Chapter Text
The problem with Light Yagami was epistemological in nature.
Not moral. Not legal. Not even logical.
No, the problem was that he knew things. Knew them too well, too sharply, too precisely, too annoyingly.
He knew L.
And that made L’s life, in the most technical and sophisticated sense, an unrelenting, masturbatory hell.
L sat cross-legged on the edge of the bathroom sink, one long foot braced against the counter, the other dangling as if he’d forgotten he had knees. His posture, a graceless fossil of whatever evolutionary mishap birthed him, remained unchanged. Light stood at the mirror brushing his teeth with the mechanical spite of a man trapped in a relationship that was 45% philosophical warfare, 45% unresolved sexual tension, and 10% actual war.
Neither of them spoke.
They monologued.
“I find it interesting,” L said, voice low and smoky and infuriatingly devoid of toothpaste, “that you brush your teeth with such ferocity every morning. As though cleanliness could erase guilt.”
Light spat into the sink. “I find it interesting,” he replied, rinsing, “that you observe my oral hygiene habits like a voyeur with an Oedipal fixation on dental care.”
“You’re projecting,” L said immediately.
“I’m deflecting,” Light corrected.
L licked the rim of a teacup that hadn’t been washed since the Aizawa Incident™ and said, “Precisely. Projection would imply you have something to hide. But as you’ve reminded me, you’re not Kira, so why would you need to hide anything at all?”
Light narrowed his eyes. “This is about the cereal bowl, isn’t it.”
“I have not forgotten the cereal bowl,” L said darkly.
“Jesus Christ—”
“I am not him.”
“Noted.”
They were living together in a two-bedroom apartment that only had one bed. That wasn’t an accident. Ryuzaki had “forgotten” to order the second frame. Light had “forgotten” to mention it to Watari. They had both “forgotten” they weren’t actually dating, and then very suddenly, very loudly, remembered—at 3:47AM during an argument that started about the ontology of justice and ended with L slamming Light into the kitchen counter and biting his lip.
Which wasn’t sexy, because the lip bled.
Which was sexy, because Light said, “Is this how you gather evidence, detective?” and L moaned like the perverse goblin of reason he was.
The morning after was worse.
Not because of shame. God, no. Shame required the belief that things were somehow wrong.
It was worse because they wouldn’t stop.
They hadn’t stopped since. Not in the bathroom. Not in bed. Not in the middle of breakfast, where L currently crouched with one hand around a fork and the other halfway into a box of sugar cubes.
“Do you know,” Light said with calculated casualness, shirt half-buttoned and hair still wet from the shower, “how absurd it is to eat thirty-eight grams of refined sugar before 8AM?”
“Do you know,” L replied, “how arousing it is when you lecture me about dietary consequences like a priest with a god complex?”
“I don’t have a god complex.”
“You are a god complex.”
“You’re misusing the term.”
“And you’re misusing your mouth.”
There was a moment of silence. It was not romantic. It was not a soft silence.
It was a prelude to atrocity.
“You’re such a goddamn slut for Socratic method,” Light muttered, dropping into a chair like the weight of his own brilliance had finally wearied him.
“And you’re a whore for moral relativism,” L replied without blinking.
They stared across the breakfast table like two generals on opposite sides of a battlefield made entirely of pancakes, tea stains, and emotional dysfunction.
A beat passed.
Light cracked first. “We need a safe word for breakfast.”
L sipped his tea. “I propose Plato.”
“Too sexual.”
“I disagree.”
“Of course you do.”
L’s toes brushed Light’s ankle under the table.
Not sweetly.
Not shyly.
Like a threat. A challenge. A dare.
Light flinched, but only inwardly. Outwardly, he took another bite of toast like his mouth wasn’t being seduced by epistemological footsie.
“This,” Light said, softly, dangerously, “is hell.”
L chewed contemplatively. “And yet you keep coming back.”
“Is that a double entendre?”
“I only speak in double entendres,” L said, wiping his mouth with Light’s discarded tie.
“You are a nightmare in a hoodie,” Light said. “A philosophical miscarriage.”
“And you’re a tragedy disguised as a valedictorian. I find it romantic.”
“Romantic?” Light laughed, the sound sharp and defensive. “You think this is romance?”
“I think,” L said, rising from the table, limbs loose and reptilian, “that love is just another problem of inference. And you, Light Yagami, are my favorite unsolvable equation.”
He padded to the sink, dumped his tea, and turned. His face was unreadable. His eyes were not.
“I know you,” he said.
Light’s pulse stumbled. “You think you do.”
“I know what you’re capable of.”
“Then why—”
“Because knowing doesn’t mean not loving you.”
Light stared at him. “That’s the most self-destructive thing you’ve ever said.”
“I’ve said worse things,” L murmured, crossing the kitchen. “I’ve done worse things.”
His hand settled against Light’s jaw.
Light should have pulled away. Should have said something biting and intelligent. Should have called him a hypocrite. Should have reminded him that love was a delusion, that suspicion lived under their skin like rot, that trust was impossible in a house of lies.
Instead—
He leaned in.
“I hate you,” Light said, lips brushing L’s.
“I know,” L said. “I’m hard.”
And then they kissed.
Desperately. Furiously. Like proof. Like punishment.
Like philosophy.
The cereal bowl shattered somewhere behind them.
Neither of them noticed.
---
Later, after the breakfast table was destroyed and the cereal bowl buried with full honors, Light lay in bed wondering how, exactly, his life had devolved into an existential debate club hosted inside a softcore porno.
The sheets were tangled around one ankle. L had his fingers shoved into a bag of stale marshmallows like they were evidence of a greater moral truth. Light had not been allowed under the blanket. That was the consequence of having called Kant “a self-important virgin.”
“I regret nothing,” Light said aloud.
“I regret everything,” L said, lying horizontally across the bed like a corpse someone forgot to tag. “Especially the fact that you breathe audibly.”
“You said it turned you on.”
“I said it sounded like perjury.”
Light sighed. “You kissed me for twenty minutes this morning.”
“Because your mouth was full of lies,” L snapped, chewing marshmallows like a man taking revenge on the food pyramid.
There was silence again, but this time, it simmered. A tense lull, like the eye of a storm fueled entirely by academia and unresolved horniness.
Outside the door, Watari dropped off a tray of tea and fled before they could start another performance of Othello: Domestic Version.
“You know,” Light began slowly, staring at the ceiling like it owed him child support, “we could try normalcy. Just once. Say ‘good morning.’ Drink coffee. Talk about the weather. Not debate the metaphysical implications of toast.”
“You burned it,” L muttered.
“It was a mistake—”
“Your existence is a mistake.”
Light rolled over and chucked a pillow. L caught it with one hand. In the other, he held a marshmallow like a peace offering or a threat.
“I dreamed,” L said, voice low, “that you were Kira again last night.”
Light’s body stilled.
“And I dreamed,” Light replied, careful, “that you proved it.”
L’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. More like a moral fracture.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, dragging himself into a sitting position, back slouched like a guilty question mark. “What is it that makes a man evil?”
“I assume,” Light said, brushing hair from his eyes, “you’ve written a thesis on it.”
“I’ve written twenty-six,” L said. “And all of them contradict each other.”
“Sounds like something you’d masturbate to.”
“Only when I’m emotionally vulnerable.”
Light blinked. “Are you telling me that?”
“I’m warning you.”
Light sat up, elbows on knees, head in hands. “I can’t believe I kissed you.”
“I can’t believe you liked it.”
“I can’t believe I’m sleeping with the only man who thinks ‘deductive reasoning’ is a kink.”
“I can’t believe you’re not dead yet.”
They made eye contact. That terrible, beautiful eye contact. The kind that happens only between lovers and liars and people who’ve held knives behind each other’s backs long enough to start calling it intimacy.
Then—
“Do you think,” Light asked suddenly, “that mouthwash has a soul?”
L paused.
“I knew,” he whispered, “you were going to say something stupid.”
“I’m serious,” Light insisted. “If the concept of sin can be extended to intention, and mouthwash’s sole function is purification—”
“Mouthwash does not have agency, Light-kun.”
“Neither do I, apparently. You call me Kira every time I forget to put the cap on the toothpaste.”
“That’s not an accident,” L said grimly. “That’s premeditated.”
“Oh, for god’s sake—”
“Again, I’m not him.”
Light threw himself backward dramatically, one arm flung over his eyes. “You can’t keep doing this.”
“I can and I will.”
“God, it’s like dating a bat.”
“A bat would be less suspicious,” L muttered.
“Yeah, but a bat wouldn’t blow me in the file room.”
L said nothing.
Light lifted the arm from his eyes. “You blew me in the file room.”
“It was investigative.”
“It was disrespectful.”
“You asked me to.”
“I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and you said, ‘Exploring a lead.’”
L’s shoulders lifted in a vague, unrepentant shrug. “I stand by that.”
“You were on your knees.”
“It was a low lead.”
Light screamed into the pillow. L looked vaguely triumphant, like he’d just won a chess match against God.
The door creaked open.
Watari, god bless him, appeared with a tray of clean mugs and a kind of quiet horror behind his eyes. “Detectives,” he said, nodding, as though they were not half-naked and discussing the ethical implications of fellatio.
L took a mug. “Thank you, Watari.”
“...Of course,” Watari said, retreating like a man who’d just seen Freud’s worst-case scenario play out in cotton sheets.
“I think we broke him,” Light said when the door shut.
“I broke him,” L said. “You were just the motive.”
Light crawled back into bed like a wounded tiger, teeth bared. “One day, Ryuzaki, I will snap. I’ll strangle you with a phone charger and tell the police it was an act of art.”
“They’ll never believe you,” L murmured, sipping his tea. “Your alibi will be too compelling.”
Light hated that he was right. He hated that L was always right, in the way that only people who refused to be proven wrong ever were.
“Can we at least agree,” Light muttered, “that we’re both emotionally compromised?”
“We’ve been emotionally compromised since episode six,” L said. “Now drink your tea and lie to me.”
“About what?”
“Tell me you didn’t mean it when you said I smell like death.”
Light blinked. “You do smell like death.”
L raised an eyebrow. “And yet you’re hard.”
Light looked down, betrayed by his own body.
“This,” he said slowly, “is a hate crime.”
“You love hate crimes.”
“Don’t phrase it like that.”
“I phrased it exactly like that.”
Light sipped his tea and said nothing. His brain was a volcano of boiling contradictions, lust and logic, shame and longing, fear and frustration. He couldn’t tell where L ended and obsession began. He couldn’t tell if the way L looked at him—so knowing, so empty—was love, or hunger, or both.
He couldn’t tell what scared him more: that L knew him, or that L might be right.
Light exhaled.
The day would come. The investigation would move forward. Kira would slip. L would reach. Light would burn.
But for now—
Just for now—
He let himself lie back on the bed and close his eyes.
And beside him, L whispered:
“Plato.”
Light groaned into the pillow. “God damn it.”
---
Misa had been banned from the investigation room again.
Not because of the stalker.
Not because she kept calling L “Panda Boy.”
Not even because she tried to “lightly hex” Matsuda with a cursed Hello Kitty plushie.
No, this time it was because she'd walked in on L sitting in Light’s lap mid-argument, furiously listing off the signs of narcissistic personality disorder while Light hand-fed him strawberries like a Freudian nightmare made flesh.
“Is this,” Misa had asked, “foreplay or perjury?”
L had said, “Both.”
Light had said, “Leave.”
And Misa, with the wisdom of a girl who knew when to flee a metaphorical sex crime, had stormed out screaming, “You two are just—deranged!”
She wasn’t wrong.
Two days later, the murder case finally hit.
A man had been found dead in a locked apartment—no forced entry, no murder weapon, no witnesses. Only one clue: a used toothbrush, still wet, lying across the floor as though it had been thrown.
“Strangulation,” L said, reviewing the scene photos upside-down from his perch on the couch.
“Definitely,” Light said, matching his energy by sitting backwards on a chair like a substitute teacher who had once read Camus.
“Yet there are no fingerprints,” L continued.
“No signs of struggle.”
“No signs of anything.”
“And the toothbrush—?”
Light squinted. “Symbolic, maybe. Or intimate. Domestic violence disguised as an accident?”
“I was thinking performance art,” L muttered.
They looked at each other.
“Nietzsche would love this,” L said.
“Nietzsche would die for this.”
“He’s already dead.”
“Exactly.”
Matsuda, bravely trying to keep up, looked between them like he was watching twin tornadoes argue over metaphysics. “So… what do we think? Crime of passion?”
“Possibly,” L said. “But only if it was a passion based on moral collapse and dental accessories.”
Aizawa sighed. “So, like every Tuesday with you two.”
L ignored him, plucking a sugar cube from his pocket and popping it into his mouth like a man who thought diabetes was a conspiracy invented by boring people.
“We’ll need to visit the scene,” he said. “Watari, prepare the car.”
Light raised an eyebrow. “You never let me sit in the front seat.”
“That’s because you used it to quote Machiavelli at me while adjusting the air vents.”
“I was proving a point!”
“You were giving me a headache.”
“You like headaches.”
“Only when you cause them.”
There was a long silence.
No one spoke.
Matsuda coughed.
“I’m not riding in that car,” Aizawa said flatly. “You two need therapy. And a priest.”
“We had one,” Light said.
“He fled the country,” L added.
The crime scene was a minimalist apartment that looked like a brochure for “divorced man with taste.” Bleak walls, expensive furniture, a single cracked mirror above the bed. No photos. No clutter. Just that damn toothbrush on the floor like a challenge to reason itself.
“I don’t trust it,” Light said immediately.
“It’s a brush,” L replied, crouching low, feet flat, ass hovering like he was trying to become one with the tile. “Not a snake.”
“It’s placed.”
“It was probably dropped.”
“No one drops things at that angle.”
“You did last week when I accused you of being Kira while you were washing your face.”
Light’s eye twitched. “You ruined my skincare routine.”
“You never had one.”
“I tried.”
“And I investigated your pores.”
“You licked my eyebrow.”
“I was thorough.”
Watari, ever the professional, was behind them photographing the scene like nothing horrifying was being said. Aizawa, from the hallway, muttered something about “police brutality against common sense.”
L stood, inspecting the bed. “This was staged,” he said.
“How can you tell?”
“No dust on the sheets.”
Light frowned. “Could’ve just been made.”
“Why make a bed for a corpse?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s metaphorical. Maybe the killer wanted it to look like sleep.”
L turned slowly. “Sleep,” he echoed, voice low. “Or peace?”
“Or guilt.”
“Or guilt about peace.”
“That’s redundant.”
“You’re redundant.”
“You’re a hypothesis with legs.”
“You’re the reason I don’t believe in god.”
“You are god.”
“I’m going to scream.”
“I already am.”
They kissed.
It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t gentle. It was open-mouthed and aggressive and horrifying, the kind of kiss you could only justify with a twelve-page thesis on the psychological consequences of shared trauma.
They broke apart with equal loathing and arousal.
Light wiped his mouth. “I hate this.”
L licked his lips. “Do you?”
Light did not answer.
That night, back at headquarters, they sat in separate chairs six inches apart like the concept of space was a myth they both resented.
“I think the toothbrush was a message,” Light said, not looking at him.
“To whom?”
