Chapter Text
By the time they return to their hotel room, Light is pretty sure he’s not making up the tension between them. His whole body feels like a live wire and L is standing far too close to him.
He shuts the door behind them, pretending he isn’t profoundly aware of the heat of L’s body a breath away.
He is considering the benefits of a very cold shower when L says, contemplatively, “I have an idea.”
“What,” says Light, more snippily than he’d intended. He turns. L is staring straight at the ceiling. “No, what? It’s terrifying when you get quiet like that.”
“Mm,” says L. “Well. Would you like me to pretend to be him?”
Light stares at L. “Pardon?”
“Beyond. Do you want me to pretend to be him?”
“Like — in general?”
“Do you want to have sex with me while I pretend to be Beyond Birthday.”
“I really,” says Light, “have to pee. Goodbye.”
He walks away, shuts himself in the bathroom, then sits on the ground. The tile is very cold, which he likes. He doesn’t think his mind had ever been this empty. After a few minutes, he stands up, drinks three handfuls of cold water from the tap, then opens the door and steps back into their hotel room.
He finds L sitting on the edge of the bed, typing into his phone. “Okay,” he says.
L looks up. “You do?”
“Sure, I mean. Okay. Yeah.”
L climbs off the bed, all limbs. “Wonderful.”
They stare at each other. Light isn’t sure where to go from here. He can’t think of a template.
Finally, L says, “Do you have condoms?”
Light had owned condoms once, when he was in university and someone stuck them in a first year’s kit. “Not on me.”
“I don’t either,” L says. “We should buy some.”
“Okay,” says Light.
He stares at L. L stares at him. After a second, L says, “Do you want to watch an MV first?”
“God, yes,” says Light.
Objectively, the best place to watch MVs is on the floor in front of the bed. The bed itself feels far too intimate. L casts them from his phone to the big-screen TV.
They watch Night Fever, which is the one where Beyond has winged eyeliner, then Slow Moves, where he does those amazing body rolls, then the Halloween version of Slow Moves, where he’s wearing a sheep costume, then WATC(HER), which is honestly kind of terrible apart from the decision to put everyone in cropped tops with cut-out shoulders, and then L abruptly ends the cast.
“Right,” he says, to no one in particular, then stands up. Light follows him.
He leads Light down to the hotel service desk, where he has a brief conversation with the concierge which ends — to Light’s great distress — in him turning around and asking Light, in a perfectly clear voice, “What size are you?”
They’re both looking at him expectantly. L and this concierge.
“I — I don’t —”
The answer is small. The answer is definitely small. Light has never been especially self-conscious about this — his dick does all the normal dick things, and he doesn’t need it to be gigantic in order to do them — but he also doesn’t want to shout it across a hotel lobby, even if no one else is here.
“You don’t know?” L turns back to the concierge and says, as if there were any possibility that he hadn’t heard, “He doesn’t know.”
The concierge slides him a few foil-wrapped packages, which L slips into his pocket, looking very pleased with himself. He turns and heads back into the elevator and Light, aware that his face is bright red, follows behind.
Back in their hotel room, L tosses the condoms on the bed and then says, with no preamble whatsoever, “We should take our clothes off.”
Light’s mind goes blank.
“Yeah,” he says. “We should.”
L stares at him. He stares at Light. Then, brusquely, L removes his shirt.
Beneath it, he’s wearing a black binder. He’s even scrawnier than Light had expected. He doesn’t have the slightest bit of muscle definition on him — it makes his body look sort of soft. There’s a freckle on his left hip. He kicks off his jeans, next. His boxers are black. There’s a trail of dark hair running from his belly button to beneath his waistband. He hooks a thumb around the waistband, then hesitates.
“You should undress, too,” he says.
“Right,” says Light.
He pauses. He doesn’t want L to see his scars, or the things that aren’t yet scarred. But L had already seen them, and he hadn’t flinched.
He pulls off his own shirt and watches L’s eyes skip along the broken skin. He says nothing. Light had hoped he wouldn’t.
It’s strange, having them visible to another person — a little uncomfortable, but freeing, too. He is being looked at without judgement. He is being known.
He tugs off his pants. He’s very cold.
And then L pulls off his boxers.
He’s got thick, curly hair so Light can’t really see anything but all the same — he is suddenly very aware that L is in front of him, entirely nude. He’s never been alone in a room with a naked man before and the actuality of it sends something shuddering through him that hasn’t got anything to do with L.
