Sometimes Light brings Misa roses.

She's asleep in his bed. She's one of the best-known idols in Japan. One of the most desired women in the country. He can have her any way he likes, and has: no mystery there, any longer. Precious little to start with, if you want to flirt with honesty. No challenge whatsoever: she'd thrown herself at his feet, and it had been wonderful, a beautiful young woman kneeling there and begging him to use her. But even with the curiosity of the young, he'd been able to resist trying her out on the spot. It wouldn't have fit with the image he was presenting, and what if his mother had walked in? Still, as he'd taken her in his arms, and given her that minimal promise, he'd known he was agreeing to more than just the pretence of being with her.

Except then - then he'd been stuck with her. It hadn't been in his plan, to attach himself to an idiot woman, apparently forever. Sometimes he still fucks her, to relieve himself, to keep her quiet: when he does, he doesn't think about her, but about how many other men would kill to be where he is.

It's midnight, and the room is quite dark. She thinks he's asleep next to her. Fully-dressed, leaving a note - something came up. back soon. love, light - something reassuringly meaningless, that will be filled in with a ready story about work if she asks, which she won't - he steps outside. The night's brightly lit, reasonably busy - Shinjuku doesn't sleep much, after all, and the HQ is well-placed - and it's winter-cold, and inviting.

He's not thinking about it, the thing he's moving towards - but his body remembers, and keeps whispering it to him: a tingle down his spine, a purr across his skin. Through the station, around the back and into the red-light district of Kabukichou. It's safer here than it once was, at this hour of the night: Kira has eliminated the Yakuza and Triad gangs that used to run the meat trade here. It's a gift to humanity, if ever there was one.

Back when he began, he used to bring people here: casual pickups at first. Young women, then men, that he'd seen, and wanted, and got with a crook of his fingers. One after another. It had taken a year for him to quite realise he wanted them to fuck him more than he wanted to fuck them. Another year for him to start aiming to be the one who got picked out, and not the one doing the picking. How much of a step was it, really, to taking money for it? Customers and clients, brought to the dark little room with its permanently shuttered windows: the ultimate submission.

Light wasn't afraid: he's probably the only prostitute in Tokyo licenced to carry a firearm.

The room he rents is dark and dingy, and he pays an extortionate price for it. He can afford it. He comes here in the same clothes he wears for work: it's protective camouflage. The suit and shirt and tie are expensive, and hang on a dedicated rail as he steps through to the bathroom to change his clothes, change himself. Two fingers inside, stretching and preparing, just in case: they slide in easily. Paint applied to his face with an expert hand: he doesn't want to be recognised on nights like this, not ever. The clothes are extremely cheap: loose track pants and a hooded top, and a hat over his distinctive hair. Scruffy, cheap, disreputable-looking. Dressed to kill - not as he does now, on rare occasions, but as he did, long ago. The man on the train. Raye Pember.

The seedy backstreet club is inexpensive, but that makes it busy, which is what Light wants. He steps into the booth, and closes the door behind him. He's been here before. The proprietor knows him, even if he wouldn't recognise him on the street. The tiny cubicle is confessional-dark: the slot in the wall is closed with curtains. There's a padded stool in front of the gap: Light kneels there, meditative. Ready. He's come here regularly for two years, yet every time he's nervous. Doesn't quite know what to expect. His mind wanders, as he waits, and he finds it turning to religious imagery. Christian imagery, to be precise. The god who couldn't understand humanity, so made himself human. Who voluntarily took on that taint.

What use is a god who doesn't understand suffering? What use is Kira's judgement if he lacks understanding?

It's ten minutes before the customers start trailing in. Before the other side of the booth clatters with heavy breathing, and something pokes through the black curtains. It's the head of a penis, already stiff and demanding, and not as clean as it could be. A 2000-yen note comes through next to it. Light takes the money, purses his lips, grits his teeth. This is always the worst part, the first one. It's the point when what he knows he is competes with what he really is.

The hoarse voice from the other side of the curtain is impatient. "Oi. What am I paying you for?"

Light puts out his tongue, quickly: laps at its one eye, and kisses delicately, the way he would a woman. The taste and smell are sickening: he'd bet this one hasn't washed for two days. Sliding it further in, Light presses his lips together in just the right way at the base: the filth is lost in the back of his throat, where he at least doesn't have to taste it. He tightens his throat, lets it relax again. Tears spring to his eyes. Back, and forth, and back again. The voice of the man who's paid for him sighs, and swears: a hand reaches through, grabs Light's hair and starts to choke him. The squeak of protest is put on for effect. Mostly.