“To anyone who knew the victim. Someone intimate.”
“A lover?”
“Possibly.”
“A metaphor for domestic routine.”
“Or oral fixation.”
They paused. The silence curled. Became a joke with no punchline.
“Are we doing this again?” Light asked.
“I never stopped.”
Light leaned back, legs crossed, eyes narrow. “Why do you keep accusing me?”
L blinked. “Because it turns you on.”
“What?”
“You like it when I say you’re dangerous. You like the fear. You like being chased.”
“You’re projecting again.”
“I’m deducing.”
“You’re breaking.”
“You kissed me at a murder scene.”
“You kissed me.”
“You leaned in first!”
“You called me God!”
“I was being diagnostic!”
Light surged to his feet. “You want me to be Kira.”
L stood too. “No. I want you to be mine.”
The words hit like glass.
Neither of them moved.
Then Light whispered, “You’re insane.”
L nodded. “And you’re beautiful when you lie.”
The mug on the table cracked from the heat of untouched tea.
Somewhere beneath all of it—under the insults, the seduction, the violent games—they were falling.
Or maybe they had already fallen. Maybe they had been falling since the first accusation. Since the first lie. Since the first time L looked at Light and saw not a criminal, but a catastrophe he couldn’t stop chasing.
The toothbrush murderer had left no fingerprints.
But these two?
They were nothing but fingerprints.
On each other.
On every surface.
On everything they touched.
---
“You’re pacing again,” Light said.
“I’m thinking,” L replied, crouched like a predatory crustacean on the conference table. “There’s a difference.”
Light gestured vaguely at the crime board behind them. “Is it necessary to think while drawing red circles around my face?”
“I find it clarifies the experience.”
“I’m not Kira.”
“You’re defensive.”
“I’m being gaslit.”
“I’m being aroused,” L said quietly.
“By accusing me of mass murder?!”
L turned his head, lips parted just slightly. “It’s a power dynamic.”
“You need help.”
“You need to admit you’re a narcissist with a martyr complex.”
“I’m not a—!” Light stopped, breathed through his nose like a meditation app, and sat down. Calm. Professional. Definitely not about to crawl across the table and throttle the world’s greatest detective with his own baggy jeans.
L watched him with lazy intensity. Like a cat observing a laser pointer. Or a man who’d read The Art of War and decided seduction counted as psychological warfare.
Across the room, Matsuda knocked over a stack of reports.
Aizawa didn’t look up. “Can you two either kiss or commit to the homicide already?”
Light said nothing. He had learned, at this point, that defending himself only made it worse.
The toothbrush case, as it turned out, was Kira-related.
Not in the sense of divine justice. But in the sense that the dead man—one Arakawa Masahiko, thirty-four, data analyst, owns a limited edition panda plushie and five existential poetry chapbooks—had recently posted online about “writing Kira into his next novel.”
That alone wouldn’t have been suspicious.
What was suspicious: the tweet had gone up three days before his death.
And another tweet—posted three hours later and now deleted—read simply:
“maybe i went too far with the god complex thing lol”
They tracked it through metadata. IPs. Chat logs. Digital residue.
The message was clear.
Someone had wanted Arakawa silenced.
And maybe—just maybe—that someone didn’t like when people fictionalized their godhood.
“Do you think,” Light said, watching the panda plushie spin slowly on its string from the ceiling beam, “that Kira would care what a novelist thought?”
L was staring at the same plushie like it had personally insulted his lineage. “Kira is obsessed with legacy.”
“Obsessed,” Light echoed. “Interesting word choice.”
L’s eyes flicked toward him. “Touchy.”
“I’m not touchy.”
“You’re always touchy when we get close to the truth.”
“No,” Light said, rising from his chair with the dignity of a man standing on the gallows, “I’m touchy when you accuse me of being a serial killer for using adjectives.”
“I accused you of being a serial killer for using the phrase ‘necessary evil’ in a PowerPoint title slide.”
“Because it was a necessary evil!”
“It was a marketing deck for toothpaste.”
Light’s hand twitched.
L did not blink.
Outside, it was raining.
Inside, it was metaphor.
“I think,” L said later, back at the apartment, sitting on the floor with a teacup in one hand and a forensic file in the other, “Kira killed Arakawa to protect his image.”
Light sprawled dramatically on the couch like a dying Victorian aunt. “Then he’s a narcissist.”
“Or,” L continued, “he has a god complex.”
“Is that not the same thing?”
“One is diagnosable.”
The plushie now hung from their ceiling too. Light had taken it from the crime scene as a joke. Or a warning. Or a tribute.
L had allowed it.
Watari, upon entering, had said nothing. But his eyes had whispered a quiet scream.
“There are too many variables,” Light said. “What if Arakawa wasn’t killed because of Kira? What if he knew something? What if he got too close to the truth?”
L paused mid-sip. “Are you writing a thriller novel?”
“Are you not?”
They stared at each other. Somewhere in the background, the panda plushie rotated lazily, as though enjoying the erotic tension.
Light leaned forward. “Admit it,” he said. “You like suspecting me.”
L said nothing.
“You like watching me squirm.”
L licked sugar from his fingers. “You squirm with excellent posture.”
“Are you flirting or profiling?”
“There’s a difference?”
Light stood up. “You know what? Fine. Let’s say I am Kira.”
L didn’t move.
“Let’s say I did kill Arakawa. What would you do?”
L stood too. His shadow fell across the floor like a judgment.
“I’d prove it.”
“How?”
“I’d make you love me.”
Light’s pulse skipped like a scratched record.
“What?”
L stepped closer. “I’d make you love me. Completely. Devastatingly. Unforgivably. So that when I destroy you, it’s not justice—it’s heartbreak.”
Light’s throat was dry.
He whispered, “That’s psychotic.”
L whispered back, “You’d thank me.”
Then they kissed again, teeth and lips and mutual destruction. Not gentle. Never gentle. There was no gentleness in war.
The next day, Light was assigned to interrogate Arakawa’s editor.
Her name was Shino. She was thirty, wore leather like it was armor, and stared at Light with the weary exhaustion of someone who’d survived multiple writing workshops and at least one haunted Tumblr account.
“I didn’t know Masahiko was serious,” she said, sipping from a mug that said I Only Judge Books By Their Covers. “He said he wanted to write about Kira but make it sexy.”
Light choked on air.
“Sorry?”
“You know,” she continued. “Like morally ambiguous. Biblical. Tortured. He showed me this monologue—hold on, I think I have it—”
She pulled out a notebook. Flipped pages.
Light felt his soul leave his body.
“I am not evil. I am precise. I am not a monster. I am the blade that carves monsters from men. They scream, and I cleanse. They beg, and I bless. I am what justice becomes when stripped of law.”
Shino looked up. “Honestly? Kind of hot.”
Light stared.
L, standing behind the glass, gave him a thumbs-up.
Light lunged at the door.
Back in the office, the task force reviewed Arakawa’s files.
“We’ve got three chapters of an unfinished novel,” Aizawa muttered, flipping through the drafts. “One poem. And a two-hundred-line script about Kira doing a podcast.”
“It’s called ‘Godcast,’” Matsuda read.
Watari looked like he needed to lie down.
L read aloud from the opening:
“Welcome to Godcast. I’m your host, Divine Vengeance. Today we’ll be discussing ethical paradoxes, the metaphysics of guilt, and why I believe OnlyFans is a valid economic structure.”
He paused. “He died for this?”
“No,” Light muttered, slamming his head on the table. “He died because of this.”
L turned, eyes sharp. “Do you think Kira was offended?”
“I think I’m offended.”
“Do you think I would kill over poor writing?”
“You’d kill me for passive voice.”
“I’d kill you for free.”
“You kissed me this morning.”
“You moaned.”
“You bit me.”
“You said ‘thank you.’”
They stared.
Aizawa muttered, “I need a raise.”
That night, Light sat alone.
L entered quietly, holding the panda plushie in one hand and two mugs in the other.
He placed the plushie on the bed between them. Like a third party. Like a judgment.
Light said, “If I were Kira…”
“You’d already know who I was,” L finished.
They stared.
“You’d kill me,” Light whispered.
“No,” L said. “I’d love you.”
The plushie slowly tilted.
Light looked down.
And smiled.
But he said nothing.
Because the game was still on.
And the gods weren’t done playing.
---
That night, the Kira case shifted.
A new suspect.
Another online post.
An anonymous account: @UnholyJustice.
The post read:
“Everyone thinks Kira is a monster. I think he’s just lonely. We all want to be seen. Some of us just have…stronger methods.”
The post was accompanied by a poem. A deeply terrible, agonizingly florid free verse poem, which opened with:
“If I kill you, will you finally notice me?”
L read it aloud in the middle of the room with the same tone he might use to announce a chemical weapons violation.
“I vote we arrest them for crimes against syntax,” he said.
Light muttered, “Sounds like your diary.”
L looked up, eyes narrowed, “You read my diary?”
“You left it open next to the arsenic tea set.”
“I was multitasking.”
“You were sobbing into a poem titled ‘To My Greatest Foe, Who Smells Like Redemption and Soap.’”
“Your point?”
Light said nothing. Because L had a point, too. Unfortunately.
They tracked the account to a university IP in Kyoto.
Suspect: Ritsuko Mayumi, 22. Philosophy major. Wrote her thesis on moral absolutism and the erotic implications of surveillance. Once live-tweeted herself crying to A Clockwork Orange.
They interrogated her the next day.
Light leaned forward across the table, refined, soft-spoken. “You wrote this post?”
Ritsuko raised a brow. “If I say yes, are you going to call me a monster or ask for my number?”
Light blinked.
L, behind the glass, dropped his sugar cube.
Ritsuko continued, unbothered. “The poem was metaphorical.”
“You wrote about murdering someone for validation.”
“It’s the 2000s,” she said, sipping a Red Bull. “That’s what love is.”
Light scribbled something furiously on a notepad. It might have been girl help me I’m attracted to my suspect.
L radioed in, “Ask her about the toothbrush.”
Light asked her about the toothbrush.
She frowned. “That’s private.”
“What?”
“I don’t answer dental-based questions on first dates.”
L said, “I think I love her.”
Light said, “Get in line.”
Back at headquarters, chaos resumed.
L sat cross-legged on the floor, setting up a chessboard on top of crime scene photos and mapping the Kira case through metaphor and pawn sacrifice.
“You put the bishop on Arakawa’s mouth,” Light said.
“It fits. He was a messenger.”
“He was strangled.”
“So is discourse,” L whispered, dramatically.
Light knelt across from him, rearranging the pieces. “You put me as the queen.”
“You move diagonally. And you’re a slut.”
“Check.”
“I’m turned on.”
Matsuda walked by and screamed softly into a file folder.
Later that evening, with the lights off and the moon casting judgment through the blinds, L said:
“I think I’m getting close.”
“To what?”
“You.”
Light didn’t move. “How close?”
L leaned in, inches from his lips. “Close enough to feel your lies vibrating in your throat.”
Light swallowed. “Maybe I like being caught.”
L’s hand hovered above his wrist. Not touching. Not quite.
“Maybe,” L said softly, “you already are.”
They didn’t kiss.
But they also didn’t breathe.
The next morning, a new death rocked the case.
University professor. Found dead at his desk. Heart attack.
No note.
No message.
No toothbrush.
But on his desk: a draft of a paper co-authored by Ritsuko Mayumi.
Title: “Kira as Cultural Archetype: A Study in Mass Psychology and Divine Performance.”
L looked at Light.
Light looked at L.
Matsuda asked, “Is this about the erotic implications of chess again?”
“No,” L said. “This is war.”
---
It was raining. Because of course it was.
The university library had been cordoned off—caution tape, forensic kits, interns with wide eyes and insufficient trauma insurance.
The late Professor Kamura, bleeding-edge psychologist and part-time Kira essayist, had been found slumped over his desk. No sign of struggle. Heart attack. Classic. Almost cliché.
Except for the part where his fingers were curled around a sticky note that read:
“God doesn’t need citations.”
L held the note delicately, as if it might bite.
“Arrogant,” he said.
“Or plagiarized,” Light muttered, scanning the bookshelf titled Applied Ethics and Weaponized Logic.
“You sound bitter.”
“Because I am.”
“You sound guilty.”
“Because you’re exhausting.”
L turned, slow as a sentence forming itself. “If Kira wrote that note, he’s sending a message.”
Light’s eyes glittered. “What? That peer review is for cowards?”
“That he thinks his divinity is self-evident.”
“Like the Declaration of Independence?”
“Like an aneurysm in a God complex.”
Light snorted. “Maybe he’s insecure.”
“Maybe,” L said, “he’s in this room.”
They examined Kamura’s papers.
He had been co-authoring with Ritsuko Mayumi. Four essays. One forthcoming book. One unhinged Google Doc titled The Semiotics of the Superhuman.
It included, among other things:
- Three Nietzsche quotes
- One meme
- A section header titled “If God Is Dead, Can I Take His Place?”
And a paragraph that read:
“Kira operates in the space between consequence and theater. A divine actor performing morality for the masses, choreographed in blood and ratings.”
“I’m going to kill someone,” Light muttered.
L pointed. “Ah. Projection.”
Light folded his arms. “Do you really think Ritsuko’s involved?”
“I think she’s obsessed.”
“Isn’t everyone?”
There was a beat.
L said, very softly, “Are you?”
Light blinked. “With Kira?”
“With being seen.”
The silence was too loud.
Outside, thunder cracked like divine punctuation.
An hour later, they questioned Ritsuko again.
She wore sunglasses and the faint air of someone who would start a podcast called Apocalypse but Make It Sexy.
“I didn’t kill Kamura,” she said flatly.
“You wrote half his book,” L said.
“I also wrote a Twilight AU where Kira runs a coffeeshop,” she snapped. “That doesn’t mean I want Edward Cullen dead.”
Light choked.
L leaned forward. “Are you Kira?”
“Are you Kira?”
“I asked first.”
She smirked. “I asked better.”
Light muttered, “I hate this timeline.”
Ritsuko tilted her head. “Honestly, if Kira did kill him, I don’t blame him. Kamura edited my footnotes to say ‘objective truth’ instead of ‘agreed mythos.’ That’s a hate crime.”
“You’re defending murder,” L said.
“I’m defending aesthetics.”
Light’s notebook now read, RITSUKO MAYUMI: too self-aware to be the killer or exactly the kind of bitch who would kill for being edited.
That night, Light stared out the window with a level of brooding typically reserved for Shakespearean orphans.
L sat on the floor, knees up, balancing a sugar cube on his thumb like it might reveal the secrets of the universe.
“You’re quiet,” L said.
“I’m always quiet when you’re monologuing.”
“You’re always monologuing when I’m quiet.”
“That’s called balance.”
“That’s called obsession.”
Light exhaled through his nose. “You want me to admit something.”
“I want you to say something.”
“Like what?”
L looked up. “Tell me who you are.”
Light’s voice was dry. “No one knows who they are.”
L’s voice was quieter. “You do.”
Light turned slowly, eyes tired, dark under the weight of things unsaid.
“I think Kira’s afraid,” he said. “Not of getting caught. But of not being understood.”
L watched him. Unblinking. Consuming.
“Are you afraid?”
Light didn’t answer.
