Chapter Text
L Lawliet had long held up solid interpersonal walls—she was not keen to get mixed up with other people because she didn't have the time for it.
Lately, she'd gotten herself a little mixed-up, in an unfamiliar predicament. An odd case on her hands. That was all this amounted to. Yet, it had dissolved the forward momentum of her intellectual worth, the only thing that truly cut her paychecks. The resultant stagnation was inexplicable.
L knew these details about her chief female Kira suspect, and so much more still: Light Yagami was a brilliant young college student who wasn't trying to be an idol. Nevertheless, she had a five-thousand-plus member online fan club who traded her candid photographs while swooning about her cool factor, using walls of emoticons to describe what they felt when they saw her do... just about anything at all.
Perhaps, Light was worth the frightening level of interest. L couldn't help but be affected. Long, pin-straight auburn hair down to the small of her back with side-swept bangs, sparkling amber eyes, and a perfect smile that her fans claimed could set anyone's heart at ease. She wore an expensive Omega timepiece—in a small nod to her family's upper middle-class wealth.
Light kept fingernails tidy with clear gel polish. She preferred simple, elegant skirt and button-up combinations cut from expensive fabrics. She rotated an alarming amount of cashmere cardigans in modern cuts, a tawny Burberry leather briefcase with a minimalist logo, and beautiful Oxford loafers she kept spotless. Presenting herself at all times as refined, she had a dignified bearing and perfect posture. At home, her inside was as organized as her outside, she kept to a tight schedule.
Yes even behind closed doors, where the digital eyes of L had followed, there were only minimal signs the young woman wasn't completely above human foibles: a hidden stash of consommé-flavored potato chips and cola for herself in the cabinet, hidden behind the things meant for other people. Light played Nintendo video games with her younger sister. She became visibly annoyed if she didn't win. She studied and completed her schoolwork diligently, ignoring the social media messages she received from would-be suitors and even, it seemed, her own friends most of the time.
But Light Yagami was complex in a way that felt as calculated as a watch mechanism, perpetual motion. Something never felt right to L about the smooth automation of everything this other woman did—as if her life were long-form performance art. After weeks of bugging Yagami-kun's place with every conceivable style of hidden camera and recording device, L had still been met with the nagging feeling that the routine was for show down.
It drove her wild. Surface-wise nothing was wrong. How very not wrong that it couldn't be real. She maniacally munched through a fourth chocolate biscuit whilst watching the feed—logging another perfect day in the perfect life of a perfect human. It was all... timed, uncannily co-ordinated. L started to have mad musings, as if even those stupid potato chips were part of the act. What if she didn't like them? The woman looked adorably awkward eating them while studying, almost as if she'd never really eaten potato chips before. She ate them with a small flourish of her hand, as if each individual chip needed to be savored—similar to how one would eat a truffle or cherry cordial.
This nagging feeling solidified when Light perused a pornographic magazine for women, looking at it like it was a furniture catalog. L felt assured then that her suspect must be onto her. There was just no way someone with the top test scores in Japan was buying a softcore rag in the age of the internet. All these comfortable details meant to set L at ease that Light was a regular college hopeful had done the exact opposite.
As for the second Kira: Misa Amane was older, a triple-threat idol by trade. Famous enough for her product-moving cuteness, agencies sent her abroad for gigs when no one else could match her appeal. L had figured out Misa—her motivations, her preferences, and her likely future actions—within half a day of bugging her place.
The occult was her obsession ever since her parents had been murdered. Trinkets for frivolous rituals gave her a sense of power over the confusing aftermath. She admired Kira for killing criminals of the sort who had murdered her family. Gothic Lolita style, sexy underwear, expensive makeup—she spent half her income on these things. She responded to all social media messages like it was her job. Perhaps she even felt it was.
L found her boring, but admittedly the shoulder-length blonde bob and dark brown eyes couldn't have been set into a cuter visage. Mostly, it was like watching a puppy follow Light around, to the detective's eyes. Her feelings toward the woman veered between mild attraction and abiding annoyance. Any of that attraction... she chalked up to Misa being endearingly cute and somewhat openly helpless, such that watching her made people—even people like L—feel protective.
As different as her two primary suspects were, L didn't know how to begin to relate to women like Light and Misa. L's profession was her only enduring relationship. People she socialized with throughout her days were typically older law enforcement officers, experts in every field of study, and the gifted orphaned children she'd helped sponsor with her extravagant funds through Wammy's House Foundation in England.
So they were both a few statistical deviations away from the average look of people in her life. And Light Yagami, in addition to being possessed of great natural beauty, may well have been the only intellectual peer anywhere near her age that L had ever encountered in real life.
She couldn't understand most women—all this time they were willing to waste on physical appearance, time sucked up changing themselves to be attractive. L dressed in simple, loose-fitting Levi's jeans and a plain white t-shirt—a combination both purposefully misleading and profoundly simple. She didn't want to ever spend time thinking about her wardrobe. She'd most often been mistaken for an owl-eyed young boy with no self-care routine, though she was a twenty-five-year-old woman with decent personal hygiene.
