Chapter Text
my brother, my wound
[Light Yagami makes his first kill on November 28, 2003. He makes his second kill that same day. Both the death of the school shooter and the motorist make it to the local Kanto news, but Light, by then, has stopped paying attention. He kills five hundred more people by December 3.
The world’s police organizations are in an uproar; the ICPO calls an emergency meeting. Soichiro Yagami attends with an up and coming police officer, Touta Matsuda, and the various representatives debate the merit of calling this anything more malicious than a freak coincidence.
The screen glitches. “I am L,” says a robotic voice, and the wheels of fate creak as they turn anew.
But none of this changes much about the Yagami household.]
“Easy,” Ryuzaki murmurs, his breath ghosting over Light’s face. Light can smell the cola candies he’d been chewing through earlier, all sweet and acidic. His fingers hold Light’s jaw still with a tenderness that he’s not used to. “If you move too much, I’ll miss.”
“Don’t remind me,” Light snaps. “Why did you want to do this, again?”
“I thought it would be cute. And you conceded defeat, if you remember. I’m owed a prize.”
Light grits his teeth as he thinks back to that humiliating moment on the floor of the family kitchen. As if that had been some kind of gracious concession of defeat, some diplomatic surrender. He can’t tell if his brother is trying to give him a sop for his pride or if it’s just his usual condescension, not when he can practically feel the faint scratch of the needle in Ryuzaki’s hand as it hovers over his earlobe. His heart rate kicks up despite itself. “It’s getting less cute by the minute,” he mutters. “Get it over with already.”
“Shh,” says Ryuzaki. “I’m just making sure everything is lined up right.”
Light opens his eyes a fraction and takes in the intent look on his brother’s face—eyes narrowed, mouth slightly open. The potato held behind his ear feels both sticky and wet. But there’s something to be said for being the sole object of Ryuzaki’s focus, especially when he’s in a careful mood. Light shuts his eyes again.
“On three,” Ryuzaki murmurs. “One, two—“
A sharp pain lances through Light’s ear and it’s only his strength of will that keeps him from flinching away and God forbid, tearing something, as Ryuzaki’s thin fingers tug at his earlobe.
There’s a soft click. Then a hand pets over his flank as if to soothe him. Light feels both gratitude and revulsion squirm in his gut, low and dissatisfying—he dislikes that the half-assed gesture worked.
“Did you get it,” he asks, breathless.
A tongue click. “I missed.”
“Wh—“
Ryuzaki’s laugh settles over Light like a blanket, and Light opens his eyes to his brother sitting back on his haunches with a satisfied grin. “Joke,” he says.
“I’m going to poke your eye out,” Light tells him. “Give me the potato.”
Ryuzaki clicks his tongue again. “We’re using a fresh piece, Light. What if you have syphilis?”
“Who would have given it to me?” Light shoots back, and snatches the potato from Ryuzaki’s hand. His ear has stopped smarting by now, and it’s faded to a dull ache. He resists the urge to fuss with it.
He’s holding it up to his brother’s ear when Ryuzaki sighs. “Use the other needle, Light. We’re blood brothers enough already.”
Irritation bleeds into embarrassment. “Your assumptions will bite you someday,” he mutters, and picks up the plastic wrapped needle from the bedside table. He’s not sure where Ryuzaki got these—they’re piercing needles, not medical or sewing ones.
His brother’s soft condescension prickles over him. Light isn’t a child anymore—hasn’t been for a long time—but something about this room, with its dim lighting and the childhood within it, makes him feel too small for his skin. This is the kind of idiocy he’s used to seeing from his old high school classmates. But now, having turned eighteen, passed the entrance exam for To-oh, and with more murders under his belt than most people can speak to in a lifetime, he feels both impossibly adult and suffocatingly young.
Ryuzaki’s wild hair is in the way. He reaches out to tuck a chunk of it behind Ryuzaki’s left ear, the mirror to Light’s. His brother’s skin is cold to the touch. Like a corpse, he’s always thought.
“Don’t move,” Light murmurs, narrowing his focus to Ryuzaki’s earlobe. He almost doesn’t catch Ryuzaki’s sharp intake of breath, or the way he goes completely still. Experimentally, Light shuffles closer on the bed. They’re almost chest to chest. A heartbeat thuds in his ears—his own, or Ryuzaki’s? It’s steady. So steady.
He doesn’t give his brother the mercy of a countdown. He only takes his earlobe between thumb and forefinger, improvised backstop held securely with his other fingers, and pierces through Ryuzaki’s ear. For one blinding moment, the two of them are connected by steel and skin and the air between them, as thick and tense as anything. Ryuzaki doesn’t make a sound.
Bright red blood wells up where he’d poked a hole. As if shaking off a spell, Light picks up the second hoop earring from the bed and pushes it through as carefully as he dares. There’s red on his fingers—maybe he should have worn gloves. He pinches the hoop shut with a tiny click, and then it’s done.
Gold gleams in the low bedroom lighting. It clashes with his brother’s pallor, and when his hair falls back over his ear, it glints as if winking.
Ryuzaki’s mouth twitches into a smile. “How do I look, Light?”