He exhales. There’s no use getting maudlin.
He slips off his own underwear and lets it fall to the floor.
L’s eyes trail downwards to his groin. His face is flushed. “Oh,” he says. “Good.”
“What?”
“It’s not very big.”
“What?” says Light.
“I like when they’re big,” L explains, his voice a little quick, “But this seems easier to, you know, get inside. Of me. When we fuck.”
“It’s a fine size,” Light tells him. “It’s fine.”
“I know. I said it was good. You should put on a condom.”
“Right,” says Light. He walks over to the bed and picks one up. As he rips open the package, he tries very hard to remember his high school sex ed.
The condom is wet. It feels very thin. He hesitates.
“Do you know how to put it on?” L says.
“Um,” says Light.
“I don’t, either. I’ll google it.” L kneels down and plucks his phone out of his jeans, then walks over to Light and sits down on the bed beside him. His stomach folds over itself when he does. It’s cute. Light tells himself not to notice that it’s cute.
He unlocks the phone, then looks up the WikiHow article. “Oh,” he says. “You have to be hard, first.”
“I know that,” says Light. His voice comes out more irritable than he’d intended. This is sort of the point of the exercise, but getting hard with L feels terrifying and vulnerable.
L reaches towards him. “Do you want me to…?”
“Um,” says Light. “No. I can do it.”
He grips himself, then looks up. L is watching him very closely, his eyes wide, as if Light were an interesting sort of insect he’d found scuttling about, doing arcane things.
This should make things more difficult but, to Light’s horror, he feels himself stiffening. He takes a breath and starts to rub himself. It would be nice to have hand cream or any lubricant whatsoever. After a moment’s consideration, he spits into his palm and tries again.
L’s eyes go even wider. He licks his lips and, god, between that and his own hand Light is properly hard. It feels mechanical, barely erotic, but it also feels good. He reaches for the condom. L tilts his phone screen and Light, following the instructions as carefully as he can, rolls it on.
He feels sort of stupid sitting there naked with nothing on except a condom. It’s undignified. “Should we, ah. Lie down or something? Start, you know …?”
“Okay,” says L, then turns and slams him against the mattress.
Light briefly exits the Samsara cycle. He has no idea what his face is doing. Probably something mortifying.
L grabs Light’s wrists in one hand and pulls them above his head. He’s quick but gentle, his grip loose enough that Light could wriggle out if he wanted. He pushes his hips against Light’s, his cunt against Light’s dick, and Light lets out a very strange, strangled noise. L grins down at him, crooked.
It’s not L’s smile. It’s Beyond’s, to a T. That hint of cruelty in it, that snarl hiding just behind the edges.
He’s never even been kissed before. He’d thought maybe he never would be.
“My little pet,” L purrs. He has Beyond’s voice just right. L’s voice always has a fluting quality — a woodwind melody, impossibly soft with moments of sharpness which always take Light off guard, a voice forever in the minor key. But he’s made it darker now, rougher, like something dredged up from a deep, wet place. “So pretty when you’re in your place.”
Light really can’t help it. He squirms against L’s hips, trying to get more of that pressure, and L obliges him by pushing back. His cunt is so hot. Light is suddenly terrified that he’s going to come before he gets inside L.
He is making noises. He doesn’t mean to. He can hear them in his ears, a series of low whines that don’t sound like himself. He wonders if there is something deeply wrong with him, that he finds his own noises erotic.
“Can I —” His voice comes out breathy.
“What do you want, my pet?”
Jesus. Light is ascending. Descending, possibly. “I want — I —”
“Do you want to fuck me? Is that what you want?”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes. Please.”
L leans down to snarl in his ear. “Then do it.”
Light moans, then exhales. He squirms against L again. Then he stops. “Um. I think —”
“Mm?”
“How?”
L looks at him, and suddenly it’s just them again. “What? You just — tab A. Slot B.”
“No, I mean. I think I need my hands.” He could yank them out, but he’s looking at the angle and he’s pretty sure L would fall. His wrists have become somewhat load-bearing.
“Oh.” L leans back, and lets go of him. “Right. Of course. Well.”
“Could you — could you do the voice again?”
“Of course.” L crawls over him again, hands on either side of his head. He grins again, crooked and vile. “Go ahead, pet. Fuck me.”
Light takes himself in his hand and says a brief and very fervent prayer that he’ll last long enough to get L even halfway there. He thinks about what they say about atheists and foxholes.
