Infiltration Level: Sugar High

by sweetlawless31

Summary:

That one time when L, the world's greatest detective was finally being outsmarted. And that one time when Light finally realized that maybe... just maybe... he had loved Misa too.

Notes:

To make it easier to understand, here are important points you should be aware of:
1. This one is set ten years after the original timeline where Light got the Death Note.
2. Instead of in High School, Light got the Death Note when he was already a Police Officer.
3. L is in his mid to late 30s, Misa and Light are in their early 30s.
4. Misa had nothing to do with Death Note or being second KIRA.

Chapter 1

Some stories didn’t begin with a scream, or a siren, or a gunshot. Some began with the soft clink of a fork against porcelain. A sound far too delicate to be dangerous, yet far too out of place to be ignored.

Matsuda had to give himself three sharp slaps just to make sure his brain didn’t play tricks on him. 

They were under the table.

Sitting there, both cross-legged on the tiled floor, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Two neat plates of half-eaten strawberry shortcake balanced on their knees. 

The older boy, perhaps eight or nine, sat with his back straight and his expression carefully neutral as if as if he had personally risk-assessed the operation and decided it was just barely worth it. He lifted each bite of his cake to his mouth with slow precision, like someone who knew the value of quiet and very much intended to keep it. 

His hair was dark and fine, slightly unkempt but clean. His fringe fell just above his eyes, which were sharp in that watchful, unsettling way adults often mistook for shyness. His sleeves were neatly rolled, cuffs dusted with flour or sugar—or possibly both. 

The younger one was a different story.

He was perhaps four. Though he looked almost identical to the older one, in every other respect he was something else entirely. One sock on, the other lost somewhere in the escape. Hair a bit too long, shirt too big, legs bare save for a fresh white nappy. He had icing on his face, around his cheeks and his chin, and mischief in his eyes. His fork wasn’t so much a utensil as a weapon, used with full abandon to chase strawberries across the plate.

Both looked, in every possible way, like lost children. 

Except lost children didn't usually invite themselves into one of the most secure investigation rooms in Japan. Nor do they speak with the calm confidence of those who believe, quite reasonably, that they have every right to be exactly where they are.

Matsuda stared. Really stared, for a long time. 

His brain made a valiant attempt to catch up, flipping through possible explanations like a malfunctioning Rolodex.

Had he passed out during the briefing? Was this a dream? A hallucination from too much coffee and not enough sleep? Or had the universe, in its infinite cruelty, decided to prank him personally by placing two children beneath the kitchen's table, armed with cake and unholy confidence?

The older one looked like he was planning the next five moves on a chessboard Matsuda couldn’t even see. The younger one looked like he had already won and was celebrating with sugar. And both of them were looking back at him and behaving as if he was the strange one in the room.

This was L’s kitchen. L’s table. L’s cake. There were surveillance-grade biometric locks on the doors.

And yet here they were. 

Two strange little boys who looked like they might be White at first glance, unless you were this close that you could notice some of the subtle Asian details. Their skin was too sun-warmed, their features too mixed to place. Not pale, not dark, not anything he could confidently name. Like children drawn from memory by someone who remembered them in grayscale.

One dark-eyed mystery boy calmly dissecting sponge with mechanical focus.
One barefoot toddler happily destroying a strawberry with all the finesse of a tiny, frosted gremlin.

Matsuda suddenly had the difficulty to resist the urge to laugh. Or scream.  Were they part of some test? Had L hired child actors to study the task force’s reaction under pressure? 

No, that was ridiculous, right?

Still, he glanced up toward the ceiling instinctively, half-hoping, half-dreading to see one of L’s cameras swivel toward him with cold amusement.

Nothing.

Just the quiet clink of forks and the unbearable, surreal normality of two small strangers acting like this was their living room.

Matsuda edged forward slowly.

“Ah… hello? Excuse me, small boys,” he said, clearly trying to sound calm and international in his broken English. “Can I ask… what is your name…s? Why you here?”

There was a brief pause, but neither of the boys answered. Matsuda swallowed, maybe they didn’t hear him? Or maybe didn’t understand what he said? He cleared his throat and gave a small, hopeful wave.

“Me, Matsuda,” he said, jabbing a thumb toward his chest, then motioning to them. “You…?”

Still nothing.

The silence stretched just long enough to make his palms start to sweat. He could understand English well enough for small talk, but speaking it out loud like this, especially in a situation this weird, made his tongue feel like it was wearing shoes two sizes too big.

And the fact that neither of the kids had said a single word only made it worse. Matsuda tried his luck by switching to Japanese, his voice pitching up.

“Nihongo… wakarimasu ka?”

Still nothing.

He tried again, this time slower, gesturing wildly like he was miming a missing scene from a children’s show.  “Namae wa… nan desu ka? …Lost? …Ehh… okashi… cake?”

