#lawryuk

This is actually a fairly decent afterlife, all things considered. No pinpricks of sensation can touch him now. He’s going to miss haunting this place, once Light is gone — because he will be gone: L may have no faith in his successors but he knows Light’s time is ticking to an end. L can tell. He doesn’t have the energy to run much longer.

When he closes his eyes he can still hear Misa’s wild laughter in his ears. He stares at the ceiling instead.

“You really hate him, don’t you?”

“Hm?” L lolls his head around. Ryuk is dangling from the ceiling beams like he’s doing a pull-up. “Why do you ask?”

“I told you,” Ryuk says. “Ghosts can only hang around if they’ve got a powerful anger in their hearts, yeah?”

Oh. Right.

L is not very used to lying. He’s good at it, don’t get him wrong — certainly better than most people he knows — but he has never had to sustain one for such a long and continuous span of time. Ryukichi ‘Ryuk’ Nishiyama cannot be allowed to figure out who L’s real target is, because who knows how that would disturb the little play they’re both watching?

The moral thing to do, really, is write Ryuk’s name right now. But then L wouldn’t be able to hang around here anymore, and he is rather invested in seeing how this ends.

(And seeing Light’s misery first-hand, but that’s less relevant.)

“Yes,” he says. “I hate Light Yagami.”

It’s not even that much of a lie. Dying hurt, you know?

“Well,” Ryuk says, “I’m not letting you kill him.”

“I’m not planning to,” L says politely. “But how would you stop me?”

Ryuk shrugs. “I don’t know how ghosts work… Block you from getting to him. Tell him about you. Kill him first.”

“Why haven’t you told him already?” L asks, because apparently he wants to keep up his streak of self-sabotaging curiosity.

“Are you kidding? He’d be all over me, asking me how to talk to you, trying to figure out how he could kill you again… He’s insufferable when it gets to you, L.”

There’s a surge of misdirected fondness in some chamber of his dead heart. L shakes it off and says, “I thought you liked him insufferable.”

“It’d be a nice change of pace from this,” Ryuk agrees. “But… hmm. I dunno, keeping a secret from him is kinda fun. Since he knows everything most of the time.”

Light has never known everything. Light knows around 1% of what L does, and certainly less than what most people do at his age, considering he can’t even act very human around his coworkers anymore.

“And besides,” Ryuk adds, “it’s nice having someone to talk to, you know?” He nods at the bedroom door. “Light-o doesn’t really talk anymore.”

Yes, because Ryuk dropped a murder book into his life and drove him to ruin his relationships with everyone around him while stagnating in forever-seventeen, and Light doesn’t even seem to realize. No fucking wonder he doesn’t talk anymore.

“I guess you’re better entertainment than I’ve had in a while,” Ryuk concludes.

“Careful, Ryuk,” L says, letting a drop of condescension seep into his voice. He’s earned it for putting up with this monster for so long. “I might think you like me.”

Ryuk’s eyes flash wide. “Huh?”

L rolls his eyes. “It was a jo—”

Ryuk lets go of the ceiling beam and only just manages to flap his wings before he crashes into the ground.

…Wait. Is L onto something?

He mentally flips through his psychological profile book. Ryuk likes: entertainment, apples, the secondhand thrill of breaking the rules. Ryuk dislikes: boredom.

Ryuk has been very bored.

L has also been very bored. And he can’t kill Ryuk now, but no one said a little torture wasn’t in the cards.

L tilts his head, deliberately slow, so his hair brushes over his clavicle in a way he’s been told is insanely attractive. Possibly it isn’t now that he’s dead, but Ryuk’s eyes snap over right away, so he’s still got something.

“I was joking. But we could have fun if you wanted,” L says, letting his voice dip lower.

“I — uh — wait a second, L,” Ryuk says, half-stammering. L smirks to himself. “Are you saying…?”

L raises an eyebrow at him. Then he remembers most people can’t see his eyebrows. Then he remembers the Shinigami have preternaturally good vision, and he has nothing to worry about.

“Uh…” Ryuk’s eyes dart around. “Gods of death aren’t allowed to have, uh, intercourse. It’s in the rules.”

“We’re not going to,” L says, hoisting himself up from the sofa and catching the brief flash of disappointment over Ryuk’s face. “Would you enjoy having a knife held to your neck, in a sex way?”

Ryuk’s eyes widen further. “That’s a thing?”

That’s definitely a yes. Also, how has Ryuk lived millions of years peering down at the human realm without witnessing knifeplay?

“Come on,” L says. “We can use the guest room.”

-

It takes more tries than L would like to admit for him to get a grasp on the kitchen knife. He has to focus, to feel the ground under his feet, to remember that if he can obey the physical rules of floors then he can obey the physical rules of wielding violence as well.

It’s vaguely uncomfortable. His body is his, at least in abstraction, but the environment is not; he was never particularly good at existing in everyone else’s reality even back when he was alive. He liked his padded white room and his Macbook and the deafening silence.

Ryuk is looking at him, though, and when he hyuks in response to L’s third failure, the rage that shoots through L is so cold and dark that he snatches the knife perfectly.

So now they’re here. Somehow L has ended up straddling the god of death that he swore his most serious vow to kill. The sheets underneath them are beige. Ryuk is panting in his face — his breath probably stinks, but thankfully L’s olfactory senses aren’t tuned into this world’s channel yet — and L eyes his neck: no arteries, but lots and lots of collarbones that are practically begging to be broken.