Light is willing to bet this is another thing he does better than anyone else in Japan.

As soon as one man - it's always men - vacates the booth, another replaces him. Some of them are clean and quiet and apologetically, exceptionally polite. Some are violent, jerking him around by his hair, cutting off his airway and smacking his face. Most are somewhere in between. Sometimes they ask him to use only his hands. Sometimes they invoke Kira as they're grunting and shoving against him, and talk about what happens to people like Light these days: Kira sees everything, bitch. Light somehow manages to fake apprehension and not laugh aloud. And sometimes they slip him another 4000 yen, and tell him to turn around, and he clutches the edge of the stool, closes his eyes and gasps, and strokes himself lightly while they do it. As if he's quieting a baby bird, reminding it to lie still, to relax. Even here, Light's a perfectionist, and a masterful social engineer, and he gives each of them exactly what they want.

And his mind wanders to the back rooms, and the question of whether today will be a time that he gets more than he planned for.

Eventually, he finds out. The voice is loud. Drunk. Outside the door of his booth. "That one. We want that one, he's good."

It shouldn't please him, but it does. He should be afraid. He should beg to be excused. Instead, the smile on his bruised lips is hard and sharp and ready, and gone back into wide-eyed college boy innocence by the time they open the door and pull him out.

Every time this happens - it doesn't, always - Light wants to know what the worst that will happen is. If there will be anyone in the crowd he knows. As they lay him on the table, he wonders, with sharp, excited trepidation, how many of them are going to fuck him. If they all will. There's very little he can do but take it. He's completely out of control of the situation.

It feels wonderful, and he can't understand why it should. Why it is that his mind and body demand to bend to this.

The men pass coarse comments around the table, and don't look down at his face unless they're about to fuck it. Light could almost be offended by this: he knows he has a beautiful face, even painted up as it is, almost unrecognisable - and there's the memory he tries not to think about, the time he'd looked up from a table like this one and seen Ide, and Ide had seen him, and they'd known each other, and Ide had taken his turn, hard and fast, gripping Light's hips, anonymous, yet not, and Light had come with him from the sheer wrongness of it, and the next morning it had been as if it never happened, and still is: some day he's going to kill the man for that. Even more than the rest of them, Ide Hideki is living on borrowed time.

Ever since then, Light has been afraid that one day, one of the men will be his father. In that event, he knows he'd rather not be recognised: hideous as it would be, he'd rather take the consequences of his acts than be exposed for what he is. What he does.

As the first of them presses sharply into him, Light groans, and his head falls back, mouth dropping open: someone else is standing ready to fill that. Light suckles hungrily, stuffed full at each end.

"Oi oi! Little whore's loose as a cunt back here!" He can't grit his teeth at that, not with the head sliding into his throat, easily past the knot at the back. So what he does is laugh, around the cock that's choking him, cutting off his airway, balls bouncing off his nose, and roll his stare downwards, eyes watering, to the man who's laughing and dragging himself out and in, slapping hard against him with greedy, piggish grunts and meaty slaps and squelching sounds. Light memorises his face, and wishes the eyes were cheaper. The man punching into his throat grabs Light's hair, as he's gurgling and frothing, pulls him forward and back, while Light focuses on his gag reflex, and uses his stretched lips and tongue and all the rest of him, as if what he was born for was to be gang-fucked by rooms full of strangers.

It's been - how long? An hour? Light is still surrounded by cock.

"Where are you from, anyway?" asks the panting man rubbing himself hard over Light's face.

"I'm not foreign." Light doesn't need to be told what he means. The head slips between his lips as he gasps out spattered words: it's already dripping, and tastes foul, and Light still moans, hungry, licking, wanton. Chatter disquiets him: shakes him out of the part of himself that's on display. Why would anyone ever want to talk to something like him?

"Lies. Look at that hair." It's pulled in a handful, a sharp tug on one side.

Light is pleased by his auburn hair, the exceptional mutated pallor it has. It's special: it sets him apart. Except sometimes it also gets him into difficulties, like now. Other men join in the abuse, stroking themselves and queueing for him. "He's a kitsune." "Only one tail though." Raucous, vicious laughter. The speaker reaches down to tweak Light's "tail", where he's hot and swollen almost beyond endurance: he screams, a stutter of denial, and nearly comes right then and there. He doesn't want to, not until they're done with him: it's all so much less tolerable if he's not aroused himself. If he has to remember who he is, and what. "Ha. Drown the little queer, then." Leers, and a tide of semen over his mouth and nose, as three of them cascade over him, losing control one after the other.