As it turns out, this is not an issue.
What happens is much, much worse.
He simply cannot get it in.
Geometrically. Physically. It’s not happening. It’s like the punchline to a bad joke.
L is staring at him, anticipatory, and Light is trying really very hard. He has absolutely no idea what’s going on. This seems like fairly simple math, and yet it’s not working.
He thinks he’s going to cry. He doesn’t want to push too hard and end up hurting L, but he’s not sure how hard he’s supposed to push. There’s resistance, but it seems like the wrong kind of resistance. This is possibly the least erotic thing that’s happened to him in his entire life, including that time when he was fourteen and had accidentally projected the SasuNaru fic he’d been reading the night before on the overhead for the entire class and then had to be removed to the nurse’s office because he was crying too hard to breathe. He wonders if L would mind if he stood up, took a little break, stepped into the hall, and threw himself down the elevator shaft.
After about thirty seconds of this, he feels himself going very definitively soft, which at least means that he has to stop.
He looks back up at L. He’s expecting L to look mortified — Light is personally experiencing secondhand embarrassment on top of his regular embarrassment — but instead he just looks very curious. Light truly can’t decide if that’s better or worse.
“Right,” L says. “That went very poorly. Would you like to watch some more MVs?”
“Yes,” says Light, croakily.
Light is too mortified to do anything but sit there, frozen, as they cycle through the videos. This time, he provides absolutely no input into what they’re watching. It doesn’t matter much to him; he can barely process which videos are or are not on the screen.
He’s put his clothes back on but L, for some reason, hasn’t; he sits there with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. It’s sort of nice, actually. He wishes L would take off the binder.
At last, out of nowhere, L turns to him. “It’s my first time, too,” he says, somewhat generously.
“Oh,” says Light. He’d assumed L had some sort of experience. He writes so much about sex. Although everything he writes about sex is insane, so maybe this makes sense.
“I’ve never been with anyone, not really,” L goes on. “I dated a few people in high school, but we never got further than kissing. Do you think that’s strange? I’m thirty.”
“I’m twenty-seven,” Light points out. “We’re almost the same age. I don’t think it’s strange. I’ve never — I’ve never dated anyone at all.” He’d had opportunities, at McGill, but he’d never taken them.
“Mm,” says L. “By the way. Would you like a handjob instead?” Then, before Light can say anything else, “As him, obviously. I can do the voice.”
“Um,” says Light. “Yeah. Sure. Let’s…let’s do that.”
“Okay. Can you take your pants off again?”
Light kicks them off and then, because he feels stupid half-dressed like some kind of cartoon animal, he takes off his shirt, too. L’s eyelids flutter.
This is possibly the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to him, but it’s not bad. It’s sort of interesting, actually. He had known, abstractly, that he was allowed to use his body for things like this, but it simply hadn’t felt real.
L sidles up beside him, then takes Light’s dick in his hand. He does this in a very businesslike manner.
“My little pet,” he coos. “Here you are.”
He wraps his hand around Light’s dick and then, slowly, begins rubbing it. It’s dry and hesitant but the pressure still feels good; Light leans his head back.
L rubs him, slowly at first, then quicker. He’s got a strange, halting rhythm. Light considers stopping him and making him get some sort of lotion but he’s not sure they have any and anyway he doesn’t actually want L to stop.
It’s strange, having someone else do this for him. He’d thought it would feel better automatically. It sort of does and it sort of doesn’t. He could do a better job of it himself, but he can also feel the heat of L’s body beside him and the fact of this sends heat pooling low in his groin.
“Do you want to come?” L says, his voice low and dark against Light’s ear. His hand stills. Light exhales, heavy.
“Yeah.”
“Is that how you talk to me?” He tugs at Light’s hair, just slightly. “Try again.”
Light can’t help it; he lets out a low moan. L’s eyes get even darker, somehow.
“Yes,” Light says. He thinks he should feel embarrassed but he doesn’t — he just wants and wants and wants. “Please. Yes. I do.”
“Alright, well.” L is staring at him. He seems suddenly very unsure of what to do. “You should probably do that, then.”
He doesn’t do anything to help in this regard. Light wants but he just goes on staring. After a second, Light touches L’s hand. L startles, then looks down at it.
“Could you…”
“Oh. Right.” L wraps his hand a little tighter around Light’s cock and gives it a stroke. He’s so goddamn terrible at this. It’s astounding. It really is much worse than when Light does it himself. But he’s looking straight at him.
