Oneiromancy

Ryuzaki with his crooked grin, Ryuzaki with his sugar-sweet breath, Ryuzaki with his hunched shoulders and odd habit of scratching his ankle with the toes of the opposing foot, Ryuzaki with his panda-eyed stare that makes Light smile involuntarily just a little every time he sees it, Ryuzaki with his quick-snap-jump ability to follow what Light is thinking and further it, Ryuzaki with his solemn promise that he will see Kira brought to justice – Ryuzaki, L, Light is fascinated with him.

L has taken his freedom, chained him to him like a recalcitrant pet, has confined him and lied and arranged a mock execution and done just about everything he can to prove that Light is a psychopathic mass murderer, and Light can't help but be fascinated by him.

Light is used to the emptiness of the pedestal, used to being admired and whispered about and having everything except meaning, everything except someone he can talk to, someone capable of thinking at his level. Light's world has been flat and grey for a very long time, and L and Kira, they bring colour to it – so what if the colour is red?

Light is so tired of the nothingness of his own existence - no passion, no challenge, no life. All he's ever wanted is... something. Something, anything that will give him

(meaning)

a purpose and Ryuzaki gives him that. Kira gives him that. Light has been waiting all his life for the world to finally become real, for it to stop being so empty, so pointless, so boring and monotonous and it's finally happened; Ryuzaki

(is the only solid, the only coloured thing in the world)

has given him reality.

Light could stand far worse than what L has done to him for that.

So he smiles and he promises Ryuzaki they'll catch Kira together and he means it when he says Ryuzaki is his friend, even after everything his friend has put him through. Because Light isn't Kira, and if everything Ryuzaki has done will help to prove that, Light can stand it.

Light dreams of monsters and apples, the scritch-scratch of pen on paper and the clink of chains.

Every little act requires enough adjustment on both parts that after a while (and more than a few mishaps) they work seamlessly together almost as one. Ryuzaki reaches for the phone; without turning Light leans towards him and raises his arm enough to allow the movement without inconveniencing himself. Light adjusts his pace for Ryuzaki's habit of stopping at odd moments when a thought strikes him, or meandering off in the middle of what should have been relatively straightforward walk to Misa's room or the control room or wherever. Ryuzaki stops pulling him along like an inanimate object. Most of the time.

Watari brings a new tray of pastries; Ryuzaki concentrates on putting enough sugar in his tea to put a diabetic in shock while Light picks out which piece of confectionary Ryuzaki will eat first (donuts are always his first choice, because Light finds the faces L makes as he eats them hilarious) – always suggesting that he eat something with actual nutrients next time.

Ryuzaki will thank him for looking out for his health, point out the relative nutritional value of his cookie (or shortcake, or lollipop or) and calmly devour whatever it is and muse aloud if perhaps Kira would try to undermine his reasoning abilities by taking away his sugar.

Light will argue that he won't need to worry about Kira he keeps eating the way he does; all Kira will have to do is wait patiently for his body give up under the strain of coping with so much sugar, and Ryuzaki will blink at him and make a pointed remark about his ability to perceive things from Kira's point of view.

Their accommodation breaks down depending on several factors – if Light has slept well the night before, the degree of suspicion in Ryuzaki's voice when he talks about Light's understanding of Kira, the last time they fought and if Ryuzaki has demonstrated a particularly great degree of social ineptness lately.

(Light doesn't care what Ryuzaki says, he knows he could have arranged any number of different things instead of their current showering system.)

Ryuzaki's hands are an endless source of fascination for Light. The tracery of blue veins, the stretch and flex of ligaments and tiny bones shifting beneath the skin, the delicate, neat movements. If he keeps his gaze on Ryuzaki's hands he doesn't have to look at his eyes.