Light exaggerates his grimace of disgust, because it pleases them - even as he's angling his hips upwards with warped need, pushing back against whoever is currently fucking him, and dropping his neck back to better catch the mess. What the hell is wrong with me? Why do I keep coming back to this?

"Look at him. He loves it."

His eyes drift sideways, into the wall: traces of memory flicker. The label of fox-demon has followed him since before elementary school: the muffled giggles and harsh glances while the teacher insisted on reading aloud to the class. It was part of the reason he first really learned to lie and manipulate the others: his odd hair and his unique name and his uncanny intelligence should have made them hate him. Instead, he'd made them love him.

Someone else seizes his hair in knots, pushes into his mouth, thick and short, demanding and rough. Light leans back, taking it deeper, wanting it and not sure why, needing them to hurt him. Head bobbing, eyes half-closed, floating along on endorphins and disassociation and lust.

The room is almost empty, now, and the last man to use Light is the owner of the shop. It's always this way: part of the service charge. Light can hardly move, and thinks he might explode if he doesn't touch himself soon. It's all he can think of. The pimp - it's what he is, even if Light is freelance - is banging him harder and harder, shifting him along: a filthy, skinny boy-whore on a table in a red-light district, wearing only a hooded top, drenched in other men's semen and his own desperate sweat. The disgust on the fat man's face is palpable. He grunts, sinks down, and shoots yet another load into Light - and as he does so, Light grabs himself, pulls once, twice, and screams it all out, despair and grief and horror - the relief is a wave, a tsunami crashing into him, blanking out the pain, the humiliation, the disgrace, the day-to-day emptiness of living with Misa, the sacrifices, the deaths, all of it. Just for those few moments, he forgets what he is, and doesn't have to believe it's good.

He could die right there from the exhaustion, and the shame of it - but the pimp is holding the door, and he has to scramble back into his clothes, choke down the water he brought with him, and settle his accounts - it's always a surprisingly large amount: it more than pays the rent on his room - and leave.

Every time, he spends half the night giving himself away, and half of it begging himself back. In the rented room, he peels off his caked, stiff clothes, straight into a bin liner: they're disposable, like him. He makes himself vomit up everything he took in, a torrent of slime into the toilet, sour and sharp, clinging to his mouth and throat. Emetics and enemas. Then he scrubs himself as if it's going out of fashion, scalds himself beneath the shower, explores the damage he's taken this time. Where he's been torn, and how badly. Which bruises he's going to be keeping secret from Misa for a week or two. It won't be hard. Harsh, dark handprints scabbing over his hips and thighs and shoulders. Clawmarks. A sting in his scalp as if someone's tried to wrench his head off. His lips are puffy, too, but Misa doesn't ever seem to put it together. As if she can't imagine this: dark humour, in the fleeting, wry glimpse he offers his reflection.

He gets through half a bottle of mouthwash before scrubbing his teeth: his patrons have left scratches and abrasions in there that scream, corroded by alcohol and mint, burning like acid. Where they entered him over and over and over, he aches and stings as if he's been beaten: his throat is almost swollen shut, and his nose is running. In the mirror, he stares into his own eyes, glazed as if he's seeing a horror: triple-checks that there are no tell-tale hairs stuck in his teeth. Except that when he's done with that, his face falls into a dazed smile. As if it's a natural look on his face. As if he's loved every moment of it - or as if he isn't quite back, yet. Not quite himself.

It's almost 6am, yet as he heads out of Kabukichou, there's a street vendor selling single red roses in plastic tubes. 200 yen apiece. He probably does good business at this time. Showered thoroughly, inside and out, and back in his work clothes, Light looks like a particularly well-dressed young businessman, returning to the station. The vendor hands him the rose with a crude smirk: I know what you've been doing. Light takes it, smiling like - well, like the cat that got the cream, and heads back towards the HQ. If you only did. If you only did.

Before he drops into bed to sleep for an hour, disgusted with himself, crushed and yet purring all over with satisfaction, Light leaves the rose beside Misa, on the pillow. She'll assume he snuck out in the night to get it, which is true enough.