Because yes. Always.
The next morning, a new death.
A student. Political science major. Ritsuko’s ex.
Heart attack. No note. No toothbrush.
But in his dorm: a printed copy of The Semiotics of the Superhuman, marked up in red pen. One line circled again and again:
“To be loved as a god is lonelier than to be hated as a man.”
Light stared at it for too long.
L said, “You’re thinking something.”
“I’m always thinking something.”
“Say it.”
“I think Kira wants to be punished.”
“Interesting.”
“I think he wants someone to stop him.”
L looked at him. “Do you?”
The silence was loud again.
They sat in the library later, because the crime scene tape had been taken down and neither of them respected personal boundaries or trauma protocol.
L played with the chessboard again. Pieces resting on pages of poetry. The white queen was still Light. The black king was still justice. The board was still war.
“You always put me in check,” L murmured.
“You always deserve it.”
“Someday, I’ll beat you.”
“Someday, I’ll let you.”
They stared.
And then:
“Did you kill him?” L asked suddenly.
Light didn’t flinch. “Do you want the truth?”
“I want the version that breaks me.”
Light looked down. His hand hovered over the board. Moved the queen forward.
“I want to be seen,” he whispered. “Even if it kills me.”
L moved his rook. “Checkmate.”
They kissed like gods cursing each other.
---
In the aftermath of the kiss, they both did what any emotionally healthy individuals would do:
They ignored it completely and restructured the evidence wall.
“Red string implies desperation,” L muttered, tugging at the corner of a photograph. “We’re above that.”
Light, from three feet away and six inches of restrained gay yearning, said, “But what if the string is ironic?”
“It never is.”
“What if I am?”
“You always are.”
They were arguing over where to pin the second body photo when Matsuda walked in, saw them hip-to-hip under the corkboard, and made a noise like a dying blender.
“Are you guys—uh—busy?”
“Yes,” L said.
“No,” Light said.
They turned and blinked in unison. Matsuda briefly considered taking up religion again.
They reinterviewed Ritsuko.
This time in the records room, where fluorescent lighting made everyone look like a corpse and L had built a crime timeline out of discarded cafeteria trays.
“You said you and Kamura had a falling out,” Light said.
Ritsuko shrugged, perched atop a filing cabinet like a goth oracle. “He wanted to reframe the book around deterrence theory. I said Kira isn’t about deterrence, he’s about devotion. He said I was being too romantic. I said he was being too Kantian.”
L perked up. “Go on.”
“He wanted to frame Kira as a symptom. I wanted to write him like an author. Someone writing justice. Or rewriting it.”
“So you murdered him,” Light said, too brightly.
Ritsuko narrowed her eyes. “No, I just blocked him on Myspace.”
“That’s worse,” L murmured.
Light leaned forward. “The latest victim—your ex. What was your relationship like?”
Ritsuko stared at him. “It’s very weird that the police keep asking me about my emotional history and not, say, what I was doing during the actual murders.”
L scribbled something. Probably her emotional history is suspiciously well-articulated.
“You wrote a whole paper on Kira,” Light said. “But you never defined him.”
“I didn’t have to. That’s the point.”
L tilted his head. “Explain.”
She smiled. Sharp. Precise. Too composed.
“Kira doesn’t need definition. He’s a reflection. People project justice onto him. Or fear. Or love. Or vengeance. He’s a mirror with a body count.”
Light muttered, “That’s plagiarism.”
“From who?”
Light hesitated. “…Me.”
Ritsuko grinned. “Then maybe you’re Kira.”
The air changed.
The lights flickered.
L didn’t move.
Light said nothing.
And Ritsuko said, far too softly, “Or maybe you just want to be.”
Later that night, L found Light sitting on the floor, surrounded by open books and closed truths.
“You okay?” L asked, biting into a sugar cube like it owed him money.
“No.”
“Same.”
Light looked up. “Do you think she’s Kira?”
L sat across from him, folding his limbs like a spider writing a dissertation. “I think she’s too clever to be careless.”
“She talks like a manifesto.”
“So do you.”
“That’s unfair.”
“It’s accurate.”
There was a silence, not empty but pointed, like a knife facing inward.
Light sighed. “I don’t want her to be Kira.”
“Because you relate to her?”
“No. Because she’s more honest than me.”
L blinked. “You think you’re dishonest?”
Light met his eyes. “I know I am.”
L leaned back, balancing on two chair legs like a bad idea. “And yet, I believe you.”
“That’s stupid.”
“That’s love.”
“…Shut up.”
The next day, the task force found something.
Kamura’s computer had been wiped. But the IT team dug through his cloud backups.
Amongst lecture notes, half-written erotica, and an entire folder labeled “Justice Is Hot,” was a single audio file titled kira_final_edit.wav.
They played it in the meeting room. Everyone present. Ritsuko included. She was chewing gum like it was her last remaining vice.
The file was warped, filtered, masked.
But the voice—distorted though it was—said:
“This isn’t about cleansing the world. It’s about ending silence. Every name I write is a scream.”
Matsuda coughed. “That’s…a little emo.”
L rewound it. Played it again. Slower.
Light stood motionless.
“Do you recognize the voice?” Aizawa asked.
“No,” Light said, too fast.
“Yes,” L whispered.
They locked eyes.
And Ritsuko, quietly, under her breath, said: “That’s not Kamura.”
The room turned to her.
“That’s not his syntax. He never used first person that way. He wrote in detachment. This…this sounds like theory turned confession.”
“So whose voice is it?” Soichiro asked.
She hesitated.
Then looked at Light.
And smiled.
Outside, L pulled Light aside.
“Innocent people don’t flinch,” he said.
“Innocent people don’t get followed into stairwells by men who never sleep.”
They stood there, too close. Again.
“You think I’m Kira.”
“I know you want me to think that.”
“And what if I do?”
“Then you’re either the killer or the most elaborate existential performance art piece the world’s ever seen.”
Light’s mouth twitched. “Can’t I be both?”
L stared at him.
And said, “Don’t make me love you.”
Light whispered, “Then stop watching me like you already do.”
Notes:
Hope you enjoyed this one so far! My intention was for a fun, crack-ish mystery... It somehow evolved to a philosophical epistemological horror fic. Don't ask me how. It'll only get eerier from here.
The second part of this will be posted next week—if you want to keep up, please consider bookmarking or subscribing to this.
Next chapter —
The plot thickens. Who is Ritsuko really? Who is behind these murders? Who is Kira?
You can find me on Bluesky ( @the_wild_poet25 ) and on my new Twitter account (the_tamed_poet) if you want to connect. I'm also on Discord too!
The comment section also works—feel free to leave a comment! :)
Chapter Text
“So,” Matsuda said, “just to summarize: we have a dead professor, a dead poli-sci major, a former grad student who writes Kira fanfiction, and an audio file that sounds like someone read The Communist Manifesto backwards through a blender.”
Silence.
L sucked thoughtfully on a lollipop.
Light wrote KIRA IS A POET WITH A GUN in the margins of his notebook.
Ritsuko filed her nails.
Aizawa groaned, “We need an actual lead.”
That afternoon, L and Light were seated at opposite ends of the investigation room table like rival monarchs negotiating a war they were both winning and losing in secret.
L said, “You’re unusually quiet.”
Light said, “You’re unusually suspicious.”
“Incorrect. I’m always suspicious.”
“You’re like if paranoia gained sentience and never learned to moisturize.”
“Thank you. You’re like if a Harvard debate team went feral.”
They stared. The table between them crackled with passive-aggressive academia.
“Light-kun,” L said, fingers drumming, “if you were Kira, would you kill Kamura?”
Light leaned back in his chair. “If I were Kira, I’d kill no one until the world begged me to. Then I’d pick someone symbolic. Loud. Infuriating. Someone who thinks their moral relativism is the final word on good and evil.”
L blinked. “You mean…like Kamura?”
Light smirked.
“And his student?”
Light shrugged. “Collateral? Or—”
He paused.
“…a love note.”
L tilted his head. “A love note?”
“If Kira is performing, the death has to mean something. It’s not just punishment—it’s publication. It’s intimate.”
L bit his thumb. “Then who’s it addressed to?”
Light didn’t answer.
He didn’t need to.
They found a clue.
Buried in Kamura’s research archive was a draft email he never sent. It was addressed to Ritsuko.
“If you’re still collaborating with him, I want no part of this. You’re endangering everything. This isn’t theory anymore. This is real.”
Attached: a transcript of a voice call.
It was short. Clipped. Choppy.
Voice 1: You said this would be abstract.
Voice 2: I changed my mind.
Voice 1: We can’t do this.
Voice 2: I already did.
The metadata was corrupted.
L looked up from the computer screen. “He said him.”
“So she’s not working alone,” Light murmured. “If she’s involved at all.”
“She’s involved.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you keep defending her.”
Light raised an eyebrow. “Are you jealous?”
L didn’t blink. “Of a woman who compares Kira to Ozymandias while wearing eyeliner and writing death poetry in public forums? Yes. Deeply.”
That evening, the two of them sat in the old university archive, surrounded by dusty microfiche and philosophical despair. It smelled like dry rot, ink, and buried ideas.
Light was reading a thesis titled Death as Spectacle in Modern Myth.
L was drinking a Yoo-hoo and watching him over the rim of the bottle like it contained divine revelation.
“You think this is Kira’s ideology?” L asked.
“I think it’s his foreplay.”
“That’s a metaphor.”
“No, I mean it. This—” Light gestured to the article—“this is seduction. Kira isn’t trying to convert people. He’s trying to be understood. He wants someone to look at what he’s done and say, ‘I get it. I see you. I still love you.’”
L said, too softly, “Do you?”
The air changed.
Again.
Light closed the folder.
And said nothing.
Later, Ritsuko was brought in again.
“Why didn’t you tell us about Kamura’s email?” Light asked.
“I didn’t see it,” she said flatly. “He never sent it.”
“But you knew he suspected you,” L said.
“I suspect myself sometimes.”
“You’re being flippant.”
“I’m being tired. You think it’s fun having people accuse you of mass murder because you wrote an essay called Kira Is the Last Romantic?”
Light looked at her. “Are you working with someone?”
She smiled. “Aren’t we all?”
“Who is he?” L asked.
“I think you already know.”
Light’s pulse tripped.
L’s voice dropped. “Does he think he’s God?”
Ritsuko said, “No. Worse.”
“…What’s worse than God?”
Ritsuko leaned in.
“Someone who knows God is dead and thinks he can do it better.”
---
That night, Light stood alone on the balcony. Cold wind. City lights. A thousand lives below, unaware of the war waging in whispered philosophies and death notes and kisses no one talked about.
L came up behind him.
“You don’t believe in God,” he said.
“No.”
“But you believe in Kira.”
“I understand him.”
“Is that the same thing?”
Light’s laugh was low. Bitter. “Understanding is always the first step to forgiveness. And then, sometimes, worship.”
“You want to forgive him?”
“No.”
“…You want to worship him?”
Light turned slowly. “I want to break him.”
They were close now. Too close.
L murmured, “That’s not what it looked like when you kissed me.”
“That wasn’t a kiss. That was an accident.”
L smiled faintly. “Then do it on purpose.”
And Light did.
They kissed like a thesis defense: meticulous, violent, breathless, impossible to win.
And when they pulled apart, L said:
“If I die, will you write an essay about me?”
Light answered, “Only if I kill you.”
---
Light Yagami had kissed L.
The first time had been an accident, strategically performed.
The second time had been a decision. Tactile. Treasonous. Possibly the dumbest thing he’d ever done that hadn’t directly resulted in a heart attack.
The other times, well, there was really no excuse for that.
Now, he was standing in the elevator, gripping the railing like it might stop the descent into hell.
L was beside him, silent.
Well, technically silent. He was chewing a marshmallow with the precision of a moral reckoning.
Light stared at the numbers.
B2… B3…
Basement archive again. Of course. Because who doesn’t associate emotional chaos with state-sanctioned university death records?
“Do you regret it?” L asked, out of nowhere.
“The marshmallow?”
“The kiss.”
Light didn’t look at him. “Which one?”
“The one that felt like a confession.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in confessions.”
“I don’t. I believe in patterns.”
“And what’s my pattern?”
“You kiss when you’re trying to lie.”
“…That’s unfair.”
“It’s accurate.”
Light turned. “Do you regret it?”
L tilted his head. “I don’t make value judgments. I make observations.”
“Very convenient.”
“Very lonely.”
The elevator doors opened.
They were here for the journal.
Kamura had submitted an article weeks before his death. It wasn’t published. It wasn’t peer-reviewed. It wasn’t even finished.
But someone had completed it.
It appeared in the latest issue of Justice & Deviance Quarterly, released posthumously under Kamura’s name. Except… it wasn’t his style.
The syntax was off. The footnotes were manic. The title was capitalized like a ransom note.
THE RIGHT TO KILL: DEATH AS RESTORATIVE POWER IN POST-MODERN MORAL PANOPTICISM.
Light read the first sentence and immediately said, “This was ghostwritten by someone who has a superiority complex and too much access to Derrida.”
“So… you,” L said.
“I’d at least cite myself properly.”
“Would you?”
They bickered over phrasing while Matsuda awkwardly hovered behind a filing cabinet pretending he wasn’t witnessing the emotional equivalent of sexual tension and academic plagiarism.
Ritsuko had been the one to find the journal. She was the one who pointed out that page 14, footnote 7 directly quoted one of her unpublished essays.
“It’s like he was trying to answer me,” she said, eyes sharp.
“You think Kamura did this?” Aizawa asked.
“No,” she said. “Kamura would never cite Adorno that sloppily.”
“Then who did?”
L stared at the text. The quote was familiar.
Too familiar.
Because he had read it before—in one of Light’s old debate transcripts, from a national competition three years ago.
Word for word.
“Light,” L said slowly. “Did you ghostwrite for Kamura?”
Light blinked. “What? No.”
“This footnote is yours.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is. You quoted yourself. From 11th grade. You were arguing against capital punishment.”
Light went still.
Ritsuko narrowed her eyes.
Aizawa said, “Is that possible?”
Light said, “I’ve written a lot of essays. Maybe someone stole it.”
“Maybe you stole it.”
“I didn’t kill Kamura.”
“No one said you did.”
“But you’re implying it.”
“You’re very defensive.”
“I’m not defensive, I’m—”
“You’re lying,” L said gently.
“You’re projecting,” Light snapped.
There was a beat of silence.
Then L said, “Why are you scared?”
And Light—perfect, brilliant, utterly unraveling Light—whispered, “Because I don’t know if I’m innocent anymore.”
That night, it rained.
Of course it did.
Because what is guilt without aesthetic?
Light stood at the window again, shirt half-unbuttoned, collarbone reflecting the city’s self-hatred.
L sat cross-legged on the couch like a depressive monk eating off-brand Pocky.
“So,” L said.
“So,” Light said back.
“You think you’re losing it.”
“Only if by ‘it’ you mean object permanence, a clear sense of morality, and the will to keep pretending I’m not in love with my nemesis.”
“Good. That means you’re processing.”
“Is that what this is? Processing?”
L got up. Walked across the room. Stood beside him.
“You’re not Kira,” he said.
Light flinched. “How do you know?”
“Because Kira wouldn’t doubt it.”