Ryuzaki's eyes are just plain unnerving and Light has moments where he is as susceptible as everyone else to that blank stare. In the safety of his own thoughts he thinks of black holes, of tears in space that take everything and give nothing back. He doesn't like looking up at odd moments and seeing those black, black eyes stripping him, looking for a monster beneath his skin, looking for blood and filth that isn't there, dammit, and how many times does he have to say it? Light has never had anyone look at him that way before, as if what was beneath his bright smile and easy charm and in his lightning-quick, lightning-bright

(lightning deadly)

mind was far more interesting. Light would be flattered, if L wasn't looking for a mass murderer, if he didn't know L wanted to see him dead for something he didn't do because surely you'd remember if you killed people. But he can stand it. He's not Kira and he'll just have to prove it to Ryuzaki somehow.

The first time he realises he knows what Ryuzaki is thinking from the way his brow creases minutely and the slight change in his eyes he is exalted, he is as proud – no, prouder than if he had just scored a hundred percent on an exam, or learned a new language.

"Don't be mad," he says suddenly, eyes alight with his own triumph and an amused smile tugging fruitlessly at his lips (and oh, this is going to raise his Kira-percentage something terrible) "You know Matsuda just can't help himself. The data isn't lost or anything."

"I'm not mad," Ryuzaki says flatly, but he turns slightly to apply the full-force of his terrifying attention to Light's face, searching for some clue as to how he could have reached such a conclusion.

"Sure you're not," Light says, a trifle giddily, drunk on triumph, and it is suddenly hard to believe that he woke up resenting this man.

I know what you're thinking, he wants to say, thrilled, except common sense clamps down on his elation and warns him coldly that he should never give anything away to Ryuzaki, that Ryuzaki will use anything he says against him.

So he doesn't says anything, however much he wants to, because Ryuzaki would take it as Light trying to learn something to use against him and Light doesn't want that; he only wants to know Ryuzaki better, to know him enough for Ryuzaki to stop suspecting his every little action.

Light dreams he is holding the world in his hands and for a while it glows with his triumph. But then it begins to sicken, to darken and fall apart even as he tries to hold it together.

They spend one night avoiding work and sleep both and doing nothing but play games. They start with chess, to be obnoxiously symbolic, which of course ends in an obnoxiously symbolic stalemate. They proceed to play Go, Monopoly, Connect Four, Mouse Trap and any number of card games, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. Light thinks he won't ever be offended by Ryuzaki's ridiculous percentages again after hearing him complain that only Kira could manage to build a trap that killed mice that weren't even in the game, and even laughs when he keeps moving Light's counter to jail whenever he looks away from the monopoly board for more than a second.

He wonders if maybe this is what normal people who are friends act like.

Ryuzaki objects to Light's strong coffee and actually manages to convince him to try a puff pastry after a winning hand at poker.

When the team arrives at a sensible time in the morning, Light is so sugar-high awkward questions are asked.

Later, hunched over his mug of slowly congealing coffee and being vaguely entertained by the sparkling lights that keep dancing around in perpetual wheels across his bleary vision, L tells him to go back and check over his work. It's not that he doubts the conclusions Light came to while under the influence, he explains, but sugar seems to fast-forward his thinking processes and if even he could barely follow the leaps and bounds of logic (and occasional illogic) across various tables of barely interconnected data, the rest of the team just didn't stand a chance.

Light decides he's swearing off sugar for good. Ryuzaki's face is blank but Light knows he's laughing at him on the inside.

Light curls into Ryuzaki as he sleeps, as if asking for comfort or protection.

The first time Light wakes to Ryuzaki's hand in his hair, gingerly dragging his fingers through it as if Light were a tiger fast asleep and the chance to touch his fur had outweighed the danger involved, he wonders if he has enough speed and reach to catch those spidery fingers between his teeth and bite down.

Ryuzaki wonders if he is feeling well, he looks quite pale.

"My head hurts," he says quietly at last, and carefully doesn't say that it feels as if something is pounding at his skull, trying to get out.

