-Male Specimen-

Author's Notes:

This started out as a writing exercise to help me work on my OTHER Death Note fic (the novel *faints*) and turned into it's own whole little ficlet. Many thanks to BC3!

Hope you enjoy!

"You know that she's NOT from the forties, right?"

"I am aware, Raito-kun. But there are so few women from the forties left on our great planet - one must find reminders where one can." said L, casually. He was busy attaching a garish and brightly colored poster to the wall of their shared bedroom. A photo of Taylor Swift, no less, her blonde hair swept up a la Marilyn Monroe and a string of pearls caught teasingly between her white teeth.

Light hated that poster the second he saw it.

"I can't believe you. I KNOW what you're doing."

"Do you?"

"Yes. I do."

"What am I doing, Raito-kun?"

"You're trying to make me...you want me to..." Light's voice broke off into a frustrated half-scream. "And I don't like it, L!"

"You will have to be more specific. I'm sure there was a minority of complete sentences there," L replied, smirking.

Light felt himself become significantly more angry in a significantly short period of time. "L, you KNOW what I'm talking about, you know I know, and I know you know that I know, so just take the damn poster down and we'll be done with this," he snapped.

L turned away from the poster and regarded Light thoughtfully. "Your eyes become very bright when you are angry, Raito, did you know that?"

"My eyes aren't the POINT, L, and -"

L tilted his head, still watching Light. "And your cheeks...they are flushed. It is almost reminiscent of..." his voice trailed off suggestively. A smile was slowly forming.

"L, I can't believe you would bring that up NOW when I'm sitting here watching you putting up a picture of some girl who reminds you of your porn collection." Light tried his best to keep the bitterness out of his voice as he spoke. L was a man not long out of adolescence when they met. It would be unlikely for him NOT to have a porn collection. It wasn't his fault he was bisexual, and it wasn't his fault that he had a...thing...for women of the 1940s and 1950s.

But it didn't seem to make things worse that Light was being petulant. If anything, L's smile grew.

"Do you know, Raito-kun, my collection has changed lately? Narrowed, you might say?"

Light had no idea where this going but decided to play along, for politeness's sake, if nothing else. "No, L, I didn't know that."

"It has. In fact, it has narrowed considerably. It now includes just one specimen. Male, in point of fact."

Light was unimpressed and sharply annoyed. This time, he made no effort to keep his emotions out of his voice. "Really." he replied, flatly. "How interesting."

"Oh, he is very interesting, yes. And aesthetically pleasing, to the utmost. I have never seen smoother skin, in just that shade of almond." L let the poster in his hands hang limply, almost as if it wasn't his primary concern at the moment. Light didn't know whether to appreciate that fact, or take it as an omen that this "male specimen" was even more captivating than Taylor Fucking Swift.

"His features are almost unnaturally alluring, as well. Sometimes I wonder if he is not completely human, but rather created with a supernatural incantation of beauty. His lips, for example..." The poster had curled itself into a loose scroll by now, and L let it drop carelessly to the floor. He advanced on Light thoughtfully.

"are lush, and full, and at times I imagine them wrapped around my - "

"L, honestly, I don't need to hear this." Light turned out, making a direct and solid path for the door. He fully intended to reach the bathroom before puking his guts out, which is what he felt he DID need at that moment. "In fact, I couldn't STAND to hear this if my life depended on it."

Light felt a hand close around his wrist, stopping him in his tracks. He wanted to rip it out of L's grip - wished he could - but found that all he was capable of was freezing, motionless.

"His name is Light." came L's soft, but firm words.

Light still couldn't move. It seemed like everything in his body had stopped, right down to his heart.

"You're a bastard, you know that?" Light said. He felt a smile threatening to show itself, but perversely wanted to punish L for the moments of hell he had just put Light through. So he kept the smile hidden from his voice.

L appeared in front of him, sliding his hand from Light's wrist to intertwine their fingers. "And you love me for it, Raito-kun."

The bastard's eyes were twinkling.

Light took a step forward. He spoke his next words quietly, almost, but not quite, against L's lips. "Don't ever do that to me again, do you understand?"

"But Raito-kun," L protested, just before he closed the gap between them. "How can I stop, when these are the results?"

FIN

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