“And if that’s the best alibi I have?”
L touched his hand.
“Then I’ll make it count.”
---
Plot twist: Ritsuko disappeared.
Gone.
No trace. No note. Just her apartment key card on L’s desk and a highlighted copy of The Right to Kill with one sentence underlined again and again:
“Gods do not need forgiveness. But they crave witnesses.”
A new tape arrived that morning.
Unmarked envelope.
Inside: a cassette.
They found the player. Pressed play.
The voice—distorted, processed, layered—was speaking again:
“There is no truth. Only authors. And I am writing the ending now.”
Static.
Then—something new.
Another voice.
Fainter. Clearer.
Familiar.
“You can’t do this. You promised it was theory—”
“It is. My theory. My text. My law.”
L froze.
Because the second voice—
—was Ritsuko’s.
And the first voice—
—Light’s.
The tape looped once. Then again. And again.
L didn’t speak.
Light didn’t breathe.
Matsuda asked, “That can’t be real, right?”
No one answered him.
Because the voice was too perfect.
Not just Light’s voice, but Light’s cadence—sharp consonants, rhetorical cruelty, the way he broke sentences in half like bones. The voice on the tape was a memory with a gun.
“You think it’s fake,” Light said finally. He was standing very still, like someone bracing for the guillotine.
L didn’t look at him. “I think it’s real.”
“…You think I’m Kira.”
“I think someone wants us to believe that.”
“Is there a difference?”
“There has to be.”
The silence between them rippled. Not empty. Just loud in a new way.
Like accusation.
Like heartbreak.
Like faith cracking at the seam.
---
Ritsuko’s apartment was still warm when they arrived.
Misa was already there.
“I came to borrow her boots,” she said simply. “She said I could have them. She was going away.”
L’s eyes flicked to Light. “Did she say where?”
“She just said she was ‘finally going to find the ending.’” Misa looked almost thoughtful. “And to tell Light that she forgave him.”
Light went very, very still.
“What is she forgiving me for,” he asked, “exactly?”
“She didn’t say. But I assumed it was the manifesto.”
“…What manifesto.”
Misa blinked. “The one you helped write.”
L later found it buried in a private server tied to the university’s underground academic journal repository. The metadata was stripped. But the prose was unmistakable.
On Justice: A Treatise for the Emerging World.
“The problem with modern justice is that it requires performance. Punishment must be witnessed. Execution must be art. Without spectacle, the death is meaningless. And what is Kira, if not the most perfect performance of all?”
And beneath it: two authors.
R.M. and L.Y.
Light Yagami.
“You never published it?” L asked, voice cold.
Light sat on the edge of the table like a prince in exile. “We wrote it for a class. Second-year ethics seminar. Kamura assigned it. Wanted a mock moral theory proposal. Mine was too aggressive. Ritsuko polished it. He loved it.”
“Then why hide it?”
“Because I got scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of how good it felt. To argue like that. To build a world where right and wrong were simple again.”
“You think Kira is simple?”
“I think Kira is honest.”
That silenced them both.
Night again. Always night now.
Rain, of course. Window fogged. The city beyond blurred like a dream you forgot to forget.
L sat at the table, typing.
Light stood behind him.
“You’re quiet,” L said.
“I’m thinking.”
“About what?”
Light came closer. “About guilt.”
“Oh?”
“Whether it’s real. Whether it matters. Whether the body knows it even when the mind doesn’t.”
L stopped typing. “You think you’re guilty.”
“I think I’ve always wanted to be.”
“…Why?”
“Because then I’d be free.”
L turned. “Of what?”
Light met his eyes. “This.”
A pause.
Then, quieter, “Of you.”
The kiss this time wasn’t an accident or a dare.
It was resignation. Requiem. A prayer in reverse.
L kissed Light like they were both already dead, and this was the only thing left uncounted.
Light kissed L like he was trying to steal something—his breath, maybe. His suspicion. His judgment.
It didn’t work.
Nothing did.
Afterward, Light sat on the floor with his head in his hands.
“I didn’t kill Kamura.”
“I know,” L said.
“But I could have.”
“I know.”
Light looked up, desperate. “So what do I do with that?”
L stared at him. “The same thing I do.”
“…Which is?”
“Keep looking.”
---
The next morning, L called Watari.
“Trace the voice synthesis origin. Check the metadata. Find the timestamp and cross-reference with security feeds. I want to know where and when it was made.”
“And the content?” Watari asked. “The implication?”
L paused.
Then: “Prepare a public response. If this goes live, we need to control the narrative.”
“Which narrative?”
L looked at Light.
Then said, “All of them.”
A new note arrived.
Not a tape.
Not a death.
Just a sentence.
Cut from a page of On Justice.
Scotch-taped to their hotel room mirror.
In red ink:
“You can’t catch God in a mirror. He’s always behind you.”
---
There were, objectively, more professional ways to process a possible murder accusation than screaming at your maybe-boyfriend/definite-nemesis while eating cup ramen at three in the morning.
But Light Yagami had never been a man of half-measures.
He was pacing the kitchen in socked feet, hair askew, chopsticks clenched like a dagger.
“This is idiotic,” he said.
“That’s not an argument,” L replied, seated cross-legged on the counter like a malevolent frog.
“It is an argument. The premise is: ‘This is idiotic.’ The conclusion is: ‘Therefore, we stop acting like it isn’t.’”
“Unsound logic.”
“Says the man who poured milk in my ramen and called it ‘a textural innovation.’”
“I was experimenting.”
“You’re a sociopath.”
“You kissed me.”
“That was a strategic mistake—”
“Twice.”
“—and I’m still recovering.”
L stirred his own cup. “I think you like losing control.”
Light laughed, bitter and low. “Then you’ve clearly never seen me actually lose it.”
“Oh?” L’s eyes gleamed. “Show me.”
The chopsticks snapped in Light’s hand.
Earlier that day, the university posted a public statement.
Ritsuko was listed as missing but not presumed deceased. The statement made no mention of the tape, the journal, or the red-scrawled note on the mirror. It did, however, imply there were “ongoing investigations regarding academic dishonesty and unlawful publication under faculty credentials.”
Which meant someone had turned over the manifesto.
L suspected it was Ritsuko herself.
Light suspected it was himself from three years ago, cleverly programming a chain of digital breadcrumbs before he knew he’d have to run from them.
“Self-sabotage by genius is still sabotage,” he muttered, deleting another copy of On Justice from his backups.
L was quiet.
Then, “What if this is all performative?”
Light looked up.
“The notes. The tapes. The narrative structure. What if this isn’t a real crime but a designed one—to test us? To provoke a response?”
Light blinked. “You think this is… performance art.”
“I think it’s dialectical warfare.”
“…You think someone is writing a philosophical trap for us.”
“Yes.”
“…Hot.”
L ignored that.
Later, after the ramen disaster and the argument about it being unethical to use Kant to justify punching someone in the face (Light: “Categorical imperative, Ryuzaki, not categorical pacifism”), they sat in silence in front of the mirror with the red-ink note.
“You can’t catch God in a mirror. He’s always behind you.”
“Ritsuko didn’t write that,” Light said softly.
“No,” L agreed. “You did.”
“…But I never published it.”
L nodded. “Exactly.”
There was a pause.
Light asked, “So someone got into the drafts?”
“Or into you.”
Light blinked. “Excuse me?”
L tilted his head. “You underestimate how easily you leave traces. Your writing, your phrasing, your logic—it’s distinct. Someone is imitating you.”
“Great,” Light muttered. “I have a fan club.”
“Or a co-conspirator.”
“Or a stalker.”
“Or a murderer.”
“Cool.”
They stared at each other.
Then Light muttered, “I wish I was Kira. At least then I’d have some damn agency.”
L said nothing.
Just offered him a strawberry candy.
Light took it. Begrudgingly.
Flashback: a classroom, three years ago.
Kamura sits at the front, nodding thoughtfully.
Light is seventeen, exhausted, too brilliant to be tolerated.
Ritsuko taps her pen, eyeing him like he’s a thesis worth defending and disproving.
“You’re saying justice should be felt, not calculated,” she says.
“I’m saying justice isn’t a system,” Light replies. “It’s a sensation. The minute we try to codify it, it’s already corrupt.”
Kamura writes that on the board.
Ritsuko smirks. “Spoken like a future megalomaniac.”
“I prefer ‘moral visionary.’”
“Same thing.”
Kamura chuckles. “I want a paper from both of you. Work together. Propose a theory. Scare me.”
They do.
It’s On Justice.
And it works.
Back in the present, Matsuda called.
“I think we found something,” he said. “Security footage from the copy center two days before Kamura died. Look.”
A figure, hoodie up, sunglasses, gloves.
Carrying a USB.
Matsuda fast-forwarded.
The figure printed twenty copies of On Justice, binded them, and put one into Kamura’s mailbox.
“Enhance the image,” L said.
It sharpened.
The face was obscured.
But the hands—the fingers—
—they were painted.
Red.
Nail polish.
“Ritsuko?” Light asked.
“Or someone who wants us to think so.”
“But why?”
“To bring us here,” L said.
“To this moment.”
Light frowned. “What moment?”
L turned to him.
“The moment where you stop being sure you're not Kira.”
That night, Light didn't sleep.
He wrote, feverishly, angrily.
If I were Kira…
If I were Kira, I’d never kill Kamura. I’d kill someone like me. I’d kill the version of me who could kill Kamura.
He stared at the page.
Then ripped it out, crumpled it, and flushed it down the toilet.
L was watching from the doorway.
“How’s your guilt spiral?” he asked.
Light closed his eyes. “Intact.”
“Want me to ruin it?”
“Always.”
L walked over, gently unbuttoned Light’s shirt like it was a secret he already known.
The kiss this time wasn't desperate or punishing.
It was quiet. Terrible. Gentle.
Like they both knew it’ll end in disaster.
But they kissed anyway.
Because everything else already had.
---
The morning was overcast, which felt fitting.
So was the interrogation room.
L had insisted they use it, even though they were the only ones present.
He needed the symmetry, he said.
Light didn’t argue.
He knew exactly what kind of mood L was in. The kind where logic becomes ritual. Where questions are knives and silence is religion. Where chairs are placed just so, and the room becomes a crucible.
A courtroom.
A cage.
“Sit,” L said.
Light sat.
There was a single object on the table.
A printed sheet from Kamura’s office. Pulled from the scanner logs, recovered by a very reluctant intern, forwarded by a very distressed Chief Yagami.
Light stared at it.
His own words stared back.
“In the event that morality becomes an outdated currency, justice must evolve into force. Death, then, becomes the last moral language.”
“Do you remember writing this?” L asked, voice low.
Light hesitated.
Then said, “Yes.”
“You didn’t sign it.”
“I didn’t need to.”
“But you also never published it.”
“I was seventeen. I thought about burning it.”
L was quiet for a moment.
Then: “Did you?”
“…No.”
The lights buzzed overhead like dying hornets. Somewhere, beyond the mirrored wall, Light imagined an empty room.
No watchers.
Just ghosts.
He met L’s eyes.
“You think I’m being manipulated,” Light said.
“I think you’re being mirrored.”
Light frowned. “As in—”
“Someone is rewriting you back at you. Constructing a version of you using your own intellectual DNA. They’re quoting your unpublished drafts. Your ideas. They know your language. They know how you escalate.”
“So a fan.”
“A ghost,” L corrected. “A ghost of the person you could have been.”
That shut Light up for a long time.
When they left the room, L didn’t let go of his wrist.
Not his hand.
His wrist.
Like a leash, or a lifeline. Something halfway between imprisonment and intimacy.
Light let it happen.
Because the alternative—not being held—felt worse.
Back at HQ, the Kira caseboard had changed.
Someone had pinned a polaroid to the center.
A grainy photo of a man on a balcony. Middle-aged. Barefoot. Smoking.
A sticky note beneath it:
“KIRA 0”
Light blinked. “We don’t even have a suspect named that.”
“We do now,” L said. “There’s a new theory circulating on the forums. That Kira didn’t begin with you. That 'Kira’ is a myth, created to rationalize a purer form of justice. Executed first by this man.”
“…An original Kira?”
“A prototype. A beta test. Someone who killed without magic. Just… by being smart.”
“Rational murder.”
“Deductive homicide.”
Light’s voice was dry. “So we’re not just investigating me now. We’re investigating my conceptual ancestor.”
“Correct.”
“Do I get visitation rights if he turns out to be real?”
L ignored that.
That night, they didn’t kiss.
They talked.
L was on the floor, cross-legged, staring at case files. Light sat on the bed, arms around his knees.
“You ever think we were created just to think about each other?” Light asked.
L didn’t look up. “Yes.”
“And?”
“And I think we were also created to destroy each other.”
“But in the end?”
“In the end,” L said, looking up now, “I think we’ll do both.”
Light laughed. “Kiss me when I die?”
“No,” L said. “Arrest you when I cry.”
“…Romantic.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
A pause.
Then L said, quietly: “You’re not Kira.”
Light blinked. “You’re sure?”
“No.”
“Then why—”
“Because I want you to be innocent.”
Light swallowed. “But if I’m not?”
L looked him in the eye.
“Then I’ll still want you.”
It was the most terrifying thing Light had ever heard.
And the most beautiful.
---
Three hours later, the tapes started again.
Same voice.
Same rhythm.
Same Light-like cadence.
But the name had changed.
It didn’t say “L.” It didn’t say “Ryuzaki.”
It said “Lawliet.”
Over and over. On loop. In the exact same voice as Light’s own.
And then—
A laugh.
Not Light’s.
Not Kira’s.
Not anyone they knew.
Just laughter.
Wet. Smiling. Kind.
L pressed pause.
“I think we’re being watched.”
Light turned slowly.
And there, on the window ledge, was a piece of black paper.
Folded like a crane.
Light unfolded it.
Inside:
“I believe in God. He just doesn’t believe in either of you.”
---
They ran.
Not like suspects.
Like suspects in love with the idea of being caught.
The subway tunnels were dark and too warm, choked with the smell of electricity and rust. Light’s tie flapped loose behind him, his breath ragged. L moved like something born in shadows—unnaturally fast, all angles and urgency.
“You don’t—huff—you don’t think this is a trap?” Light gasped, half-laughing, half-dying.
L didn’t answer. Just turned sharply left. Down another tunnel. Past a broken emergency exit door.
Only when they ducked into a service alcove did L speak.
“She’s here.”
Light blinked. “Ritsuko?”
“Or someone wearing her face.”
“How poetic.”
“Or psychotic.”
Light braced his hands on his knees, trying not to wheeze. “Same thing.”
They found her standing on the edge of the platform.
Backlit. Smiling faintly. Hair cut short now. Black hoodie. Eyes like fire under glass.
“You came,” she said.
“You sent us a death threat written in my handwriting,” Light snapped. “What were you expecting?”
“A love letter. Maybe flowers.” Her voice was melodic, wrong, sweet with something toxic. “You never did like being outwritten, Light-kun.”
He stiffened. L stepped forward.
“Are you Kira Zero?”
“I’m every version of the crime you didn’t commit.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m the theory you buried. The version of Light that did write that manifesto, publish it, murder Kamura, become divine. I’m your fiction made real.”