"What are you thinking?" Light asks Ryuzaki idly one morning, before he's had his first cup of coffee and jump-started his brain, watching as he stacks sugar cubes with exquisite precision. The angle and lines of the cubes, Ryuzaki's long pale fingers and neat, spidery movements, they make Light think of numbers and angles and geometry

(percentages)

and mathematics is the language of creation; if he looks closely enough at Ryuzaki's hands he's convinced he'll see the numbers dance and in the spaces between them he'll see the beginning of everything.

Ryuzaki raises his head, a sugar cube held between thumb and forefinger of each hand. He regards him for a long moment, as if trying to taste or see or smell the veracity of Light's question, because Ryuzaki can't even be suspicious the same way as other people. With this thought in mind Light makes a mental note to see if he can convince Matsuda into believing Ryuzaki can tell when someone is telling him the truth by tasting it on his tongue. "I am thinking," Ryuzaki says, and Light instantly leaves all frivolous thoughts behind at the sound of his voice (this is automatic, but he can't remember why) "that you are a door."

Light blinks, perplexed, and he gives Ryuzaki a gentle, genuine smile that is confused and a little uncertain.

(If the girls he charmed in high school could see him now they'd never believe it.)

"I am thinking that you are a door, and behind it is Kira."

Light's smile vanishes as if it had never been and he opens his mouth to argue or protest or something because Ryuzaki couldn't possibly-

"I thought I had the key, when you were put in confinement and the killings stopped," Ryuzaki continues lowly, his eyes fixed intently on his face as if looking straight through him for an answer of some kind. "No," he corrects himself, "I had the key. I put it in the lock and turned it and the door still wouldn't open." The sugar cubes crumble beneath sudden pressure from his fingers. "I will find out how you managed to do that," L promises, and Light hears I will prove you are Kira.

Light stops the conversation continuing by grabbing a cookie from the plate Ryuzaki abandoned to do his sugar-stacking and stuffing it into Ryuzaki's mouth.

When Ryuzaki finishes chewing he declares that Light's Kira-percentage has gone up another three points for attempting to choke him with confectionary.

When Matsuda walks in he has to blink three times before he finally believes he really is seeing Light pinning Ryuzaki to the ground and force-feeding him cookies. Not that there seems to be much force involved, and Ryuzaki doesn't seem to be complaining (much). He wonders if he should mention this to the Chief, but thinks the Chief'll probably think similar things to what Matsuda did when he first saw them and Ryuzaki might like to have children some day.

(I will open you if I have to break you, L says in the early hours of the following morning, with his mouth too close to Light's ear as he lies frozen in the dark.

I will break you, L says, and Light listens to his breathing for a long, long time, shaking with rage and wishing death on him with quiet, vicious despair, because L is a genius who has never learnt wisdom and can't stand the possibility of being wrong.)

Light dreams of a mirror, and the face in it is pitiless and beautiful and monstrous and it becomes L's face and whispers kira with tender satisfaction to his furious scream of denial.

There is a peaceful stillness to Ryuzaki's face on the rare occasions when he sleeps, something tranquil and otherworldly that makes Light think of stone saints. Light can see the shadow of his death there. With sharp angles and soft curves painted in shadow and moonglow, Ryuzaki is beautiful and if Light wasn't walking on razorblades every waking moment because of him he might see it, he might be honoured to see it.

Instead his hands clench and he stares at that face and the stray thought of smashing a pillow against that crooked smile or wrapping the handcuff chain about his pale throat and stilling the steady pulse there crosses his mind with enough speed he can tell L honestly and with indignation that he's never even thought about it, God, Ryuzaki!

"I'm not Kira," he says quietly to L's face – L, because Ryuzaki is a façade he puts away when it's just the two of them trapped together in the dark – "I'm not Kira," he says and wills L to see the truth of it.

"Not right now," L agrees casually, and Light sucks in a breath as if L has kicked him and he doesn't know if the feeling flooding him is anger or something else entirely (why should he be hurt? He's never cared enough to be hurt) before he turns away.