The younger one licked frosting off his fingers and grinned. He gave him a broad, toothy smile, sticky with sugar and utterly unbothered by the question as if being discovered halfway through stolen cake in a top-secret investigation facility was nothing more than a mild inconvenience.

Matsuda muttered under his breath in Japanese, half to himself, half to the universe for always reserving cruel jokes for him. 

The older boy, by contrast, fixed Matsuda with a long-considering look. It wasn’t quite a hostile look, but it wasn’t exactly friendly either. It was the sort of look one might give a puzzle missing just enough pieces to be annoying.

Matsuda stared back, trying not to blink first. There was something… familiar in the angles of their faces, in the eyes—one pair bright and laughing, the other dark and far too old for the boy’s age.

They looked like strangers. But somehow it felt they weren’t. 

“Are you both… lost?” he tried again in Japanese, voice low and cautious, though he already knew the answer.

Still no answer.

Just that silence, and the older one’s unnervingly calm gaze. Matsuda scratched the back of his neck again, heart thudding violently, and prayed— actually prayed —that someone else would walk in and rescue him.

Then, after a pause that dragged just a little too long, the older boy finally let out a sigh. Not dramatic. Just… weary. The kind of sigh you’d expect from someone who had already predicted this exact conversation five minutes ago.

“You smell like trouble,” he said flatly in perfect Japanese.

Matsuda visibly relaxed the moment he heard it. His shoulders dropped, the tension in his jaw loosened, and he nearly sighed in relief. Thank god, Japanese. At least they could understand each other. But then his brain finally caught up with the meaning of what the boy had just said. 

He blinked, “I—I what?” he stammered, pointing to himself, eyes wide.

The boy didn’t bother repeating himself. He simply folded his hands neatly in his lap, straightened his posture, and continued as if he were giving a presentation to a room full of adults who clearly weren’t going to keep up.

“We would be in trouble,” the older boy said, “if our mother were to find out we’re here. You are currently standing between us and the successful completion of a very narrow, cake-based window of opportunity. Should you intervene, the likelihood of us being caught increases by 83 percent—based on previous outcomes. Logically, you ought to do nothing.”

The younger boy, still chewing with his mouth open, gave the older boy a thumbs-up of encouragement.

Matsuda blinked again, stunned. Half in admiration at how fluent and articulate the boy was in Japanese— shockingly articulate for someone this small—and half bewildered by the sheer maturity and technicality of what he had just said.

Then, without quite meaning to, Matsuda’s eyes darted around the room as if expecting a furious woman to come crashing down through the ceiling tiles at any moment. No sign of her. No distant stilettos or footsteps. No slamming doors. Just the unnervingly calm voice of a child who spoke like a junior barrister with access to classified data sets.

“I—no! I mean, I can’t just do nothing ! ” Matsuda sputtered. “You’re children! You’re not supposed to be in here! This is a top-secret crime unit kitchen, not a picnic ground!”

The older boy tilted his head slightly, his fork poised mid-air.  “You could let us go,” he said calmly. “Statistically, you won’t, which is disappointing, but not entirely unexpected.” He took another bite of cake, unbothered. “However,” he continued, chewing delicately, “you lack sufficient jurisdiction to detain us without parental presence.”

What the heck?

Matsuda stared at the boy, utterly thrown. The words were ridiculous, and completely absurd. And yet… somehow also correct?

“lack sufficient jurisdiction to detain us without parental presence.”

That was… that was exactly the sort of thing he had once heard a precinct sergeant say during a press briefing about underage suspects. Word for word.

It was the kind of phrase you would expect from someone in uniform, not someone whose legs barely reached the edge of the chair. Who even talked like that at his age? And worse: it actually made sense.

Matsuda rubbed his temples, torn between dragging the boy out by the collar or asking him to explain probable cause again. This was madness.

Before he could do anything, the boy was already speaking again.

“So, in the absence of said authority,” he went on, “and given that no material harm has been done unless you intend to classify the unsupervised consumption of two slices of unlabelled dessert as a felony, which would be legally tenuous at best, I would argue that there is very little you can do. Ethically or otherwise.”

The boy swallowed calmly, “Now, if you’d kindly allow my brother and I to finish, we’ll be on our way.”

Matsuda’s jaw worked soundlessly for a moment, as though his brain had attempted to file an official complaint but was still waiting for someone to process the paperwork.

Then, all at once, his hands shot to his hips.

“No,” he said, with a wobbly sort of firmness that betrayed his own rising alarm. “Absolutely not. I cannot let you go. You’re underage, unaccounted for, and quite frankly not supposed to be anywhere near this building, let alone inside this kitchen! ”

The younger boy, still unfazed, simply licked the icing from his fingers and blinked up at him with the wide-eyed serenity of someone who had never once faced consequences in his short but eventful life. 