Light’s hands curled. “You’re not me.”
“I’m not claiming to be,” she said. “I’m claiming to be your shadow.”
L’s voice was cool. “Where’s the real Ritsuko?”
The woman tilted her head. “Everywhere. And nowhere. Depends on what version of the story you prefer.”
Light stepped closer. “What are you trying to do?”
She smiled wider.
“Make you choose.”
Suddenly, the platform lights flickered. A projector buzzed to life on the far wall.
The tunnel behind them flooded with an old security reel—clips from earlier in the case, stitched together in real-time. Light and L sleeping in the same chair. Arguing in Kamura’s office. Light writing something alone in a hotel. L standing outside a window watching him. Freeze frames, red-circled text, timestamped intimacy.
“She’s been recording us,” Light whispered. “Since the beginning.”
L stared, unmoving.
Then the last clip played.
A recent one.
Light in the surveillance room. Alone. Eyes dark. Head tilted.
He opens the Death Note.
He writes.
He tears the page out.
And smiles.
“No,” Light said.
His throat felt raw.
“No, that’s not real. I didn’t—I didn’t do that.”
“But someone could, right?” the woman whispered. “Someone who’s almost you. Or almost Kira. Or almost God.”
L’s hand was suddenly on Light’s arm.
Steady. Firm.
The woman smiled at the gesture.
“A shame,” she said. “You were more interesting when you hated each other.”
“We never hated each other,” L said softly.
Light looked over.
L wasn’t looking at the woman.
He was looking at Light.
They made it out, barely.
The projection shut off.
The woman was gone.
Just the echo of her laughter down the tunnels.
And a new piece of paper folded under Light’s jacket, slipped in during the chaos.
He read it in the car.
“You already are Kira. You’re just too in love with him to notice.”
He didn’t show L.
That night, L didn’t ask questions.
He sat beside Light on the floor, long legs folded underneath him, staring at the same blank wall.
“I’m starting to think she’s right,” Light said.
“About what?”
“About me being capable of all of it.”
L was quiet.
Then said, “That’s why I love you.”
Light blinked.
Slowly turned.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do. In the way a detective loves the perfect crime. In the way a story loves its ending.”
Light swallowed. “So you’re not trying to stop me.”
“I’m trying to solve you.”
Light shut his eyes. “Same difference.”
---
At 2:37 a.m., the surveillance feed in their room turned to static.
For six seconds.
When it resumed, nothing looked different.
Until they noticed the apple on the desk.
Half-eaten.
---
Light dreamed of her again.
Not in the biblical way—in the epistemological way. Dreamed of her as a concept. A question. A mirror made of eyes.
Ritsuko was standing at the end of a hallway that had no walls, only pages. Each one scrawled with Light’s handwriting. Every word he had ever redacted. Thought and then swallowed. Flirted with, intellectually, and deemed too dangerous.
She walked slowly.
Barefoot.
Smiling.
And as she passed each page, the ink lifted off it like smoke and drifted toward her mouth.
She breathed it in.
Spoke with it.
“I am what happens when your restraint starves.”
“I am your thesis statement.”
“I am Kira, if he were honest.”
Light woke up in a cold sweat.
Not from fear.
From recognition.
He didn’t tell L. Not at first.
They ate breakfast in companionable silence, which meant arguing over how best to butter toast. (L held that geometry mattered; Light asserted that uneven distribution was the enemy of justice.)
They watched surveillance footage for three hours. Found nothing.
They analyzed call logs.
Ran facial scans.
Light’s pen trembled once, mid-sentence, but he passed it off as caffeine withdrawal.
He didn’t say anything.
Until 3:12 p.m.
Then, unprompted:
“I dreamed of her.”
L didn’t ask who.
He just looked at Light for a long, long time.
And said, “Did she speak with your voice again?”
Light flinched.
Then nodded.
---
They went back to the tunnels that night.
Illegally. Of course.
The service access had been locked off by municipal authority. Which meant L picked it in ten seconds flat with a broken fork tine and the handle of a toothbrush.
Light did not ask questions.
He respected the art.
They found her again.
Not standing this time—sitting. Cross-legged, in the center of the tracks. A single candle lit in front of her.
The wax was red.
“Hello, Light,” she said. “Ryuzaki.”
“You’re going to get hit by a train,” Light said dryly.
“No train comes through here. Not anymore.” Her voice echoed. Like she belonged in the space. Like they didn’t.
“You staged that security footage,” L said.
“Of course I did.”
“You forged it?”
“I created a possibility. That’s what fiction is. That’s what Kira is.”
Light stepped closer. “Why me?”
“You wrote me,” she said.
And then she opened her coat.
Inside were dozens of pages.
All in his handwriting.
All his.
The missing journals.
The drafts he had thought burned.
“I stole them,” she said, smiling. “Years ago. During that university seminar. When you were still a child philosopher with a god complex and no one to impress but yourself.”
Light’s mouth was dry.
“You were in Kamura’s seminar,” he said.
“Third row. Purple notebook.”
“You said nothing.”
“I was listening.”
L’s voice cut through the tension. “You’re not just a mimic.”
“No,” Ritsuko said. “I’m a reader. I read Light Yagami before anyone else did. I watched him write himself into divinity, alone in the margins of a syllabus. He created Kira long before the Death Note ever fell.”
Light shook his head. “You’re obsessed.”
“I’m devoted. There’s a difference.”
“And now what?” L asked. “What’s the endgame?”
She tilted her head.
“To make him see himself clearly. Not through your lens. Not through his father’s. Not even through Kira’s. Just... as the origin.”
Light’s breath caught.
“You want me to accept that I could be Kira.”
“No,” she said.
“I want you to love that you could be.”
The wind in the tunnels howled, rising in pitch. A train after all?
No.
Just the sound of some moral architecture collapsing.
L stepped forward. “You’re not well.”
“No,” she agreed. “But neither are you.”
Light moved between them.
“If I’m so much like her,” he said, “then you should fear me too.”
“I don’t,” L said.
“Why not?”
L looked at him, long and steady.
“Because you still hesitate.”
That night, Light locked the old journal pages in the case archives.
But he couldn’t stop reading them.
Again.
And again.
Not because he believed them.
But because he remembered them.
Because they were his.
He didn’t sleep.
Neither did L.
They sat together in the silence of their shared insomnia, a mug of bitter coffee passed between them like contraband.
At one point, L whispered, “I don’t want you to be Kira.”
Light whispered back: “Then stop looking.”
---
Light woke up choking.
Not on smoke. Not on blood.
On truth.
Thick. Acrid. Metallic. Familiar.
His throat burned with it. His chest heaved. He stared at the ceiling of the investigation HQ and knew, with a lucidity so blinding it might be divine punishment, that he was Kira again.
No trigger word. No dramatic gesture. No evil laugh.
Just a click.
Somewhere inside.
Like a gun cocking.
And then—
I remember.
All of it.
The Death Note.
Ryuk.
The names.
Raye Penber’s eyes.
The way Naomi Misora’s voice broke when she realized—
The way Light smiled when he—
And L.
L. Always L.
The pursuit. The closeness. The obsession that wasn’t fake. The way Light had fantasized about his death and his kiss, both with equal tenderness.
“Fuck,” Light whispered.
And started laughing.
L looked up from his corner of the room where he was quietly deconstructing a laptop and eating a sugar cube like a squirrel.
“Something amusing, Light-kun?”
Light swiped a hand down his face. “Yes,” he said. “I just remembered I’m God.”
To L’s credit, he didn't flinch.
He just stared.
Unblinking.
Like the moment Light regained his memories was penciled in on a calendar somewhere under inevitable.
“I see.”
“That’s it?” Light choked. “You see?”
“You’re not the first man to believe you are God in this building,” L said. “You are, however, the first one who may be right.”
They sat in silence for a long moment.
Light pressed his palms to his eyes. The sheer scale of what he did—of who he was—was folding in on him like origami hell.
He felt filthy.
Brilliant.
Infinite.
Rotten.
“What did I do,” he muttered, “what did I do—”
“You were Kira,” L said calmly. “You killed over a thousand people with a notebook and a belief system.”
Light looked up, fury flashing behind his eyes. “You don’t have to sound so impressed.”
“Oh, I’m not. Merely thorough.”
Light huffed. “So what now? You chain me up again? Sedate me? Drag me into a cell and monologue about morality while licking frosting off your thumb?”
L considered this.
“No,” he said. “I think we should have tea.”
Cut to: Five minutes later.
The tea was bad. The mood was worse.
Light kept gripping the ceramic mug like it was a holy relic. His brain was running triage on itself. Sorting memories. Regrets. The sheer theatricality of his Kira-scheme was giving him a headache.
“You really tied me up to you?” he asked suddenly. “That’s real?”
“Yes.”
“For surveillance.”
“Yes.”
“And not, say, in a deeply Freudian way?”
L shrugged. “The line is thin.”
Light stared at the table. Then at L.
Then started laughing again—raw, incredulous, and cracked through the center.
“I made myself forget you. You realize that? I erased you along with the guilt. The rage. The notebooks. I erased you.”
L met his gaze, dark and unreadable.
“And yet,” he said softly, “you’re here.”
Outside the window, the sky was turning gray.
Inside, Light was breaking.
“I can’t go back,” he said.
“No.”
“I won’t go back.”
“No.”
“I’m going to fix this.”
L said nothing.
Then: “Do you remember the plan?”
Light hesitated.
Then closed his eyes.
Yes.
Step one: Feign innocence.
Step two: Remove memories.
Step three: Ingratiate myself with the investigation.
Step four: Regain the Note. Regain power. Finish the job.
His hand twitched.
He could do it. Right now.
Outthink L.
Outkill Ritsuko.
Rule again.
Godhood was a heartbeat away.
But.
There was a pause.
A single pause.
Because L looked at him like something sacred.
And Light couldn't tell if it was worship or a death sentence.
“I’m not the same,” Light said.
“You’re not,” L agreed. “You’re worse.”
Light smiled. “You love that.”
L smiled back. “I do.”
Later, Light found an hidden compartment in the investigation records.
Inside:
One black notebook.
One apple core.
A note in his handwriting.
“Welcome back.
Don’t disappoint us.
— You.”
He closed it.
His reflection in the desk glass grinned at him.
----
By the time Light reentered the tunnels, he wasn't sure if he was going to confess, kill, or beg.
He didn't tell L where he was going. He just said, “I need to be alone,” which was a boldfaced lie, and they both knew it.
L let him go.
Not because he trusted him.
Because he was curious.
And curiosity, as history taught them both, was how you get murdered by a god in a teenager’s body.
---
Ritsuko was already there.
Of course she was.
She was standing in the exact center of the abandoned station again, one foot resting on a rail like a wolf caught mid-prowl. Her coat fluttered in no breeze.
“Welcome back,” she said. “Or should I say—congratulations.”
Light crossed his arms.
“Stop talking like we're co-authors of a Greek tragedy.”
“We are,” she said, smiling.
She stepped closer. Her heels didn’t make a sound.
That was the first red flag.
Light didn’t move.
He just said, “You’re not human, are you?”
Ritsuko didn’t blink.
“Define ‘human.’”
Light scoffed. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’ll get.”
She held out her hand.
A Death Note appeared in it.
No summoning.
No flourish.
No theatrical apple-eating Shinigami in sight.
Just her.
And it.
And Light with a pulse so loud in his ears he could barely hear her next words.
“I found it before you ever did,” she said. “I didn’t need to. I just wanted to see what you’d do with it.”
Light stared.
“You’re not a Shinigami,” he whispered.
“No,” she said. “But I remembered them.”
“Then what are you?”
Her smile was sharp as a razor blade tucked in a confession.
“I’m something that watched.”
In that moment, Light knew.
She wasn’t bound by death.
She wasn’t immortal, but she wasn’t not.
She was like the idea of surveillance given shape.
A philosopher’s ghost.
A concept that walked out of Plato’s Cave and put on lipstick.
He stepped back.
His breath was shallow.
“I wrote you,” he said again, like it might rewrite the universe if he just said it enough.
“Yes,” she said.
“And now?”
She leaned in, close enough to smell his thoughts.
“I wrote you back.”
That night, Light didn’t return to HQ.
He went to the library.
Yes, it was 2 a.m.
Yes, it was illegal to break into a city archive.
But he was Kira. And a Yagami. And most damningly, he was a nerd.
He found references to women like her in myths that never made it to publication. Notes in margins. Scribbles on banned dissertations. A mention in the Kabbalah. A footnote in a suicide’s journal.
“She’s the one who watched the Watchers.”
“She was there when the first name was written in blood.”
“Do not say her name aloud after midnight. She may answer.”
Light didn’t say it.
But he thought it.
Ritsuko.
Like a summoning.
Like a warning.
Like a prayer.
Back at HQ, L waited.
He was watching surveillance on four monitors and playing a game of Go against himself.
He had not touched his cake.
Watari was concerned.
But L only said, “He remembers now.”
Watari nodded. “Then it began again.”
“No,” L said softly. “This was new.”
When Light finally returned, he looked—
Ruined.
Radiant.
Something wearing Light Yagami’s shape with better posture and worse intentions.
He didn’t speak for a full hour.
Then he looked at L and said, “She was never real.”
L nodded. “I suspected.”
“She wasn’t a Shinigami. She wasn’t human. She was an observer. A catalyst.”
“A trigger,” L murmured.
“A test.”
“And did you pass?”
Light didn’t answer.
He just closed his eyes.
“Do you think I became Kira because I was bored?” Light asked suddenly, bitterly, voice flat as bone.
“No,” L said. “You became Kira because the world was beneath you. Because the rules were dull. Because you wanted to see if a god could be made.”
Light laughed.
It was ugly.
Sharp.
“I made a god. And she showed up to grade it.”
They sat in the dark for a while, the silence between them taut as violin wire.
Finally:
“I’m going to use the Note again,” Light said.
L’s fingers twitched.
“I figured.”
“I’m not asking for permission.”
“I wouldn’t give it.”
“I might kill you.”
“I’d let you try.”
Their eyes met.
And the heat there was not entirely metaphorical.
That night, they fell asleep on opposite sides of the same couch, breathing in tandem, the Death Note resting on the table between them like a live grenade.
In the tunnels, Ritsuko read a new name aloud.
Not from the Note.
From a different book.
One that predated gods.
The name sounded like thunder whispered underwater.
Something shifted.
The air folded.
The final stage had begun.
Notes:
Hope you enjoyed this one so far! I told ya it'll get more serious and angstier. It somehow evolved into this. The characters have minds of their own, I guess.
The last part of this will be posted next week—if you want to keep up, please consider bookmarking or subscribing to this.
Next chapter —
Light has his memories back. Will he work with Ritsuko? Kill L?
You can find me on Bluesky ( @the_wild_poet25 ) and on my new Twitter account (the_tamed_poet) if you want to connect. I'm also on Discord too!
The comment section also works—feel free to leave a comment! :)
Chapter Text
There were four whiteboards now.
One for suspects. One for timelines. One for misdirections. And one that no one was supposed to touch.
L called it the Godboard.
Light called it foreplay.
The investigation headquarters had taken on a strange rhythm: half-breaths, coded glances, scribbled formulas that were just ancient prayers rewritten with math.
