a/n: I had this unsettling feeling that if I don't upload this story tonight, I may never.

"Meet Me in Maslak"

One day Light opened up the mailbox. In it was a yellow card. L Lawliet has had you erased from his memory, it says. Please never mention your relationship to him again. Thank you. L? He thought. Who the hell is that?

...

"He's controlling. He doesn't let me do what I want," a younger Light pled to a grey-haired doctor and, unbeknownst to him, a tape recorder in the corner.

"We fight constantly. Over everything. It gets physical, too. A lot of the time. I start it sometimes, but he does too."

Meanwhile, in another room of the same office, L echoed that sentiment.

...

Light has a type. He knows he does. It's tall, pale men with long hair and intelligence and passion. The kind of passion that means they fight all the time, and that's the reason why many of his relationships end badly. At least, he thinks it is. He knows that a lot of his relationships have ended badly, even if the faces and the details are hard to recall.

The point is that Light has a type. So, is it really so surprising that, when he meets someone with that exact type in Istanbul, that they click instantly? And if, later, when they're kissing, is it so surprising that Light finds all this a little familiar?

...

"So, what's that tape recorder for?" L asked.

"Our records," the doctor answered. "Don't worry, it won't go anywhere."

"If I ever want my memory back …"

The doctor readjusted his glasses. "If you think that's a possibility, you shouldn't go through with this. It's irreversible."

"OK," L said. Then, looking directly at the tape recorder, he said, "it's 2, lowercase o, capital P, 4, 5, capital Q, lowercase f, pound sign, capital V, open parenthesis, 0, lowercase m."

…

Ultimately, L values intelligence over all else. More specifically, he values intelligence similar to his own. That was something he'd realized after his third breakup with a dark-haired woman from the Czech Republic. It wasn't that she wasn't smart enough, it was that she wasn't his kind of smart.

After their third break-up was when he received the first card in the mail. Irene Adler has had you erased from her memory. Please never mention your relationship to her ever again.

He looked it up. Lacuna Industries. Able to erase all memories of any person. An interesting element that could be added to a case. For no other reason, he filed it away in his memory.

…

There is a series of sealed files in L's computer. That is not surprising. Everything on his computer is encrypted. If it were to end up in the hands of anyone else, they would have an incredibly difficult time accessing anything.

The thing about the sealed files is that not even L can open them. He can see various metadata, which is helpful. All of the files appear to have been hastily deleted at one point in time, and then recovered and placed under the seal. They started almost ten years ago, for a few months, and then there were none for a few months, and then they started again a few months later, on and off up until just a few months before.

His unsealed records from those times don't show any inconsistencies. Once in a while, there would be a deduction where he hadn't explained where he'd gotten it from, but L wasn't the best at record keeping anyway.

…

The first thing that L notices when he meets the brunette Japanese man in Istanbul is how incredibly out of place he is. He speaks not a word of Turkish, or Arabic, or any of the other languages that could possibly help him in that country. Instead, he tries to get by on his meager English.

His accent is very interesting. Mostly it is dominated by Japanese, but with an unsightly combination of British and American words. It's cute, L decides. He likes it.

Light proves himself worthy of dating when they get into a three-hour argument over Machiavelli.

...

"So much of the time it feels like we're fighting," Light said to the grey-haired doctor. "No matter who wins, we always just go back to fighting."

Light shifted his weight. "We're not good for each other. We bring out the worst in each other. Around him, it's like I'm angry all the time. And he's cold. Like he doesn't even care what I feel or think."

"So, L again?" the blond secretary asked him on his way out. The comment stuck with Light until that night.

…

Less than a week later, and it feels like Light is a part of L. They solve the Istanbul murders together, staying up till three in the morning, talking passionately and calling the Turkish police.

They wake up together, too, on the couch, with Light's head resting comfortably on L's shoulder. Several coffee cups lay overturned on the floor and pictures are spread everywhere else.

That's about the point when L decides he's legit. At one point, L had a fantasy of finding someone else, someone like him, and travelling the world together, solving cases. The more he ruminates on this, the less sure he is when it came from, or what, other than some deep longing for companionship.

But it doesn't seem to matter. He tells Light who he is, what he is, and Light tells him that he loves him all the same.