“Awful,” Light says immediately. He drops the needle onto the bedside table and stares at his fingertips, streaked with blood. “Gross.”
Ryuzaki takes his hand. Before Light can yank it away, he bends his head and licks a stripe across Light’s fingers—his tongue is warm and wet, and his grip is uncompromising.
Light feels every hair on his body stand on end, like an electrocuted cat. “What is wrong with you,” he hisses.
Ryuzaki’s eyes, half-lidded, pupils blown, flick up to his own. “I made a mess,” he says. His tone says he’s trying for idle, but he overshoots into something trembling, wild. Light finds himself leaning back onto his elbows as Ryuzaki crawls over him. Dark hair hangs in the space between them—Light can see the new earring flash and vanish as his bangs sway.
A drop of blood rolls down the side of Ryuzaki’s jaw. Light watches, transfixed, as it beads. It falls—just as he’d thought it would—onto the hollow of his own throat.
Ryuzaki licks that one clean, too. But he lingers. Lets the edge of his teeth scrape raw against Light’s collarbone, drags his tongue over Light’s skin until he shudders beneath him.
Light closes his eyes. And yet his brother doesn’t advance, seemingly content to straddle him as long as Light stays flat on his back. His right earlobe throbs and the warm ache of it spreads through him.
“Hey,” says Light, suffused with some strange boldness. “Ryuzaki.”
“Hm?”
“How long are you going to keep this up?” he asks. “We can’t—we can’t do this forever.” Hetwists and pulls at the bedsheets. “I’m going to college. There will be a day that I move out of here.”
He thinks of the world he’s trying to build. He’s been, so very pointedly, not thinking about where his brother would fit into it.
Ryuzaki is silent for a long moment. “Light-chan is asking when I’ll let him grow up,” says his brother then, his voice contemplative. “The answer is never.”
Light opens his eyes to glare. “Even you can’t prevent the passage of time.”
Ryuzaki sighs. With a grasp too firm for Light to wiggle away, he hauls Light’s knees back until their hips are flush together, and rolls his slowly. Light looks away—it’s one thing to be confronted, over and over, with his own disastrous attraction. It’s another for Ryuzaki to dry hump him through his clothes.
“Light is being obtuse,” he says, soft and chiding, like Light’s some kind of recalcitrant student. Desire twists in his belly. “You’ll always be my hopeless little brother. Look at you—you’re getting blood on the sheets because you won’t look at me.”
Frustration wells up inside him. “You’re not taking me seriously—!”
“Of course not.” Ryuzaki rolls his hips again, and the steady rhythm of not-enough-friction and nothing-at-all only winds him up further. “You’re saying stupid things. You’re smarter than this, Light.”
Light digs his heel into the small of his brother’s back as meanly as he can. “You’re refusing to face reality, Ryuzaki. It’s downright delusional to think you can keep this up forever.”
“Those are really big words,” his brother croons, his thumb digging into the soft meat of Light’s hip. “Did you learn them recently?”
Light lets out a noise that’s half frustration, half punched-out surprise—Ryuzaki’s deft fingers had zipped down his pants and palmed over his dick. “I’ll kill you,” Light says, and half means it.
“How well has that worked out for you?” Ryuzaki asks, stroking him over his underwear. His voice drips with a condescension that slides along Light’s skin and seeps into him like a poison. His head spins; his earlobe throbs.
Light reaches over and fists his hand in Ryuzaki’s shirt. “Quit teasing me,” he hisses, and pulls.
Ryuzaki’s mouth twitches. “Use your words, Light. What is it that you want?”
You, thinks Light, with so much shame that it burns. He wants the relief of Ryuzaki inside him, wants the dreadful embarrassment of being folded in half because it’ll mean the end of this endlessly ratcheting spring inside of him. He doesn’t want to say it. He’d rather die than say it. He’s so certain of this that he makes to get up from the bed and leave, because even an unsatisfying wank in the shower would be better than admitting—
Ryuzaki’s fingers tug, ever so lightly, on Light’s new earring. The piercing smarts and Light nearly wails.
“Come on, little brother,” Ryuzaki murmurs. “You can do it.”
“What gives,” Light says, his voice an octave higher than usual, as the piercing throbs with a new urgency. “You’re gonna tear it—”
“I suppose that means you should behave,” Ryuzaki says.
And Light’s jaw snaps shut, because the last thing he wants is for his earlobe to be ripped in half because Ryuzaki got too overzealous. Would his brother do that? Permanently disfigure him in that way? Light doesn’t know. Maybe he wants to know. To test it, to see just how far his brother would go.
Ryuzaki tilts his head.
And Light—flinching, humiliated—turns his face into the sheets. “Fuck me,” he mutters.
There’s a soft tug on the earring that nevertheless sends pain radiating into Light’s body, and he clamps his eyes shut. He can feel tears welling up. “Please,” he says, as Ryuzaki tugs his underwear down over his knees.
“How?” murmurs his brother, as he pushes Light’s thighs to his chest. He feels exposed. He is exposed, disastrously open, a place that not even the sun has touched laid bare. Ryuzaki is staring at his asshole like it contains all the secrets of the universe. God. He’d rather be flayed.