They had long since stopped pretending this was about catching a killer.
This was about who won.
Who broke.
Who bled first.
L didn’t sleep anymore.
Not really.
He watched.
Mostly Light.
Sometimes the cameras.
Sometimes the shadow Ritsuko left behind when she stopped pretending to be comprehensible.
Light, for his part, had returned to a state of controlled volatility. Calculated mania. He showered again. Ate again. Smiled again.
And every single thing he did was suspicious.
Even when it wasn’t.
Especially when it wasn’t.
“Do you know what bothered me most?” Light said, one night, late, hunched over the chessboard that no one had won in eight days.
L didn’t look up. “That I was right?”
“No,” Light said. “That you never doubted I’d come back.”
“To Kira?”
“To myself.”
L shrugged, knight to e5. “I never believed the self was something one could abandon. Only overwrite.”
Light frowned.
“I tried to overwrite it.”
“Yes. But that self wrote the overwrite. A recursive contradiction. Clever. Sloppy.”
“Don’t call me sloppy.”
L raised a brow. “Then don’t act like someone else wrote your god complex.”
Light stood.
Paced.
His mind was a skyscraper with the power out. Tall, crumbling, dangerous to occupy.
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” he said. “Even when I killed them. I thought—”
He cut off.
There was no dignity in confession when L was watching.
L stood too.
Moved to the Godboard.
He pointed to a scrawled phrase in Light’s handwriting from weeks ago:
"Salvation through terror is still salvation."
“Did you believe this now?” L asked.
Light said nothing.
But his silence had teeth.
When Light returned to the tunnel system, he brought an offering.
Not a name.
A mirror.
Polished silver. Antique.
Something from Sayu’s old ballet room.
He left it where Ritsuko first stood.
The next day, it was gone.
Replaced by:
A note that said “Almost.”
A clock with no hands.
A lock of his own hair.
Light laughed.
Then threw up.
Then laughed again.
There was something wrong with the world now.
Maybe it had always been wrong.
Maybe Light had just noticed.
He had begun to suspect that reality was holding its breath.
And if he blinked at the wrong moment, he might see what was hiding underneath it.
Matsuda noticed none of this.
“Hey, Ryuuzaki, Light-kun—uh, just checking, were either of you sleeping at night?”
“No,” L said.
“I was,” Light said.
They said it at the same time.
They were both lying.
Matsuda nodded like he understood. He didn’t.
But that was his power.
He was protected by irrelevance.
That night, Light dreamed of his father’s voice.
You’re better than this.
He woke up with blood on his tongue.
He had bitten it in his sleep.
He did not cry.
He would not cry.
He was Kira.
Kira did not cry.
By day, he was Light again. Perfect. Controlled. Flawless as glass before it shattered.
By night, he became something else.
Not quite Kira.
Not quite human.
Not quite done.
L noticed.
Of course he noticed.
He watched Light like a priest watched a false prophet: half with awe, half with the hope of catching him sinning.
He did.
Constantly.
But he kept it to himself.
“Tell me what the Note said to you,” L said, one night, unprompted.
Light looked up from the pages he had been pretending not to reread.
“It didn’t talk.”
“No,” L agreed. “But it spoke.”
Light closed the cover.
“It said,” he murmured, “You can fix this. You can fix everything. You just have to be willing to bleed.”
“And were you?”
“Willing?”
“Yes.”
Light stared at him.
And L—brave, beautiful, broken L—stared back.
Neither of them flinched.
Meanwhile, in the Kanto region of Tokyo, a child went missing.
Her name would not be in the paper.
She was taken by something that looked like a woman, wore a coat, and hummed a song older than grief.
The security footage glitched.
The police found nothing.
But Light—Light woke at 3:03 a.m. knowing her name before the news broke.
And he wrote it down.
And crossed it out.
And burned the paper.
Because this was not about his sister.
This was about what was watching.
Back at HQ, L opened a package addressed to no one.
Inside:
A mirror.
A clock with no hands.
A lock of Light’s hair.
He said nothing.
But he smiled.
And added a new board.
---
There was a new equation on the whiteboard.
L didn’t remember writing it.
It read:
“What happens when the god realized he was only worshipped because he was feared?”
Underneath, in red pen, unmistakably Light’s hand:
“Then he doubled down.”
The tension in HQ had calcified into something almost sacred. Sacred in the way ruins were sacred. Or crime scenes.
There were three types of tension then:
The tension of being watched.
The tension of being known.
The tension of almost touching someone you shouldn't.
They were living in the third one.
Permanently.
“Your blood pressure’s elevated,” L remarked one morning.
“I think that was just my proximity to your voice,” Light muttered, peeling an orange like he wanted it to confess to murder.
L raised a brow. “Would you like me to whisper?”
Light huffed. “Would you like to die?”
“I would like a nap,” L replied. “And for you to stop grinding your teeth when I look at your hands.”
“I didn’t—”
“You did. I counted. It was Pavlovian.”
Later, in the shower (same building, separate times, unfortunately), Light realized L was right.
He thought of L’s hands—long, pale, precise—and bit down.
He tasted copper.
His mouth was a confessional.
He didn’t spit.
He swallowed.
“Light-kun.”
“What.”
“You were staring at the surveillance feed.”
“It's a loop.”
“Yes.”
“You looped the hallway cam?”
“Only to see if you’d notice.”
Light didn’t respond.
He rewound.
Watched himself walk through the hallway again.
Then again.
Then again.
He couldn’t remember the real version anymore.
He didn’t say anything.
He just turned off the monitor.
And whispered, “Am I still real if I'm only watching myself pretend?”
L’s eyes narrowed.
“You're beginning to sound like her.”
Light shivered.
He didn’t know if it was revulsion or agreement.
Speaking of her—
Ritsuko was not where she should have been.
Which was concerning.
Because she had never been anywhere to begin with.
And now her absence felt violent.
Like a blackout. Or a scream cut short.
The mirror was gone again.
So was the clock.
But the lock of Light’s hair had been replaced by a tooth.
His.
He ran his tongue over his teeth that night, over and over, until L caught him doing it and said gently:
“You haven’t lost anything. Yet.”
Light closed his mouth.
And then opened it again.
To say something that wasn’t allowed in human language.
---
They didn’t touch.
But they orbited.
Hard.
Like asteroids.
Like a binary star collapsing under mutual gravity.
Like two people who had kissed with their minds already and knew the body would be a demotion.
And yet—
“I wonder,” L said, “if your god complex has a physical expression.”
Light glanced up. “Are you asking if I got hard from divinity?”
“I'm asking if Kira did.”
“I was Kira.”
“Were you?”
Their faces were inches apart.
It was past midnight.
The lights were flickering.
Somewhere, a god was watching. And grinning.
And maybe touching himself.
Light reached for the Death Note.
L stopped his hand.
They both froze.
L leaned in, voice a sin in a cathedral.
“You're afraid of her. But you're more afraid of yourself.”
Light’s breath caught.
Then he smiled.
Like a guillotine about to drop.
“No,” he said. “I'm afraid of what happens when you stop looking at me.”
They didn’t kiss.
But it felt like they did.
Something cracked open between them.
And out of it stepped the part of them that should’ve never existed in the first place.
Elsewhere, Ritsuko wrote a new phrase into the air with a fingernail:
It wasn’t the book that corrupted. It was the boy who believed it was meant for him.
She laughed.
And Tokyo lost power for seven seconds.
Seven seconds was enough time:
For a pacemaker to glitch.
For a subway train to stall.
For L to see Light’s real face in the dark.
For Light to wonder if L’s lips would have tasted like sugar or judgment.
The power returned.
But nothing was the same.
The next morning, Misa sent them both a text:
“Did either of you do that blackout thing? Because if so, it was VERY hot and also please don’t kill me <3”
Light deleted it.
L saved it to evidence.
Watari started carrying holy water.
Just in case.
Later, L came up behind Light at the Godboard.
He didn’t touch him.
But he said: “We need a new term for what's happening here.”
“You meant the investigation?”
“I meant you.”
Light’s fingers froze on the marker.
“You think I'm unstable.”
“I think you are becoming stable in the wrong direction.”
“I think you are obsessed with me.”
“I think you're right.”
They stood there.
Breathing.
Inhaling each other’s entropy.
Pretending they weren’t imagining what would have happened if they gave up pretending.
That night, Light woke up with a new plan.
It wasn’t a kill list.
It was worse.
It was a mirror.
He was going to give Ritsuko what she wanted.
He just needed to figure out what that was.
He suspected—
She wanted him.
Not as a lover.
Not even as a weapon.
But as a template.
A successor.
A student.
A warning.
He wrote her name in three different languages.
He burned the paper.
He repeated her name until it stopped sounding real.
Then wrote:
Ritsuko wanted a god. He’d give her one she couldn’t control.
---
L woke to find every monitor in the HQ playing static except one.
That one showed Light asleep on the floor.
Around him:
Mirrors.
Clocks.
Hair.
And a single red apple.
Rotting.
---
Ritsuko didn’t leave footprints.
She walked on floors, across thresholds, down alleys in the rain—and never left behind more than an impression of having been there. Like a breeze. Like déjà vu. Like a ghost who hadn’t decided who she was haunting yet.
She reappeared in a bookstore.
Not one they could trace. Not on any map. But L found the receipt in Light’s pocket.
How had it gotten there?
Neither of them remembered going out.
But the receipt was dated two days from then.
And it was damp.
And on the back, someone had scrawled: “He who wrote must one day read.”
Light dreamed of Ritsuko again.
She had no mouth in the dream, only eyes—dozens of them, each blinking independently, watching from the folds of her coat, the backs of her hands, the insides of her palms. She held the Death Note like it was a wedding invitation.
And she said—
Nothing.
Because she didn’t need to.
Light woke up sobbing.
He didn’t know why.
He didn’t tell L.
L already knew.
---
The HQ was colder lately. Drafts came from nowhere. The lights flickered even when the power grid was fine. Monitors whispered static when no one was watching. Matsuda insisted everything was fine. Aiba avoided the stairwells now. Watari didn’t sleep, but you knew that already.
Light wore more sweaters. It made him look gentler, even when he was plotting to make the concept of free will obsolete.
L didn’t comment on the sweaters.
But he looked at them too long.
Like he was wondering what they’d looked like on the floor.
“You’ve been quiet,” L said, one morning, fingers wrapped around a spoonful of sugar. “For you, that’s either the beginning of something or the end of it.”
“I was thinking,” Light replied, eyes on a piece of paper that was very, very blank.
“About her?”
“No. About you.”
L looked unimpressed. “Please. You think about me constantly.”
Light lifted his eyes. “Yes. But that time, I was thinking about how I was going to kill you.”
L still didn’t flinch. “I hope it was romantic.”
“It would be,” Light said. “It always is.”
And they went back to silence, the kind that echoed like a scream in a cathedral.
Ritsuko appeared on a security tape that hadn’t recorded anything in weeks.
She was sitting in the chair Light usually used. She was reading one of the theology books he had been annotating. She turned a page without using her hands.
Then she looked up at the camera.
And smiled.
And the tape combusted.
Physically. Sparks. Smoke. Gone.
Watari replaced the system.
The next day, every backup file had been replaced with a single sentence:
“You are still asking the wrong questions.”
---
L dreamed, too, then.
Not about Light.
About Light’s absence.
He woke in cold sweat, hands reaching for a chain that hadn’t been there in months. In the dream, he was in the hotel again. The first one. Back when Light was still pretending not to be god. Back when L could still lie to himself.
In the dream, Light left the room.
And never came back.
In the dream, L waited forever.
They fought again.
Not about Kira. Not about the notebook. About epistemology.
“Knowing something is not the same as proving it,” L said, pacing.
“That’s a coward’s excuse,” Light spat. “You know I was Kira. But you can't say it. You can't own it. You want me to be Kira so you can be right, but you're too afraid to be wrong.”
L turned slowly. “I don't need to say it. You're already proving it.”
“Then say it.”
“I don't need to—”
“SAY IT.”
And L did.
Softly. Like a prayer.
“You were Kira.”
Silence.
The kind of silence that you could build a church around.
Light’s lips trembled.
It wasn’t rage.
It was relief.
He laughed.
And it was ugly.
Too ugly for a face that perfect.
And L smiled, just a little.
Because now they had crossed it.
Whatever line it was that had kept that game playable. It was gone now.
Later, they sat on opposite ends of the long desk.
No one else was there.
L drank his tea.
Light wrote in his notebook.
It wasn’t the Death Note.
But it could have been.
L watched him.
Light didn’t look up.
They didn’t speak.
But the silence sounded like:
I’ll kill you if you get in my way.
You already had.
Do it again.
Please.
They found another message in the elevator shaft.
That time carved into the metal.
How she had gotten in, they didn’t know. How she left, they never knew.
But it said:
“Gods are not born. They are chosen.”
Underneath it:
“You were not my first choice, Light.”
Light didn’t show it to L.
He just traced the words with his fingers, over and over, until he drew blood.
Then he smiled.
Because of course she hadn’t chosen him.
No one ever did.
He took his place.
And he’d do it again.
That night, Light didn’t sleep.
He watched himself on the mirror L hadn’t noticed him installing in the ceiling.
He watched the version of himself he let L see.
And he whispered, just once:
“I am still yours.”
The reflection didn’t answer.
But it smiled.
Just like L did.
When Light wasn’t looking.
---
Light had always been good at playing the long game. The sort of game that required twelve steps ahead, the kind of game where sacrifice was not failure but a prerequisite. He had been good at breaking people from the inside. And he had been very good at smiling while he did it.
It took five days and four hours for his memories to resettle like ash across his synapses. They returned in fragments: names, faces, signatures, gasps, final prayers, apples rotting on the edge of power.
He didn’t tell anyone when it happened.
He just stood in the HQ bathroom for thirteen minutes, staring into the mirror, not blinking once.
And then he smiled.
Not the Light Yagami smile. Not the polite, award-winning, camera-ready one.
The other one.
The one reserved for gods.
“You’re different,” L said.
They were on the rooftop. It was raining. Of course it was raining.
“So are you,” Light said.
L didn’t look at him. “You’re remembering again.”
Light shrugged, dripping. “Am I?”
“You are,” L said. “You’ve stopped flinching when you lie.”
Light leaned back on the ledge, one foot dangling over the edge. “Or maybe I just don't care what you think anymore.”
“You care,” L said. “You always have.”
And it was so true that Light’s silence became the most eloquent answer he had ever given.
He spent the next morning reorganizing the investigation files.
Rewriting timelines.
Adjusting connections.
Deleting what no longer mattered.
When L saw the new chart, his lips pressed into a line so thin it might not have existed.
“You’ve cut the second suspect pool in half.”
“I’ve cut the dead weight,” Light said.
“You’ve redacted Matsuda’s section entirely.”
“Is there something of value in it?”
“You redrew your own role.”
“Yes.”
“You made yourself the center of the diagram.”
“I am the center.”
L didn’t argue.
He just stepped closer.
Close enough that their sleeves touched.
And murmured, “Then prove it.”
Light didn’t move.
He just said, low and deadly, “I already did.”
The next time they met with the task force, Light took the lead.
He gestured with confidence, pulled up data, narrated hypotheses as though they had already been conclusions.
Nobody interrupted.
