses back, like he wants to be so much better at it than he is.

Light opens his eyes. Matsuda’s are squeezed shut, eyebrows a despairing arch, his cheeks flushed.

There's something to this, maybe. He isn't much of a physical person but there is some kind of enjoyment in being wanted like this, having someone reveal the private way that they worship you like this. When he grazes Matsuda’s lip with his teeth Matsuda makes a soft sound, like he can’t stop himself, and it satisfies something in Light’s stomach, being able to make a grown man whimper like that.

Then Matsuda pulls away sharply, breathing hard, and looks at the ground wide-eyed.

Light breathes a little heavier, just to be nice. Even if he genuinely liked Matsuda, realistically it would never end up as anything more than this. Why not let him think Light likes him as much as he likes Light? It’s kinder that way.

"I'm sorry," Matsuda says. His eyes dart to briefly, miserably to Light's, and then he turns away. "It's - your dad - the job - and even though you’re so smart, you’re so young, I just...” He shakes his head. “I can't."

"Yeah," Light says softly. He checks his phone in his pocket from the corner of his eye: he has a new news alert from NYPost. He sighs. "I know."

-

"It's not usually where my mind is,” was how L had rejected him back in Hokkaido.

"Usually," Light repeated, voice automatic sounding.

L hadn’t look at him. The computer screens had reflected in his eyes. "I’m only human, after all."

Then it had been quiet. They’d both stared at the screens. Light had tried to force himself to ignore the way the back of his neck burned and the uneasy curl in his gut, the abject humiliation of it all. They looked at each other and saw different things. The thing Light felt between them did not really exist.

"I know it must be interesting to consider me that way," L said, absently. “I can tell sometimes when people are thinking about it. But, as I said - it’s unusual for me to be thinking about other people in that light. It’s just irrelevant, most of the time." He hummed. "Isn’t it strange how people are so interested in knowing the most irrelevant details about you?"

Sexuality had felt irrelevant back home, where Light had never even felt strong platonic feelings towards anyone, but here, now - it was different. Light hated himself for it. He hated L more, for saying all of this and not realising how awful it was of him, and stared at the screen trying not to scowl.

“I suppose it makes sense,” L added thoughtfully after a moment, thumb to his bottom lip. “People just want to know you're the same as they are.”