Light screws his eyes shut. “I don’t care,” he says shortly, because this facsimile of consideration is more humiliating than just being taken, protesting and limp. His brother’s overtures of romance make his skin crawl.
“You don’t mean that,” Ryuzaki says.
“I do,” says Light. “Do whatever you want.”
Then his eyes fly open as something warm and wet laves over him, lascivious and terribly gentle. Ryuzaki’s head is bowed over him as if in prayer and he’s–
“What the fuck are you doing?” Light demands, twitching away. Ryuzaki tugs him back into position with strong hands and presses him back down, folded, exposed. Saliva runs moist and sticky down the skin of his ass and Light wails. It feels good. He hates that it feels good. Everything Ryuzaki does these days feels good, even when it hurts, even when it makes him want to crawl into the bathroom and throw up until there’s nothing left inside him. It’s like somewhere along the way, he’d been reprogrammed into the sort of person who liked getting fucked.
But even that shame can’t mask the sweet warmth of Ryuzaki’s mouth or the familiar feeling of thin fingers digging into his thighs. “I’ll kill you,” he says breathlessly. “I’ll kill you, I will.”
Ryuzaki makes a mmhm noise against him that has him unconsciously clenching down. Everything has started to melt at the edges, gone molasses slow. In moments like these, Light can’t think of the notebook. He can’t think of any names. He is a body on a mattress with its underwear hiked down to its knees. “Ryuzaki,” Light moans, wanton and half-outside of himself.
“Shh,” says his brother, pulling back. Fingers massage at his hole before slipping inside and Light can feel them, feel them scissoring inside of him with a slow, unhurried insistence. It’s a rare day that Ryuzaki decides to take his time. Usually their parents are home, or Light has school, but tonight there’s nothing at all. Only his brother, cornering him in the bathroom with piercing needles and a gleam in his eyes.
His thoughts wander. “Please,” he says, a perfect mimicry of the women in adult movies. It makes him feel less like a thing to be fucked and more like—
Well. Anything else.
Ryuzaki sighs at him. “You’re so impatient,” he murmurs. “Is Light sure—”
“I’m sure,” Light snaps. The words trail off into a series of ah, ah, ahs as Ryuzaki jams his fingers into Light’s prostate. He hadn’t been expecting it, and his back arches off the bed as heat shoots up his spine.
“Who taught you to act like such a whore?” Ryuzaki asks. But he’s taking out his fingers, and Light finds himself clenching uselessly on air. He’s shucking off his pants, then, and kneeling between Light’s legs. Supplicant; penitent. His hair is too long. It’s falling into his eyes, Light thinks, as he catches his breath.
A blunt, familiar pressure against his ass. “Tell me you want it,” says Ryuzaki. His eyes are dark and glittering.
Light holds his gaze. “Do you like it when I lie that much?” he says.
Ryuzaki leans down and presses the tenderest of kisses on Light’s ear, just above the new piercing. “I can always tell,” he whispers, and presses his tongue flat against the conch of his ear. Light responds with a full body shiver, and the head of Ryuzaki’s cock catches on his rim—he inhales, sharp and anticipatory. But his brother’s hips are still.
“Why does it matter if I want it or not?” Light demands, frustrated and half-hard despite himself. “It’s never mattered before.”
“Humor me.”
He lets out a wordless cry of frustration. “Yes,” he bites out, hating himself. Hating his brother. Hating the world that had shrunken to the four walls of this room, with all its suffocating smallness.
“Thank you,” Ryuzaki breathes. “Good boy, Light.”
Then he pushes inside in one fluid motion, punching a cry out of him. Light throws an arm across his eyes and sobs into his own skin. His brother fucks him with a singleminded, vicious rhythm, like the only thing he cares about is nailing Light’s prostate over and over. It feels so good it almost hurts. And it’s not long before his climax crashes over him and he comes hard, spilling all over himself with a high, thready noise he hadn’t known he could make.
Ryuzaki doesn’t even slow down. He bends closer and presses kisses all over Light’s face. “You feel so good,” he murmurs, and his breathing is satisfyingly uneven.
Light grits his teeth. “Quit treating me like—ah—like I’m your girlfriend—”
“Aren’t you?” Ryuzaki asks, before slamming in to the hilt and grinding his hips into Light’s. He’s oversensitive, stretched out, and this is almost too much—he wails, claws at Ryuzaki’s back. His brother won’t even do him the courtesy of raping him properly. Instead they have to playact at being lovers—
“Fuck,” Ryuzaki breathes, his rhythm stuttering. Light feels warmth spread through his ass and cringes. He’ll have to clean that out later, which is, in some ways, more humiliating than the sex itself.
Ryuzaki pulls out with a schlick noise and drops beside him, pressing his face into Light’s nape. “I’m never letting you get away from me,” he murmurs.
Light shuts his eyes. His first thought had been terrible. Unthinkable. He bins it immediately.
His second thought:
When he’s finally God, he’ll have no use for his brother anymore. Satisfaction warms him more than any fire.