Not even L.
Afterward, in the hall, Light paused and said, “You’re letting me win.”
“No,” L said. “You’re just very good.”
“I’ve always been good.”
“Yes,” L said. “But now you’re also terrifying.”
And Light smiled.
The real smile again.
The one that said: I know.
---
Ritsuko showed up in a photo from L’s childhood.
There were six children in the image.
Only five were named.
She wasn’t one of them.
But she was there. Behind them. In the shadow of a tree.
Grinning.
A hand raised in a half-wave.
L didn’t remember the photo being taken.
He didn’t remember that trip.
But the image was in his files. Labeled in his own code.
He showed it to Light.
Light studied it in silence.
Then said: “She’s older here than she is now.”
L nodded. “She’s not aging normally.”
“She’s not human.”
“No,” L agreed. “She isn't.”
And the room was too quiet after that. Like the whole building was holding its breath.
That night, L heard Light talking in his sleep.
Not muttering.
Reciting.
Sanskrit.
Then Greek.
Then something L didn’t recognize.
Something too old to be translated.
He didn’t wake him.
He just listened.
And when Light woke up gasping, L said nothing.
Only handed him water.
And watched as Light drank it like it was penance.
---
Ritsuko left them another note.
This one was written into the condensation on the bathroom mirror.
It said:
“I never wanted a god. I wanted a mirror that could bleed.”
Light stared at it for ten minutes.
Then wrote under it, in lipstick:
“You should’ve picked someone else.”
He made three contingency plans the next day.
One for if L turned on him.
One for if Ritsuko took the notebook.
And one for if he died before either of those things happened.
The third one was the most beautiful.
It was calligraphy, almost.
He folded it into an origami crane and left it on L’s desk.
L didn’t open it.
But he didn’t throw it away, either.
They fought again, this time over metaphysics.
“You don't actually believe you're a god,” L said. “You believe you're the most correct person in the room, and you're confusing that with divinity.”
“No,” Light said. “I believe I’ll become what no one else is willing to be.”
“A murderer.”
“A filter. A force. I never claimed innocence.”
“You claim rightness,” L snapped. “You think because you remember it all now, that makes you pure again.”
“It doesn't make me pure,” Light said. “It makes me clear.”
And L saw it then.
The clarity.
The terrifying, crystalline certainty in Light’s eyes.
The thing he’d forgotten while Light had been human, soft, uncertain.
That this Light was made of knives.
And none of them were metaphorical.
“I can’t protect you from her,” L said that night.
“I don't want you to.”
“She’s not what you think.”
“Neither are you.”
They didn’t speak after that.
But they slept in the same room.
Neither trusted the dark anymore.
Ritsuko watched from the screen.
She was in a house that shouldn’t have existed.
The wallpaper peeled in cursive.
The windows blinked when no one was looking.
She poured tea into an empty cup and waited.
Eventually, the mirror on the wall cracked.
And the tea began to boil.
Light wrote her name again.
This time not in the Death Note.
This time not even on paper.
He wrote it into the space between seconds.
Into the margin of a moment L wasn’t watching.
He wrote it into himself.
And felt it burn.
But he did not flinch.
Because he was nearly ready then.
And soon, she would come for him.
And he would be waiting.
Smiling.
---
It began with a knock.
No, that wasn’t quite right.
It began with the absence of a knock—of any sound at all—until Light turned, very slowly, from where he had been writing notes in the margin of a file L was never supposed to see. The quiet had been so full it choked.
Ritsuko was standing in the middle of the room.
Not the hallway.
Not behind a door.
Not outside the glass.
Inside.
Inside the sacred, surveillance-slick, suspicion-choked room of gods and monsters. She was barefoot. She was smiling.
Light closed the folder.
He didn’t move otherwise. The motion would have been too human.
"You’re early,” he said.
"You’re late," she replied. “Seven years, give or take a war.”
She didn’t look older. She didn’t look younger. She looked like a photograph someone had taken of sorrow and then kept folding until it fit inside a locket.
He studied her like a puzzle, like a possibility, like a ghost who had never had the decency to die. She looked back like she’d already solved him and was only there for the confirmation.
“You’ve remember,” she said, walking in that too-silent way of hers toward his desk. The shadows didn’t follow her right. “You’re rewritten.”
Light didn't answer. He merely tipped his head in the same way he used to, the same way he had when he was seventeen and carrying twenty-four deaths in his back pocket and still thought victory would be beautiful.
“I told you not to,” she said softly, running a finger across the edge of the table. Her nail left a thin, impossible burn in the finish. “Do you remember why?”
“Because I’d become you,” Light murmured.
“And?”
“And you don't like competition.”
Her grin was knife-edged. “No. I just don't like sharing the ending.”
The cameras caught none of it.
Of course they didn’t.
The moment Ritsuko had entered the room, half the surveillance system had started looping footage from three days ago. L saw Light writing. Writing. Writing.
But not what he was writing.
And certainly not to whom.
Light didn’t flinch when Ritsuko sat on the desk beside him like they had always done this. Like they were old friends. Or lovers. Or soldiers from the same unholy war.
“Did you plan this,” he asked, “or did I?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d like to know if I'm about to betray myself.”
She laughed—not cruelly, but with a fondness that made Light uneasy.
“You already did,” she said. “That was the point.”
They talked about the notebook.
They talked about L.
They talked about the dead gods, the sleeping things, the way the Shinigami realm wasn’t a realm at all but a scar, a leftover word from a language that didn’t want to be remembered.
They talked about what it had meant to be chosen, and what it meant to pretend that it hadn’t been a choice.
Light didn’t pretend anymore.
Ritsuko’s teeth glinted when he admitted it.
“You always were my favorite,” she said.
“That’s funny,” he replied. “You weren’t mine.”
Meanwhile, L was downstairs, watching the blank screen with the kind of intensity reserved for open graves and lost causes. He didn’t blink. Didn’t eat. Barely breathed.
He knew what a void meant.
He knew what it felt like when something too smart to be seen decided you weren’t worth the observation.
And still, he waited.
Because if Light was talking to something that didn't exist—
L wanted to be there when it finally decided to look back.
Ritsuko stood. Walked over. Looked down at Light with an expression that flickered—human, inhuman, mournful, monstrous.
“You’re going to kill him,” she said.
“No,” Light replied. “He’ll kill himself. Trying to save me.”
“Same thing.”
Light didn’t argue. He just nodded.
And then:
“I haven’t written it down.”
Her eyebrows lifted.
“Yet,” he clarified.
“Oh, Light,” she said.
And she sounded almost proud.
Almost.
“You’re not a god,” she whispered into his ear before she left.
“You’re a consequence.”
And he stayed very still as she disappeared—not out the door. Not out the window. Just gone.
Like a thought too dangerous to finish.
Later that night, L climbed into bed beside him without comment. Light was already awake.
“Where did you go,” L asked.
“Nowhere.”
“You lie too easily now.”
“You should’ve known I would.”
L nodded. His hair was damp. The rain hadn’t stopped for days.
“Will you tell me,” he asked, “when the end comes?”
Light turned to face him in the dark.
And said, so quietly, it was almost a prayer: “No.”
L didn’t move.
But he didn’t leave, either.
Because this had always been going to hurt.
And he had always been going to let it.
Downstairs, the crane Light had left on L’s desk had unfolded itself.
The note was gone.
In its place was a single sentence, written in a language that predated the gods:
He remembers the first death. He does not remember the first birth.
L read it three times.
And began to write again.
---
It was raining again. It always rained when something neared the surface.
L sat at the edge of the bed, one knee tucked beneath his chin, thumb hooked around his toe in that curled gargoyle posture that made him look like a statue mourning its own erosion. He hadn’t spoken to Light all morning, and Light hadn’t pushed. Their silence had coagulated into something warm-blooded. Something breathing. Something that, if named aloud, might disintegrate.
Instead, they passed each other like dangerous stars in orbit. Coffee poured. Eyes lingered too long. Shirts exchanged hands with no comment. One tie left knotted in the other’s drawer. No one said anything about the fact that the window had been closed and locked and still the letter that L had written last night was gone—gone with its corners curled inward as if it had been burned inwards, from memory out.
Ritsuko hadn’t reappeared.
But her absence was everywhere.
And Light... Light was beautiful like a loaded gun on a nightstand: accessible, intimate, terrible.
L wasn’t sure if he wanted to kiss him or destroy him.
Probably both.
Light was humming to himself again. He only did that when he was about to do something unforgivable.
L closed his eyes and listened.
It was a lullaby. Maybe. Or a war march in minor key.
It was difficult to tell with Light.
Everything was.
Everything was.
---
The problem with regaining one's memories isn’t clarity.
It’s scale.
The body is too small. The soul too soft. And the world too loud to hold it all.
Light could feel the weight of himself now. The brutal elegance of his previous self’s logic: taut as wire, clinical as a god’s signature on a kill order.
Everything made sense now. L’s presence. Ritsuko’s interference. His own… softness. The long stretch of lost time where he had been something other than this—less god, more boy, more longing, more human.
It had made him weak.
It had made him dangerous.
Now, he was both.
He stirred sugar into his tea without looking and said, casually, “You know, Ryuk used to say that humans are the only creatures capable of inventing morality.”
L blinked. “That’s not quite right.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No.” L stretched out on the tatami floor, head angled toward the ceiling, fingers twitching. “Morality is a lie built for maintenance. A system of internalized warfare. It’s not invention. It’s self-protection disguised as self-sacrifice.”
Light smirked. “You’re waxing poetic again.”
“I’m tired of being scientific.”
“Then stop trying to quantify me.”
“You’re not unquantifiable, Light-kun. You’re just… an equation I haven’t finished solving.”
There was heat in that. A slow-burn flicker under the precision.
Light leaned in. Close enough that L’s breath ghosted over his collarbone.
“Then solve me,” he whispered.
L’s pupils dilated—faintly. Only faintly. But Light noticed.
“I’m trying,” L said.
And Light—terrible, terrible Light—offered him a smile that looked like a confession.
“You’re too slow.”
---
They didn’t kiss.
They did everything but.
They circled each other like philosophers with knives. Shared space like two monarchs splitting one kingdom, waiting to see who blinked. Ate from each other’s plates. Used each other’s toothbrushes. Spoke in riddles because honesty would be too fatal.
They didn’t kiss, but they passed cigarettes mouth to mouth in the dark once.
L had never smoked. Still hadn't.
He never said anything about it.
Neither did Light.
---
The next day, Light wrote a name in a mirror with steam.
L saw it. Pretended not to. Burned the image into his brain and traced it out later on paper when Light had left for the archive room.
The name was Sayu.
Light’s sister.
But that wasn’t who the note was meant for.
The mirror fogged again before L could read what came after.
Still.
It was a message.
Not for L.
Not for the Task Force.
Not for God.
For Ritsuko.
L folded the paper and tucked it into his sock. The safest place left.
Light came back an hour later with tea and something that looked like regret, but wasn't.
He handed L the cup without speaking.
L took it.
And they sat like that for three hours.
Waiting.
Not for justice.
But for revelation.
---
The world was quiet, which meant it was about to end.
Ritsuko returned at midnight.
She appeared in the bathroom mirror this time, brushing her hair with a comb made from something that wasn’t bone, but had seen bone, understood it, sang in the pitch of old marrow.
Light looked at her through the steam.
“You’re late.”
“You didn’t call.”
“I did.”
She paused.
“Sayu.”
He nodded.
Her eyes darkened. “That was a low blow.”
“You taught me well.”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t teach you anything. I merely opened the door. You chose the threshold. You chose the teeth.”
Light stepped forward. His reflection stayed behind.
“You’ll help me.”
“Not help. Observe.”
“I’m rewriting the ending.”
“You’re bleeding it dry.”
“Same thing.”
She laughed again. That terrible, wonderful laugh like a myth being torn in half.
Then: “He knows.”
Light didn’t need to ask who.
“He always knew,” he said.
“Will he stop you?”
“He’ll try.”
“And will you let him?”
“…I don’t know.”
---
At 3:11 a.m., L rolled over to find Light already awake. Their legs were tangled. Their wrists aligned. Their lives burning from opposite ends of the same matchstick.
Light looked at him.
Not past him.
Not through him.
At him.
And L, in a whisper he would later pretend was silence, asked:
“Is this who you are again?”
And Light—
Light, who remembered every page, every rule, every death, and every lie he’d ever swallowed and spat back up gilded with justification—
Said:
“No.”
And didn’t elaborate.
They fell asleep like that.
Monsters in love.
Gods in mourning.
And dawn on the verge of opening its mouth.
---
The world is held together by paper. Not strength, not truth, not justice.
Paper. Documents. Death Notes. Letters unsent. Pages torn out and burnt for heat when the silence got too cold.
Light knew this. He had always known this. It was why he had mastered the pen like others mastered the blade. Language bent for him. Reality, too.
He was writing then—not a name, not that time. He was mapping a path. A theory in fragments. Strings of logic so taut even L wouldn’t have heard them hum. It was brilliance buried under restraint. It was strategy wearing the mask of calm.
And it was all for Ritsuko.
And for L.
And, in a way, for Sayu, though she didn’t know it. Though she would never know.
The rain had returned. That old accomplice.
In the glass reflection of the high-rise window, Light watched the city bruise under it. Everything dripped. Streetlamps flickered. The world tried to forget itself.
Behind him, L was brushing his teeth like it was an interrogation tactic. Ferocious. Focused. He didn’t trust the toothpaste.
Ritsuko stood at the foot of the bed, soaking wet, uninvited, unbothered.
The mirror hadn’t even rippled that time. She had stepped out like it was a bus stop.
“You’ve both made this very inconvenient,” she said, removing her coat. Beneath it, she wore a dress made of threads too fine to be human, too dark to be visible unless you knew what shadow to look for.
L didn’t blink. “You’re supposed to be a delusion.”
Ritsuko tilted her head. Her hair was drying into black ribbons that shifted like they had a will of their own.
“I’m whatever Light needs me to be. And right now, he needs me to be the answer.”
“You’re not real,” L repeated, softer.
“That didn’t stop Kira.”
Light turned from the window. His eyes weren’t glowing, but they felt like they were. His gaze could have split atoms. Or hearts.
“She’s as real as the Death Note,” he said.
“Which is to say, real enough to kill for.”
“And to die for,” Ritsuko added, smiling without kindness. “And you’ve both done plenty of that.”
L put down the toothbrush like it might explode. “What are you?”
Ritsuko sighed.
It wasn’t a tired sigh. It was ancient. Tectonic.
“I am what’s left,” she said. “When gods fell asleep and men wrote rules in their absence. I was in the Book before the Book had names. I was what you became when your purpose outlived your body.”
“That’s not an answer,” L said.
“No,” Ritsuko agreed. “It’s a warning.”
Later, L made tea with hands that didn’t shake, because he had trained them not to. Light was watching him with that slow-burning look he used when he was three moves ahead and nostalgic about it.
“I knew what you were planning,” L said, finally.
“You always did.”
“Not everything.”
“That was because you kept looking for a criminal.”
L placed the cup on the table. “And what should I have been looking for?”
Light smiled.
“A god.”
Ritsuko was upside down on the ceiling, idly braiding strands of stormlight into her hair. She didn’t comment, but the air thickened like a closing book.