L is clearly not capable of making Light come on his own. Light finds that he doesn’t mind, not really. It’s actually sort of nice, getting this incomprehensibly shitty handjob from a boy who is pretending to be another boy who loves him, in this hotel in a city where no one knows them. The world feels very open, somehow, and very safe, and for once he is living only in this one very particular part of it, in his body, in these seconds, with L beside him and touching him and holding him. L is so incompetent that it could go on forever, if he wanted.
He thinks maybe he doesn’t hate L that much, after all. Maybe they’re even friends.
He takes L’s hand in his and wraps it tighter, to help, then moves it faster, the way he likes. L looks down and nods, and then they’re stroking him together, as if they’d discussed it beforehand, as if this had been the plan all along. Their fingers are touching. L’s knuckles are against his. It feels good. Really, really good. Not unbelievable or world-changing but good. He would very much like to bury his face in L’s shoulder, which is right there, pale and with a red line bitten into it from his binder, one tiny freckle just above his clavicle, but instead he pushes him back, as gently as he can, so that he won’t get dirty, and then he leans back and reminds himself to imagine Beyond.
He doesn’t quite manage. L is the only person he can think of, and perhaps it was stupid of him to imagine he might have done otherwise. He shuts his eyes and allows himself to exhale, a sound that comes low and rough. And then he’s coming with L’s hand on him and the heat of L’s leg against him, a profoundly mediocre orgasm and also his first with another person and he is briefly, very, very content.
When he opens his eyes L has crawled closer.
“Can I kiss you?” L asks, very abruptly.
“Oh. Sure.”
L leans down and kisses him. He’s very bad at it. His lips are chapped. He pulls away so Light puts a hand on his shoulder blade and leans up to kiss him again. He has the distinct impression that he isn’t any better.
It’s his first kiss.
L stares at him. “Would you like a towel?”
“Um. Yeah.”
“Alright.” L gets off the bed. Light can feel the mattress shifting with his absence. He stays very still, so he won’t ruin the hotel’s nice decorative sheets, until L comes back with a fluffy white hand towel. He cleans Light off, looks at the towel, then drops it onto the floor and crawls beside Light and pulls him against his shoulder. Light curls against him. They’re not really close enough for that, but he does it anyway.
“I liked that,” L says.
Light looks up. “Really?”
L makes a low humming noise.
“Why? I mean. It didn’t do anything for you.”
“Mm. I liked pretending to be him.” Light has a bout of brief, violent and extremely confusing jealousy. “And I liked watching you.” The jealousy dissipates.
“Did I —” Halfway through asking it, he realizes what he’s about to say, and tries very hard to make himself shut up. He fails entirely. “Did I look stupid?”
L looks down at him. He’s quiet for a second. “No,” he says. “You looked very nice. You looked happy.”
“Okay.” For a second Light thinks he’s going to cry. He’s not sure why. He swallows, and manages not to. “I think…” I like you,, he wants to say. But, no, that’s too personal; it wasn’t about them, not really. It was a game. They’d been pretending. “I liked that, too.”
L hums, low. “It was different than I expected.”
“Oh. Yeah? How?” He’s worried that L is going to say it just sucked a lot, or that he’s going to inform Light that his dick is tiny again. But he just tips his head so his hair falls soft against Light’s shoulder and Light decides that L could say the most absolutely moronic, insulting, ridiculous things in the universe and Light would forgive him.
“You were very quiet,” L says. “I thought there would be more sounds.”
“Really?” Light had thought he was making plenty of noise, actually. If he thinks too hard, he’s a bit embarrassed by it. But he remembers that people in L’s stories are always screaming and making these animal moans. “Oh. Yeah. I guess. I mean. I was just…” Doing what I felt sounds weirdly obscene. “I guess.”
“I didn’t mind or anything,” L says, quickly. “It was just different than I expected. Oh, and there was less.”
“Less — what?”
“Semen.” He says this as if it were an extremely normal thing to say and Light thinks he might go completely insane.
“I mean. I guess? I thought it was, you know. A regular amount.”
“Mm.”
“Well.” He has absolutely no idea what to say to any of this. “Okay.”
“It wasn’t a bad amount.”