She counted on her self-presentation also making her a foreigner to other people's desires. It was still a patriarchal world, especially Japan—humankind hadn't evolved enough yet to understand that gender was not destiny, and her gender was a liability when many people already wanted to control her for her famous mind.
L wore no makeup, never made any attempts to cover her natural dark circles, adorned herself with zero trappings of her gender. No jewelry or pretty shoes. She hated shaving, and she'd only ever let her mentor and caretaker Watari tend to her hair when the mop of it grew truly wild.
She kept a low, gender-neutral voice. She bound her modest breasts so they lay completely flat every morning. Any attention they might have garnered could have been detrimental to having the most effective possible professional relationships with the many men she worked with daily.
She wanted to come across as asexual. Sex was normally the furthest thing from her mind... it was not completely off-putting to her to entertain her needs. She hadn't lost her virginity. She wasn't necessarily interested in doing so, but she would occasionally get herself off.
But in her mind, she was a girl despite her carefully gender-neutral self-presentation. She was at peace enough with her gender—she simply didn't like to, didn't need to, deal with any of the societal bullshit attached.
She worried that because she had kept a great, though unintended, distance from exceptionally attractive people like these two girls all her life, Amane and Yagami-san's status as an intellectually mismatched but smokingly hot secret lesbian couple affected her in a way where she might well be losing her objectivity to judge them.
They were both younger than her by more than five years. She had never felt her investigative intrusions into others' personal lives as morally wrong. She did these things to serve justice and address more complicated problems than typical detective teams could work through. But for the first time in her life, she was frightening herself. Her growing interest in the two female suspects of the current investigation—in particular, her snowballing interest in Light Yagami—was feeling further outside of her control all the time. The Tokyo University genius had insidiously become a soothing second voice in her head.
Prior to this, she had observed suspects with near-total detachment. She'd always been driven by her pure intentions to resolve the cases she took on as expediently as possible, and she was perfectly capable of viewing other people as pawns to be moved. Yagami-chan's natural charisma and multiplicity of possible motives was turning her continued detachment from a natural tendency into a daily herculean effort.
She was miles away from objectivity now. She'd known she was compromised since she'd had to lock herself in her bedroom in the middle of her workday with her hand over her mouth to massage her own cunt soothingly after watching video footage of the two girls kissing each other on a date.
She'd supposed the two had felt safe to show affection under the cover of darkness at the back of a quiet movie theater in Shibuya. But L had been able to see everything as if they had done it in broad daylight because of the infrared function on the camera she'd ordered installed as soon as she'd tracked their movie ticket purchase.
An executive decision was made on her part before she made an untimely adjournment to her bedroom that day. She'd deleted that scene on instinct before the others on the Japanese task force could look over it—the rest of the police force assigned to the case would never be viewing this video, especially Matsuda-san, who already had an unhidden thing for his boss's eldest daughter.
She told herself at that time it was for the privacy of the undisclosed sexuality of the two suspects that she didn't want to share the soft-core intimacy she'd caught on video.
Though she knew it was more self-oriented than that—the task force didn't ever have any right to see her reaction when she watched it. She wasn't a natural actress capable of perfectly schooling her features like Yagami-kun so clearly was. In fact, she may never be able to watch these two in the same room together again without flushing.
The two suspects had been careful in public up until now. It had been the first sign of non-platonic physicality she'd ever seen expressed between the two unlikely "girlfriends." It made abundantly clear the two had done more than kiss before. The familiarity with which they caressed each other was on par with an established couple. The much smaller woman leaned into the fit tennis player, who started tweaking her right nipple under the skimpy cloth of her long-sleeved half-tee.
In those moments, Light had shed her perfect, upstanding good-girl routine like a second skin. She hadn't kissed Misa sweetly or serenely either, the way L had pictured the well-coiffed girl must kiss. It had been as if she'd intended to devour the petite woman. The idol returned that kiss as a willing victim with visible admiration and longing.
They broke a long make-out session to breathe, and Misa leaned in to whisper something to Light that L had to rewind a couple times to lip-read enough to interpret what was being communicated between them.
Misa twirled Light's long auburn hair repeatedly with her index finger and whispered, "Don't you dare date anyone else. I'd have to kill them."
Light simply smiled a little too warmly in response to the threat, as if humoring the idea. She said nothing in response, but she did get a little rougher—she pulled the smaller girl by her pigtails up to resume kissing her.
The percentages for them being Kira as a pair ticked way up in L's head. And if L had shown the video to the other members of the task force, they would have agreed it was a suspicious thing for Misa to whisper... but they would never be seeing this recording.
The detective couldn't tell if her twitchy fingers typing in the code for permanent deletion had been an exercise in protecting the young women's dignity... or the first sign she was already defeated.
Long after, as the Kira case sped forward looking more like an inevitable train crash, this secret of the girls' romantic entanglement became a bit of critical information she'd hidden from the men assigned to the Kira case. When she took Misa hostage after she found her prints on the envelope for the tapes to Sakura station—which had contained messages to try and find Kira—L deleted the parts of the video where the woman was begging for Light to come save her or at least come kiss her one last time.