“You’re not a god,” L said.
“No,” Light agreed. “But I'm what happens when a man tries to become one. That's the same thing, in the end.”
L’s fingers tapped the porcelain in rhythm. “And what am I, in that myth?”
Light stepped closer. Their faces were mirror-close. Twin blades.
“You're the only thing that makes me doubt.”
There was silence. A silence that dragged its feet like something wounded.
Then L said, “That should terrify me.”
Light, gently, like breaking glass: “It should have.”
They didn’t kiss. But something worse than kissing happened. Their hands brushed when they reached for the same file. Their eyes locked too long when no one was speaking. Light left his wrist bare when he shouldn’t have. L started sleeping less—not because he suspected Light, but because he couldn’t stop listening to his breathing in the next bed.
And Ritsuko watched.
And the Death Note waited.
---
The plan had changed. It always did.
Ritsuko laid it out like a body on the table. Light added amendments in the margins with a smile that could have started fires. L wasn’t supposed to see it. He did.
The new plan didn’t end with a name.
It ended with a question.
And the one who asked it… was the one who survived.
But no one said that part aloud.
They met in stolen hours, behind locked doors that used to be metaphorical. Ritsuko revealed pieces of herself like peeling back a chrysalis made of teeth. She had once been something that ruled, she said. Not like Kira. Not like the Shinigami. Older. Stranger. Bound to a pact made when humanity first lied to itself.
She wasn’t lying then. Or maybe she was. It didn’t matter. Light believed her. L didn’t. That was their difference.
That was also their symmetry.
“Why then?” L asked her.
Ritsuko looked at Light.
“Because he was ready.”
Light didn’t deny it.
He didn’t confirm it either.
He just poured more tea.
There was a moment—just one—when Light almost told L everything.
They were both drenched. The power was out. Ritsuko had vanished again. The storm outside felt like the world reformatting itself. L was sitting on the bed, hair dripping, face blank but not empty.
And Light—
Light thought: If I had kissed him then, he would have let me.
But that wasn’t the kind of power he wanted.
So instead, he sat down beside him, close enough that their knees touched.
“I had a dream,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I was in a room full of mirrors. Every one of them cracked.”
“Symbolic.”
“They weren’t reflecting me. Just names. Endless names. I couldn’t find my own.”
L looked at him then. Not as an opponent. Not as a theory.
As a boy.
As a person.
And he said, “That wasn’t a dream, Light. That was a confession.”
Light didn’t argue.
He didn’t need to.
That night, Ritsuko appeared again.
She didn’t knock.
She never had.
That time, her eyes were gone.
In their place: twin voids, reflecting nothing but possibility.
“It’s time,” she said.
Light stood.
L did too.
And the storm got worse.
And the page turned.
---
They didn’t sleep anymore.
Not because of the case—though the case, like a fever, continued.
Not because of fear—though fear lay dormant in the bones of everyone involved, as present as marrow.
They didn’t sleep because it was too quiet. Too still.
Because even breathing next to each other felt like confession. Felt like war. Felt like that split-second before a kiss or a death.
Light stood at the window again, watching the storm bleed itself dry. A pale band of gray light cut across his throat like a blade left hovering mid-strike. His silhouette was cleaner than his conscience.
L was behind him. Not watching the sky. Watching Light.
He had been doing that for hours.
“You haven’t moved,” L said.
“I was thinking,” Light replied.
“You already had the solution.”
Light didn’t argue. The solution wasn’t the problem. The problem was who to solve it as.
He didn’t turn around. “And if I do?”
“Then say it.”
Light’s reflection was ghost-like in the pane. The storm was retreating. The mirror had cleared.
“If I tell you everything,” he said, “then there is no one left to be the god.”
Silence. Then:
“There never is.”
---
They spoke in symbols now. They always had, but it was more dangerous lately. More sacred. More like touching.
Words as chess pieces, glances as feints.
“I’m curious,” L said during breakfast. He didn’t eat, only poured tea in a pattern that resembled Morse code.
“Hm?”
“What was it like, remembering your sins but pretending you didn’t?”
Light didn’t flinch. He lifted his toast to his mouth. Chewed. Swallowed. Said calmly:
“Like living with a ghost who shared your name.”
L licked sugar off his thumb. “Then we're both haunted.”
“No,” Light said. “You're obsessed. It's not the same.”
But it was.
Because L was following Light into places he didn’t understand. Because Light was building a new end to a very old book. Because neither of them had touched the Death Note in days, and it was somehow more terrifying that way.
Ritsuko had vanished again, and the air felt like it was holding its breath.
Something was coming. Something was always coming.
When it happened, it was small.
A misfiled document.
A photograph that shouldn’t have existed.
Light left it on L’s desk on purpose. L pretended he hadn’t seen it.
It was a picture of a young girl, standing beside a Shinigami. Only she wasn’t a girl. And it wasn’t a Shinigami. It was Ritsuko, and something else behind her, half-blurred, with eyes like drowning and an outline shaped like grief.
The caption was nonsense. “Departmental Transfer, 1997.”
L didn’t ask where Light had found it. Light didn’t say.
Later, they argued. Loud. Complex. Beautiful.
About ethics, or at least the idea of them. L insisted no one was truly beyond redemption. Light insisted no one truly deserved it.
“What about me?” L said, for no reason.
Light was quiet for too long. Then:
“You aren't the one writing names.”
“But you are.”
Light didn’t say yes. Didn’t say no.
He only asked: “Would it have mattered?”
The room swayed.
Neither of them breathed for a moment too long.
L said, “Only if I loved you.”
Light looked at him.
Then turned back to the storm.
They kissed. It was stupid. Meaningless. Earth-shattering.
It happened in a stairwell, in a moment between surveillance shifts, between truths. It happened like gravity happened—inevitable and cruel.
Their mouths crashed like rival theories. There were teeth. Bruises. Blood.
It was the most honest thing Light had ever done.
It was the least honest thing L had ever wanted.
They didn’t speak of it afterward.
But they didn’t stop looking.
---
Ritsuko returned in a church. Of course.
She was in the pew like she belonged there, draped in shadows that smelled like grave dirt and ink. The stained glass above her depicted an angel dying. The wings were wrong.
Light walked in first. Alone.
“Does he know?” she asked, without turning.
“He knows enough.”
“He always does.”
“He kissed me.”
Ritsuko chuckled, hollow and sharp.
“They always do.”
Light sat beside her. Their reflections mixed in the marble.
“I needed it,” he said.
She lifted the Death Note from under her coat.
He didn’t touch it yet. Just stared.
“I didn’t want to use it,” he said.
“You would.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“That wasn’t what you were built for, Light.”
He looked at her then. Really looked.
“You built me?”
Ritsuko’s face did something that might have been pity.
“Not me. The world. Your father. Justice. The rot in systems too proud to die. I just... pointed you toward the fire.”
Light closed his eyes.
Opened them.
Took the Death Note.
L followed him.
Of course he did.
Not like a detective. Like a promise.
They met again on the old rooftop. The same one where L had once threatened to punch Light off the edge and Light had said, go ahead, I’ll write your name before I fall.
Now, they were older. Colder. Closer.
Light held the notebook loosely.
L said, “I'll stop you.”
Light said, “You were the only one who ever could.”
L walked forward. Stopped inches away.
“You were kind, once.”
“I was pretending.”
L reached out. Touched Light’s wrist. Gently.
“You are still pretending.”
Light laughed. Soft. Bitter. Human.
“Then stop me.”
Their eyes met like loaded guns.
And somewhere, far below, the first thunder of a god’s awakening sounded.
The notebook weighed nothing in Light’s hand. Nothing, and everything—an entire world of order compressed into pages thinner than mercy. The storm behind them had blown itself to bone-dry air and a sky scoured clean. It smelled like aftermath. Like decision.
L didn’t blink.
Light didn’t flinch.
They were two species of silence, evolved side by side, drawn together not by orbit, but by inevitability.
“Do it,” Light said. His voice didn’t tremble. That, at least, he still controlled. “You said you would stop me.”
“I did,” L replied. “And I have.”
“How?” Light’s mouth twitched at the edge. “You haven’t done anything.”
L stepped closer, slow, deliberate, until there was only breath between them. “That’s where you're wrong. I’d done everything.”
Light’s heart—if it still existed—thundered. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even anticipation.
It was the sound of something being breaking from the inside.
L said, “I know everything now.”
Light lifted the notebook, more reflex than action. “You can't prove it.”
“I don't need to prove it.”
“You're stalling.”
“I'm waiting.”
“For what?”
“For you.”
The wind licked around them, brushed Light’s hair across his eyes, swept past the open cover of the Death Note like it, too, knew the words hidden within. Light stared into L’s face—still boyish, still sleep-deprived, still cracked open around the edges with that barely-human calculation—and felt, for the first time, the unbearable pressure of being seen. Entirely. Down to the rot and brilliance.
“I'm the villain,” Light said. His voice was sharper now, bitter and shining. “I'm what the world made me.”
“You're wrong.” L didn’t look away. “You're what you chose.”
“You would’ve done the same, if the notebook had fallen to you.”
“I'm not so sure.” L tilted his head. “But I wouldn’t have pretended it wasn’t a choice.”
The air was too thin. Too clear.
Light lowered the notebook.
It shook, just slightly, in his grip.
He hated that L saw it.
Hated that L cared.
Ritsuko stepped out of the stairwell like a chapter turning itself. She wasn’t hiding anymore, not wearing the girl’s face. Her silhouette was longer, too symmetrical. Her skin glowed faintly, like the edges of old film caught between dimensions. Her eyes—those impossible, pre-human eyes—glinted with knowing.
“You were supposed to choose power,” she said to Light.
He didn’t look at her. “I did.”
“No,” she said. “You're hesitating.”
“That wasn't hesitation,” L answered for him, stepping into Light’s space until their arms brushed. “It was doubt.”
Ritsuko’s voice flattened. “Same thing.”
“No,” Light said quietly. “It isn't.”
Ritsuko sighed like a collapsing temple.
“You're going to let him win, then?” she asked. “After all this?”
“I wasn’t letting him do anything,” Light murmured. “I was watching him. Like he’d been watching me. Always. Even before I became a god.”
L said, “You aren't a god.”
Light finally looked at him.
“Then what am I?”
L breathed in. Carefully. “You are Light Yagami.”
It wasn’t an accusation.
It was a benediction.
And it burned.
The Death Note in Light’s hand began to smoke. Just slightly. The edge curled. A name—it might have been half-written—faded into ash.
Ritsuko shrieked, a sound that didn’t belong in this plane. Her face twisted. Not angry. Disappointed. Like watching a star forget how to shine.
“You pathetic little thing,” she hissed. “You love being Kira. You love the blood, the judgment, the weight of it all. Don't you remember what it's like? They obeyed you. They feared you.”
“I remember,” Light said.
“And yet you made your choice,” she said.
“No,” Light replied. “I rewrote the question.”
She cocked her head. “You would rather burn than bow?”
“I’d rather drag the world with me.”
L was behind him. Silent. Watching. Always.
Ritsuko sighed. She stepped forward, and the ground didn’t quite agree with her weight. She was unraveling now—her skin splitting at the seams, her shape flickering. She was not woman, not demon. Not Shinigami. Something older. Something wrong.
“You were supposed to become something greater,” she said.
Light lifted his chin. “I became something true.”
“Then die with it.”
She lunged.
L moved first.
There was a gun. There was Light’s name on her lips. There was blood, smoke, the sound of paper tearing, the weight of consequence collapsing in on itself like a dying star.
There was Light’s scream, raw and ancient and full of everything he never said.
Ritsuko didn’t die. Not exactly. She vanished, consumed by her own impossible logic. A system folded in on itself. A god unmade by contradiction.
Light fell to his knees beside L.
L was bleeding.
Light was shaking.
“You weren’t supposed to—”
“I always did,” L whispered, smiling through the pain.
Light pressed both hands to the wound, to the lie, to the inevitable end. “No, no, no, you don't get to die. Not now. Not here. Not—”
“Too late.”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen—”
“You meant for everything to happen.”
Light couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think.
And L, ever cruel, ever gentle, raised one hand and touched Light’s cheek.
“It's all right,” he said. “You were always my final case.”
Then he closed his eyes.
The notebook sat untouched.
The investigation was over.
The world breathed easier.
And Light... Light became a myth himself. Not Kira. Not god. Not even justice.
Just the boy who stopped pretending.
Just the boy who loved a mind as monstrous as his own.
He never wrote another name.
But he never burned the book, either.
Because some stories deserve an ending.
And some—some stay open.
Like wounds.
Like gods.
Like love.
Notes:
And that's a wrap! Hope you enjoyed! This fic is, at its core, a study in performance—emotional, philosophical, and criminal. It is a love story written as a trial, a trial disguised as a romance, and a romance wrapped in metafiction. Light and L aren’t just lovers or rivals; they’re thematic constructs, each chasing the idea of truth through the other’s ruin. Their dynamic is dialectic and doomed, both of them addicted to the process of mutual destruction.
The inclusion of Ritsuko blurs the line between fiction and commentary. Is she a real person? A brilliant co-conspirator? Or is she Light’s psyche externalized—his darkest logic given voice and form, an avatar of every suppressed argument and theoretical draft he never dared publish? That ambiguity is intentional. She’s either a manifestation of Light’s self-aware descent into moral abstraction… or she’s someone just smart enough to weaponize his past writings against him. In that way, the question is less “Is she real?” and more “Does it matter?” Whether she’s a ghost, a girl, or a mirror, she’s the evidence of what Light could be if no one ever said no—if no one ever loved him enough to stop him. Or maybe she’s the proof that he was never innocent to begin with.
I struggled deeply with the ending. My first draft followed canon: L dies from a heart attack. It felt inevitable, but also hollow—like a foregone conclusion that added nothing new. Then I tried the opposite: Light gives up the notebook, and they walk into some form of twisted, redemptive happily ever after. That, too, felt false. It denied who they are. So I merged them. Death and devotion. Collapse and catharsis. An ending where no one wins, but everyone is understood. Or at least, written that way.
I wanted this story to explore what it means to be seen, truly and terrifyingly. The characters know each other in ways that are weaponized and intimate, and that duality is the heart of it all. Light isn’t just a protagonist—he’s a thesis. A variable. A question about power, knowledge, and identity. L is his foil, but also his mirror. Together, they’re not enemies or lovers or detectives or criminals or gods—they’re all of them. They’re a thought experiment with blood and teeth.
And yes, I left a lot up for interpretation—deliberately. The blurred lines between reality and fiction, justice and performance, confession and manipulation… they’re all part of the same argument. The story doesn’t hand you a singular truth because the characters themselves can’t find one. I wanted it messy. I wanted it contradictory. I wanted it to feel like standing in front of a mirror and not knowing who blinked first.
Thanks for reading, and for letting them ruin each other in front of you.
---
Stay tuned for next week's Lawlight oneshot! I post/update something Lawlight weekly; if you want to stay updated on this oneshot series, please consider subscribing or bookmarking one of my Death Note series.
You can find me on Bluesky ( @the_wild_poet25 ) and on my new Twitter account (the_tamed_poet) if you want to connect. I'm also on Discord too!
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