First they go to Panama, where they catch a serial killer with a disturbing habit of stringing up his victim's entrails on various trees. Then they go to Hong Kong and track a money laundering ring all the way to the Financial Secretary. After that, they head to New York for a human trafficking ring.

Naturally, if L had studied the paper trail even further, he would have realized that New York is always where it ended.

…

"You can't undo him?" Light yelled at the secretary. He was aware he was making a scene much in the way a moth circling around a lightbulb is aware that it isn't the sun.

"No," the blond secretary said. Mary, Light's mind supplied the useless information. How did he know that, anyhow?

"So what am I supposed to do!?" Light leaned over her desk. Every muscle, every blood vessel, every neuron felt more alive than it had since he last fought with L.

"Get over him, I guess." She went back to typing on her computer. "Find someone new, new love, yadayadayada."

Like he could ever find anyone like L.

"Or we could do the same to you as we did to him," she said.

…

L maintains a permanent residence in New York. It's about a half hour out of the city, when there is no traffic, which is never. It's relatively cheap. Mostly that comes from the low quality. There's neither heat nor air conditioning, and cockroaches and fruit flies infest the whole place, probably from the fact that L never remembered to clean up his sweets when he leaves.

The main purpose of the apartment is to disguise him and his identity, and part of that includes having boatloads of mail delivered there. Light, due to his obsession with organization, begins to sort through it.

He stops at a large yellow envelope. It's padded.

"Do you have a pair of scissors?" he asks L.

It takes a bit of scrambling through various cabinets, while Light made disparaging sounds at L's living conditions. What was it with him and neatness, anyway? What did it matter if the apartment in New York, which L himself only went to twice a year, at most, was presentable? Did he know how much time he was wasting, organizing everything like that? Surely his brilliant mind could think of something better to do.

In the time L was thinking about all of that, Light finds the scissors. The handles are a dark green, and little splashes of red rust have started to form on the blades. He sits down by the mail again.

"Why is this so interesting to you, anyway?" L asks. Light hasn't opened any other envelopes, and they have a mystery to solve.

"I have a feeling," Light pauses. "I recognize this name from somewhere."

LACUNA, INC, it says on the side of the envelope.

L sighs. On the whole, he trusts Light's instincts, even if they can get a little nitpicky.

On the inside of the envelope, there are eight tapes. Light holds the first one up, no doubt asking L where the stereo was. L puts the first one in and hits play.

"So, who do you want to erase?" an older man's voice asks.

"My boyfriend, Light Yagami," L's voice says.

…

Four of the tapes are L's. Four of them are Light's. The secretary says, in a cheeky note, that she couldn't find Light's address and figured they could find each other easily enough, as they'd been able to so far.

Eight times, L listens to their relationship fall apart. The complaints were similar, too. They fought. They were mean to each other. Light would get angry at nothing. L felt nothing. Light was too neat. L was too messy.

It was nothing they don't already know about themselves, really. But the scale is different. The same everyday grievances had destroyed their relationship. Four times.

Each time, L had the foresight to tell himself the encryption key he had used for the sealed files, which is good. They will look at those next.

At the end of the last tape, Light stands up and walks over to the machine. It opens with a mechanical whine, and Light pulls the tape out.

"I'd had a feeling you'd fallen for me, over and over and over again," Light says.

L doesn't know how to respond.

They look at the files on L's computer. They're all the parts of the cases that Light worked on. It amazes L how similar Light's thought process is to his own, how little it has changed since then.

But having them both working cases was far more efficient than L by himself. He mentions that several times in his notes, how well Light sure is a pain in the neck but at least he's useful.

At one point in their relationship, they started leaving little love notes in the files, stuff so sweet L feels sick and then wonders if it is even possible to feel sick at one's own relationship. Light is eating it all up, leaning against L's shoulder. His head is warm.

"I think it's kind of romantic," Light says. "We fell in love with each other four different times."

"And it ended," L says. "Four different times."

"We don't have to, this time," Light says. "We know what we have to do not to." He pauses again, "Besides, it's kind of pointless. We're always going to find each other again."

Then, he sort of laughs, and L sort of smiles.