Yagami-kun hadn't been necessary to moderate once she was on her own, though, because she never let on that Misa was anything more in her eyes than a close friend and an idol whose singing voice she'd admired.
Her ability to switch between involved and uninvolved so easily should have worried L more than it did.
It only took a couple weeks sleeping in a California king-sized bed chained to each other for Light to seem to be the one who started to question the purity of L's research motives into her being Kira. This was after waking up one too many times to L's intense staring. Well, L could hardly help herself.
"Ryuuzaki," she started in at 1 AM, addressing 'L' by the 'dragon' pseudonym which they both knew couldn't be a real name, "What's keeping you up these nights? Is it too hot to sleep near me?"
"You snore like a freight train. It's horrible." She lied, which made Light laugh incredulously.
"First I've ever heard of it. That's the sort of problem my little sister would've teased me about by now. Or my mother would have sent me to the doctor about it long ago," argued the young woman, sounding affronted.
"Look at Yagami-kun defending herself to me so passionately. Does she have to be perfect? Her need to come across as flawless is all too typical for the megalomaniacal." That struck a nerve. L couldn't help but be mean to the woman. Honestly, she wanted to be so much crueler. Light's apparent innocence had been the best bit of acting L had witnessed in her entire life, and L was good friends with professional con artists.
"I'm not perfect, Ryuu... Two things, though? I'm definitely not Kira, and I definitely don't snore. I'm being defensive because you won't let go of your accusations even when they're nonsense." She looked down pointedly to the slighter, shorter woman's chest. "Why don't you unbind those ridiculous bandages before sleeping? Little things like others' breathing will be less likely to wake you if you aren't constricted."
L shook her head adamantly that she wouldn't do so, to which Light groaned exasperatedly. Then unexpectedly, Light reached out to dig under L's large white bed shirt to grab at the offending bandages, making the detective gasp and squirm away—but then froze as a soft hand touched a tender part of her waist in a way that sent a shock through her body.
"Don't tense up like this is some kind of big deal. Come on! You've seen my chest too."
Yes, many times she'd seen Light's enviable hourglass-shaped body nude on camera—the showers in HQ were bugged too—but fear of being naked in front of the taller, more solid Japanese woman wasn't why she was frozen. Light had put one satin-smooth, manicured hand on her waist to steady her and had lifted her oversized white bed shirt up so that L's simple Calvin Klein white boy shorts and binding could be seen. L worried, flushed, that perhaps her white panties were the worst kind to disguise the evidence of encroaching arousal. She had never thought about their flimsiness before the most beautiful, charismatic young woman in Tokyo had been trying to set her breasts free from their bindings.
L tried to meet the other woman's amber eyes to communicate her feelings. She couldn't catch them. Light was no-nonsense about her assessment that L could sleep soundly if only freed from the bindings, so there she was, seriously unbinding L's chest and wrapping the remainder of the long bandage around her own shackled wrist.
Once L's modest breasts were fully bared to the younger woman, she reached out to pull L's cotton bedshirt back down over them. L wasn't about to let this interaction end without calling out the behavior for what it could be interpreted as—she grabbed Light's wrist where the bandages were pooled.
Then Light met the dark, fathomless pools of L's stormy grey eyes. Even in the low lighting, she thought she was communicating pretty effectively that she was turned on, flushed as she'd become.
"Do you like what you see?" For L, this was bold to say, and she bit her lip in a way that she'd once read expressed sexual desire. It was the most forward she'd ever been with another human being. She hoped she was doing this right.
Light's mouth opened a little like she wanted to speak but thought the better of it. In a knee-jerk response, she glanced at the detective, who was still bared to her from the waist up, and looked her up and down.
"Are you hitting on me right now?" She said, seemingly humorlessly, but L pulled Light's wrist in, wrapped her other arm partially around the girl's back to urge her down and toward her own waiting, hopeful mouth.
Light struggled away, probably not even fully understanding that L was seeking a first kiss between them—but she was blushing. Even in the low light, L could make out her flush.
"If so, that's super unprofessional of you." Light Yagami chastised after she had hurriedly gotten back to her side of the bed and caught her breath. She adjusted the brown terry cloth headband she slept in to keep her hair in order and moved to the end of the bed to lay back down so that the chain between them was practically taut.
L generated a percentage in her head then, in a new category she'd created for this hopeful but insane thing happening between the two of them now. The younger woman wanted L as well—probability was 76%. But she'd explore that later. She needed time to think about Kira. Light had definitely been Kira at some point, and she probably still was. She needed time to make peace with her gods—justice, logic, and humanism—before she started a relationship with someone who believed they were one.
She pulled her bed shirt back down and chastised the younger girl, "Yagami-kun... You're the one who undressed me without asking."
"That's stretching it... don't be a bitch!" Light said, turning away from her and putting the elastic bindings at the side of the bed. "I was only doing it because I was worried for your breathing!" The sound of Ryuuzaki's slowed breathing paused Light in her justifications.
Light stopped talking. L could be found curled up in a tight ball, her skinny legs held tightly squared against her freed chest. She wasn't pretending to have conked out. She was snoring loudly.
Light, for her part, couldn't fall back asleep again for hours.