“No, I. I didn’t think you were implying that.” He feels like he needs to contribute something, if for no other reason than to get L on literally any other track. “Your hands were, um. Warmer. Than I thought they’d be.” This isn’t actually true — they’d been the temperature of hands — but he can’t come up with anything other than I thought you were going to be some kind of sex god and you weren’t and he has no idea how to make that sound like a compliment even though he had, actually, preferred things this way.
“Really?”
“Yes,” Light lies. L looks at one of his hands, then places his palm on Light’s chest. Light flinches. It’s freezing cold. “It was, you know. Nice. Heat. Um. Do you want me to, you know. Do you.”
“Mm. Yes, I think so.”
“Great. Okay. I’m going to. I’m going to do that now.” He takes a breath, then climbs off of L and comes to face him. L spreads his legs open and Light’s heart kicks up in his chest. He can see something pink amidst L’s hair. He can smell his cunt, an unusual scent, slightly salty.
Light decides it would be a good idea to kiss him again, so he does that, right on the side of his jaw. L shivers, then skitters his fingers along Light’s hip.
It occurs to Light that he’s pretending to be a lot more put together than he actually is.
“I’ll be careful,” he promises. “Tell me if it hurts or anything like that. I don’t want to hurt you.”
L blinks at him. His eyelashes are extremely dark and suddenly there’s something in his expression which Light can’t parse, something which isn’t softness but which feels close; something liquid, which reminds him of melting. “I’ll tell you, Light.”
He touches two fingers to L’s stomach, so he won’t be startled, then slips them between L’s labia.
He’s wet. Light should have expected this, but he hadn’t, somehow. He doesn’t particularly like the texture of that, but he likes the way the rest of L feels — soft, and shockingly hot against his fingers. He finds L’s entrance and pushes his fingers inside and L makes a broken sound and curls towards him. He buries his face in Light’s shoulder, then presses close, his hips moving so slow Light isn’t sure he realizes he’s doing it.
This makes the angle considerably harder, but he does his best anyway. He presses further, and L lets out a sharp, quick hiss.
“Yes. That hurts. You could try just one, I think.”
“Okay. Um.” Light has always heard two. He’d assumed that was standard. He tries again, slower for good measure, and L pushes up against him. Light, not entirely sure where to go from here, moves within him and L lets out another low groan.
Light changes his mind. L hadn’t been reading too much smut after all. He’s just really, really vocal.
“Is that good?”
“It feels like you’re opening me.”
“Oh —” This does something to him. His stomach quivers. He leans down and kisses the crown of L’s head and L groans and grabs his shoulder.
L grinds against him, slow, and then he catches Light’s wrist. “I think you could — it does hurt, still. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Oh. Do you want to stop?” He assumes the answer is yes, but L shakes his head.
“No. Please.”
“Oh. Does it — hurt in a good way?”
“No.”
Light is getting very mixed signals here. He pulls his finger out, very carefully, then pulls back and brushes L’s hair away from his face with his clean hand. L whimpers. His face is flushed again and his eyelids are fluttering.
“Okay,” Light says. “I think — look. I need you to just. Take a breath and tell me what you want. Okay?” He’s truly not used to being the sane one in any given scenario, but this seems to be how things are.
L breathes out. “I want you to stop,” he says. “I don’t want it to hurt.”
“That’s fine,” Light says. “I don’t want to hurt you, either.”
“Can I just stay here?”
“What?” says Light. “Oh. Yeah. I can take the cot.”
“No,” L says. “I mean — we can both — you could stay too, if you’d like.”
Light considers this. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay, sure. I can.”
Light stares up at the ceiling while L curls up beside him, sleeping. He looks so innocent like this.
Choosing not to return to the cot was the right move. He’d just had his fingers inside L, even if it wasn’t for a particularly long or successful time — God, he’d come right in front of L — and surely that’s more intimate than allowing L to sleep beside him.
Although really he’s not entirely sure that’s true. He thinks it probably is. But it’s hard to say.
It was not, he reminds himself, about them. It was about Beyond. Thinking that feels a little hollow, but he thinks it anyway.
There is a nudge against his arm.
He turns.
L has curled closer. He’s pressed his head against Light's arm, casual, as if it were a mistake, something he couldn’t help. He is, after all, asleep.
Except he isn’t. Light is quite sure. The movement had been too deliberate. His breathing is far too steady.
They’ve shared a room for weeks, now. Light knows how L breathes.
He should complain, maybe.
He doesn’t. He doesn’t want to. He lets him. He pretends he doesn’t know.
disgusting freaks DON'T kys
[Typing:
talk to you all later :) :)
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