Lesser men would start doubting their decision-making skills at this point, but L is not lesser men.

“Ah — hah,” Ryuk says, when L touches the knife to his throat.

“Sensitive much,” L comments.

“Look, buddy, I haven’t been touched in—”

Ryuk shuts up when L presses the knife in deeper, punching out an exhale, a full-body shudder, the illusion of his pupils flickering as he looks down to where L is drawing a line down to his chest.

Does a Shinigami have blood? Would he even be able to tell if he broke the skin?

He imagines, briefly, Light underneath him instead. Light would put up a fight. Light would make L work harder to dig up the sparks so obviously spinning in Ryuk’s eyes. Light would buck into the knife if it meant getting himself free and L would shove him back down, watch the blood welling in the shape of a smile along that pretty neck —

“Scared?” L murmurs.

Ryuk barks out a laugh, high-pitched and careening. “You’re a detective, aren’t you?”

L drags the tip of the knife down to the spot right above where a human sternum would be, where Ryuk’s neck and chest meet, held together by jagged arcs of bones that look like staples. They would be so easy to undo. There are an unfathomable number of years thrumming in panic under the edge of L’s blade, desperate to fall apart.

Falling into his interrogator voice is the easiest thing in the world. He makes his voice low, soft. “Answer the question.”

“I’m a little scared,” Ryuk says, sucking a breath in through his teeth when L slides the knife between the bone-rings. “I k-know you can’t hurt me, but — fuck.”

L grins. He twists the knife, listening to it scrape as he applies pressure outward, half-thinking of Beyond and then thinking about nothing at all except how goddamn difficult it is to not just tear the whole bone out and then start stabbing.

He wants, is the thing.

L does not want very much, as a rule. (Said with the carefree air of someone who has everything they believe they want on a silver platter.) He likes winning: he likes clear, beautiful, remote takedowns, cases solved and tied in neat little bows, preferably with as few civilians involved as he can manage, although he often can’t. He likes the way surprise looked on Light’s face. He likes sweets. Liking is not the same thing as wanting.

If he’d wanted Light dead, he could have arranged it. But that wasn’t the game.

Ryuk, though —

L remembers the exact moment he’d realized this was all Ryuk’s fault. He’d gotten the notebook already, his grip on the corner white-knuckled. He usually wasn’t so afraid of dropping things, but this was the only way to make things right for good. And then it had hit him in a tidal wave of nausea: he’d stopped before he could reach Wammy and almost doubled over, pressing his fist to his mouth, because — thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands by now. Real people who made bad jokes and listened to music and probably had loved ones, dead because a Shinigami was bored.

L doesn’t really have much of a moral compass. Times like this are when he remembers why. How does anyone stand it, he’d thought, Light’s face swimming in his vision, the phantom tang of blood trickling into his mouth as he remembered the sting of his punch: how can anyone stand to feel all of this at once?

Is this how Light felt, picking up the Death Note?

L could have stopped this. L could have thrown him into prison as soon as they’d narrowed their suspect pool down to the two families Raye Penber was tracking. L had not, because it was out of his jurisdiction, because he hadn’t gotten solid proof yet, because it would be boring.

“L—” Ryuk wheezes. “L, wait—”

L, the letter, was the unspoken god of the old world. L Lawliet was a person, and not a particularly good one; he acknowledged this and moved on, because there were more important things at hand, such as catching a murderer. L was judge and jury and executor. L Lawliet is dead at twenty-five and blindingly angry.

Maybe it’s not even all the rotting dead. Maybe it’s just Light. Maybe, L thinks as his grip tightens, his mouth drawing back of its own accord, he’s just hopelessly fucking furious because Ryuk had brought Light into L’s life in the same move that killed them both.

No, this isn’t judgment. Not like Light writing names upon names without breaking a sweat. Not like L’s distorted voice ordering Lind L Tailor to be restrained and dressed in newscasters’ clothes. Not like Ryuk leaning back and laughing at the fire consuming it all.

This isn’t judgment. This is just rage.

“Light!”

L lets go out of sheer shock more than anything. He looks down. His hands are bleeding, just a little, from where they were wrapped around Ryuk’s neck. At some point he’d abandoned the knife, he supposes.

Ryuk is staring at him with something like wonder and something like fear.

Okay. Well. That was a rather alarming loss of control. L sucks in a breath, then blows it out, stretching his fingers. This has never happened to him before, but he supposes it just did.

It’s good to know that Ryuk can be choked, though. Good information.

“Should I be offended?” L asks.

Ryuk looks slightly embarrassed. “Phew. Uh. No. Sorry, you’re good.”

L tries to picture Light doing what he just did. He comes up empty. Light was never much for physical violence unless it was directed towards L. Unless he had done this with Ryuk before —

Oh, wonderful. He can add jealousy to the mixture of everything he’s feeling for the first time right now.

“Jesus, I didn’t know you could be that scary,” Ryuk says, rubbing a claw over his throat.

L shrugs. “You liked it.”

“Am I supposed to take care of…”

L follows Ryuk’s gaze down to himself. Oh. “No thank you,” he says, meaning I would literally rather kill myself than let you get me off, before a thought occurs to him. “Since when do Shinigami believe in Jesus Christ?”