"Light-kun," L says, and he's going to say something that won't help at all so Light snaps that it doesn't matter, can he please sleep now, and he ignores every attempt to get his attention, concentrating on the feeling that's suffocating him, concentrating on just breathing because there's nothing L can say that will make this better.

"Light-kun," L says softly near dawn and Light can breathe now, he waits for an apology or an explanation, he doesn't care which, but L doesn't say anything, just sighs and moves away. Light's fingers curl into claws and itch with the desire to tear his face off. It stops hurting so he ignores the fact that he'd normally be shocked by the violence and cruelty of his own thoughts.

Light dreams of L, his hands all over his body, peeling skin from muscle and muscle from bone, saying Kira Kira Kira over and over until it fills the air like a chant to match the End of Days.

Breakfast sets the tone for the rest of the day and most mornings they take care to be especially civil, but L is staring at him. Not just staring, but staring as only L can, and Light wonders why exactly he spends so much time and effort smothering that one homicidal impulse.

"Stop it, Ryuzaki," he says at last, admitting defeat and raising his gaze from his homework.

"Stop what, Light-kun?" Ryuzaki says, innocence and obliviousness personified, as if he has no idea why Light would demand such thing, as if trying to strip Light with his eyes to find Kira didn't warrant such a response.

"Looking at me like that."

"Like what?" Ryuzaki counters, and Light knows the irritated sigh of exasperation at his childishness has just added yet another point to his Kira-percentage.

"What is it?" he demands at last, the edge to his voice stark.

(18 percent, Yagami-kun)

"Is it the way I'm sitting? Is my hair too messy? Too neat? Is it the way I'm reading or how I'm writing or the number of times I've yawned or how I shift my weight, what? What is making you think of Kira?"

"Should I be seeing Kira, Yagami-kun?"

Light stares at him for a long moment, and was it really only a few minutes ago that he was thinking about nothing more than that he needed coffee and how could Ryuzaki eat that for breakfast, because anger beginning to suffocate him and

I'll kill you hisses the knife-edged voice buried deep and getting stronger, I'll watch your goddamn funeral and I will dance on your anonymous grave, L.

"Well, Yagami-kun?" Ryuzaki says, patiently waiting for an answer while his bottomless eyes attempt to peel him apart and Light lunges because what else can he do and maybe if he just hits him he'll stop thinking of worse things.

When the rest of the investigators enter the room at nine they are busy pretending nothing has happened, and everyone takes care to avoid mentioning the black eye, the split lip, the bruised cheek, the torn clothing and the chain stretched tight between them.

Light dreams of L again, doing nothing but stare at him.

Light wonders sometimes what it is about L that rubs him raw. Light has always been made of masks, always known exactly how to respond to people, how to put them at ease, how to convince them of his sincerity, how to make them like him, how to prevent arguments or smooth over them. Someone once told Light (but he can't remember who, and he should, he knows he should, they were important, they were closer to him than his shadow) that he had a tongue so silver people only realised it when he pulled out all the stops and by then it was too late.

Light has never seen himself as being manipulative; the ability to charm, to alter himself into being exactly what other people want is something as natural to him as breathing. It's only facing Ryuzaki, no, L, with his utter disregard for societal conventions, and his sardonic murmurs about how terribly Kira-esque Light's ability to charm people to his will is, that Light begins to doubt himself, his own motives.

He's never used his ease with people to hurt anyone, he's pretty sure. He uses it for the exact opposite purpose, to avoid hurting anyone, and what the hell did it say about Ryuzaki that he could make being charming outside of being a professional conman sound like a Kira-trait?

There's nothing wrong with being able to connect with people, he thinks bitterly, with a sideways glance at L, crouched before the computer screens like a wide-eyed gargoyle. He looked at himself from L's skewed viewpoint once, surveyed his personality through computer screens and voice-distorting software, and he knows perfectly well what L sees. It's not an ability to connect that he displays before L's judging gaze but an ingrained piece of societal conditioning, a cold and necessary ability developed from early childhood to mimic human relations perfectly.