Matsuda hesitated, glancing over his shoulder as though half-expecting to be struck by lightning. Then he leaned in slightly, voice dropping to a whisper.

“You don’t understand. Our leader—he’s not like other people. He doesn’t shout when he’s angry. He just stares at you for thirty seconds without blinking, and suddenly you’re apologising for things you haven’t even done yet.”

The older one just stared back, unreadable, as if calculating the weight of that sentence in his own private algorithm.

“We live here,” he said then finally, calm, in a matter-of-fact way. 

Matsuda blinked at him. His breath hitched. Surely …surely… he was joking, right? 

Except he didn’t look like he was. 

Matsuda’s stomach knotted.  This building, this entire compound , had been requisitioned six months ago for one purpose only: the KIRA investigation. And from the very beginning, L had insisted on absolute control. Not just over the case, but the layout, the surveillance, the personnel too. Every last hallway, door, corridor, outlet socket secured and sterilised to within an inch of its life.

L had gone on, at length, about the need for privacy, secrecy, and silence. He didn’t even allow windows in the core briefing rooms. You needed a biometric scan just to access the lift that took you to the floor where the files were kept.

And now there were children eating cake under the kitchen table like it was Saturday tea.

Matsuda felt the back of his neck start to sweat. He could already hear L’s voice in his head. His usual calm, monotone, vaguely amused “I take it you were responsible for the breach?”

And what was he supposed to say to that?

“No, actually, Ryuzaki, I just found them here… sitting beneath your kitchen table, next to the encrypted food cupboards, wearing nappies and debating legal frameworks while eating your damn cake? ”

The worst part was, L might believe him. He might believe him and still somehow make him feel like an idiot.

Matsuda swallowed. 

He wasn’t even sure why he found L so unnerving. Technically they looked like they were close in age, not that he knew it exactly. They could have even been classmates, if not for the towering chasm of IQ points and existential dread between them.

But L had that look . The way he stared and the way he knew things before anyone said them. The way he sat like a cursed spider and somehow still made you feel like you were the unnatural one in the room.

No, Matsuda didn’t fear many things. But L? L made him nervous in the quiet, bone-deep way priests must have felt about confessional booths.

And L was going to kill him.

Metaphorically, of course. Probably . 

Matsuda drew a deep breath, eyes turned back to the boys under the kitchen table, who were now engaged in what appeared to be a very civilised post-cake licking ritual.

“Right. You two,” he said, trying for a fatherly tone but landing somewhere closer to a substitute teacher on his first day. “You shouldn’t lie, okay? Lying is not good. Especially not in places like this.”

The younger one stared at him solemnly for all of two seconds. Then promptly stuck his finger back into the leftover cream and popped it into his mouth with clear satisfaction.

The older boy merely sighed. It barely made a sound, but something about it scraped along the edges of Matsuda’s nerves like a blunt knife: long, tired, and vaguely disdainful.

He sighed again. Then once more, with greater disappointment. The kind that felt… practised .

Matsuda watched him carefully now.

That strange quiet had crept in again.  He didn’t like the feelings and the slight nervousness he had been having since he spotted these kids just under five minutes ago. There was something odd in the way they looked, and the strange stillness. The unsettling precision when the older one spoke, that flat, clinical tone that made you feel vaguely dissected even in silence.

He had the faintest flicker of a mad idea. too wild to entertain, too persistent to ignore.

And yet… he had scolded himself for even thinking about it. No.
It was ridiculous.

He flicked his gaze to the younger boy. This one looked…well, unbearably sweet, chaotic, probably sticky in multiple ways. Innocent enough.

But the other one —

The older boy, now calmly adjusting the cuffs of his sleeves like a tiny professor—he was different. The more he spoke, the more he watched, the more he… resembled someone.

Someone Matsuda worked with. Every. Single. Day.

No. Surely not…

“We not lying, Mister No-Fun Police, ” the small boy said suddenly, also in Japanese, breaking the silence with the conviction of someone preparing to report him to a higher authority. His sticky hands were folded in front of him. His face, despite being smeared with strawberry icing, had turned solemn. “Mummy say lying is bad.”

The words, so simple and confidently delivered, made something drop and roll in Matsuda’s chest. He crouched slightly, lowering himself to their level. Half to see them better, half because his knees were starting to give out from the dread pooling in his bones.

Matsuda gave a nervous chuckle. “Right. Of course. You’re not lying. You just happen to be two completely unregistered minors who snuck into the KIRA investigation compound through walls, probably, and claim to live here.”

“We do.” the older one replied. 

Another beat.

“Oh, for— where ? Where exactly do you live, then?” Matsuda snorted. “Because there are fifteen floors here. And I know everyone on them.”

“The top,” the boy said simply.