Light would disagree with him, but L shakes the foundations of himself, makes him start to think that black is white and white is red, makes him think he could be a killer, could be Kira, when he knows he's not.

Or he used to know, anyway.

Then he thinks of Aiber, how useful his skills are, and while he'd really rather not be compared to a criminal at all, he'd rather that than think of himself as

("What do you think Kira is like as a person?"

"I think… Kira… can imitate normal behaviour well. More than well. I think that he can move effortlessly and naturally among people of any type and not elicit comment. Yet he is utterly disconnected from people and society as whole, hence it is nothing to him to kill on such a scale as we're investigating."

Did you really mean to say 'Kira' Ryuzaki? Not 'you'?

"You think he lacks empathy? Or the ability to be human?"

"Lacks the ability to be human… that's a good way of putting it. There is something missing in Kira that lets him think he has the right to judge people. I think that perhaps Kira's only real connection to the world is the people he kills. He uses them not just to express his opinion, not just to demonstrate his belief that society can be altered for the better by removing certain elements, but also because he has no other way of connecting himself to the humanity he wants so desperately to change.")

In a way, Light is almost pleased that Ryuzaki drives him crazy, that he destroys that part of Light that knows people and how to interact with them. Ryuzaki reduces Light to a furious child, unable to control himself, unable to stop lashing out, and Light knows from within the purity of his own fury that L doubts his own judgement when Light reacts so honestly and so obviously to his baiting.

(Kira is childish and hates to lose.)

Yes, Ryuzaki. But Kira would never let himself be so obvious with his hatred. So Light feels fine and better than fine allowing himself to hit Ryuzaki as if they were nothing more than friends in an argument that got out of control.

This hate for you is honest. Since you can't believe my eyes, you can't believe my enthusiasm or my smiles or my affection – if you can't believe in any of the positive emotions I show to you, then believe this at least.

(If I were Kira, Ryuzaki -)

Light dreams of electric chairs and needles and firing squads and the hangman's rope and he tries to tell the people gathered to see him die – thousands of them, and this isn't right – that they've got it all wrong, he's innocent, he's not Kira, but they all wear plastic L faces and stare blankly at him with no more empathy than if he were a mad dog about to be put down. He wakes up whimpering I'm not Kira, I'm not, I'm not and when L wraps his arms gingerly around him as if he doesn't want to but knows he should

(he'll send Light to his execution with the same air of reluctant duty)

Light thinks he's fallen about as far he can go.

If L is reluctant to let go it's because he enjoys having power over Light, having him so weak and helpless and dependent. L is doing this to humiliate him, L is trying to take his trust to use it against him later, L is doing everything but comfort his friend because friends don't swear you're a mass-murderer and he'll see you executed.

If I were Kira, Light thinks, staring at L's back and he's stunned by the venom in it. If I were Kira, he thinks and when Ryuzaki turns back he's busy scrubbing his face, trying to erase both the evidence of his weakness and the hatred in his eyes.

Light is suffocating. He's in the middle of a web and it has Kira's – first Kira, true Kira – fingerprints all over it. There's a terrible sense of things slotting neatly, perfectly into place as they close in on Yotsuba, on Higuchi, a shiver of recognition, as if Light has seen this play out before, a long time ago, and is only just remembering. Kira planned this, he thinks but does not say. And it is going to plan.

I know what you're thinking, he hears himself musing sometimes as he stares at L's back. I can counter it.

Ryuzaki and Light are friends, of a sort, but L, world's greatest detective - I won't let you destroy me.

(who?)

L with his sickly pale skin and awkward jutting bones, L with his black hole eyes that do nothing but destroy, L with his torturous body contortions, L with his smile that says he knows something about Light that Light is unaware of, something that will give L the right to kill him, L with his childishness and his superiority and his refusal to see – L, Light hates him.

Light dreams of L, falling, falling, his eyes black and wide and astonished and dead and he laughs and laughs.

(and then he wakes up, gasping and choking on his own self-hatred)