Matsuda blinked. “There is no—”

He stopped. The words caught in his throat and did a slow, creeping crawl backwards into his brain.

The younger boy, still utterly unbothered, began humming to himself as he licked the edge of his plate with delicate concentration like a cat finishing the last drops of cream from a stolen saucer.

“The… the top?” Matsuda echoed, voice a little too high. “You mean the penthouse? ”

The older boy gave a single, measured nod.

For a moment, Matsuda just stared at him. His brain went completely blank. Then, as if rebooting, he let out a short, startled laugh. 

“Kid…” he managed, waving one hand vaguely. “I don’t mean to laugh at you, really, but—” another snort escaped him. “Nobody goes up there,” he said, turned half-grinning now. “It’s off-limits because it’s our team leader’s private quarters.”

He was still smiling when the colour drained from his face. It happened slowly. A realisation that crawled over his skin like a cold sweat.

His grin stiffened. 

He Froze.

Oh no. Oh… no .

Matsuda went absolutely still.

L’s private quarters.

No one went up there.

Except Watari.

Except L.

His eyes flicked back to the older boy, then to the smaller one, then back to the older boy.  

The dark-wild hair. The dark eyes. The clinical speech. The unnecessary use of “statistically.” The sighs.

His mouth opened, closed. 

The boy tilted his head slightly, watching him with a kind of curious detachment, like he was trying to decide if Matsuda was malfunctioning or merely stupid.

“Are you alright, Mister?” the boy asked, though his tone was as polite as a doctor delivering bad news, his eyes remained looking at Matsuda in that weird way. 

“No,” Matsuda said quickly—far too quickly. “No, I will not be alright until I confirm this myself.”

He jabbed a finger in the general direction of the corridor, then looked between the two of them with the rising air of a man trying very hard to pretend he was still in charge.

“You both. Follow me.”

The younger one blinked. “Are we in trouble?”

“Yes! No. I mean—maybe! That depends entirely on whether I’m hallucinating or not!”

The older one stood without fuss, dusting invisible crumbs from his lap. “Statistically speaking, your behaviour suggests you’re experiencing a mild stress response, not a hallucination.”

“ That’s not comforting, ” Matsuda muttered.

The small one took the older boy’s hand as they started walking. “Can I bwing my fowk?”

“No, you—” Matsuda sighed. “Fine. Whatever. Just don’t stab anyone.”

 

 

******

 

 

The room thrummed with a quiet electricity. The kind that lives in fluorescent lights and unspoken accusations. The air wasn’t tense so much as precise , trimmed to the millimetre with clean lines and cold logic.

L sat perched on his chair like a bird of ill omen, his back to his monitors, knees drawn up, bare toes curling against the edge. His posture was slack in theory, but every joint knew its function. His fingers hovered at his lips, one thumb brushing rhythmically against the skin just beneath his nose in that familiar, maddening pattern. Tap. Tap. Tap. Pause. As if measuring the distance between suspicion and certainty.

Across from him, Light stood by the projection wall with the kind of confidence that didn’t need to be announced. He didn’t slouch nor twitch. Every movement, from the way he clicked off the laser pointer to how he shifted his weight onto one leg seemed intentional and rehearsed. His voice had the measured warmth of a broadcast anchor, charismatic but controlled.

“…which means the correlation between media-reported criminals and subsequent disappearances continues to decline. KIRA is adapting and filtering new sources. That would suggest a direct access point.” He turned just enough to glance over his shoulder. “Perhaps even within the investigation team itself.”

L didn’t blink. His gaze remained fixed on the graphs fluttering across the monitor like hospital readouts. “That’s a reasonable conclusion, Light-kun,” he said, voice barely more than breath. “If we assume KIRA’s choices are reactionary.”

Light allowed a small, agreeable nod. “Which, at this point, they clearly are.”

“Or,” L said, tilting his chin just a fraction, “we assume KIRA is someone close enough to manipulate both cause and effect.”

Light turned, fully facing the sleep-deprived detective with arms loosely crossed. His lips curled upward with the barest trace of amusement.  “Are we still doing this?”

“I haven’t found a reason to stop.”

The room fell back into stillness, save for the hum of a cooling fan and the quiet static of too much data crawling across too many screens.

Light let the smile grow just a touch wider. “Ryuzaki,” he said, the tone effortlessly diplomatic, “we’ve spent months side by side. I’ve worked tirelessly. Followed every lead. If I were KIRA, don’t you think I’d have slipped by now?”

L rocked forward, letting his feet drop soundlessly to the floor. He stood  with a quiet fluidity that made it feel like the room had tilted slightly. His eyes locked on Light’s, expression unreadable.

“No,” he said. “Because KIRA enjoys the game.”

Light’s mouth twitched at the corner. His eyes, sharp as glass, flicked toward the nearest screen, then back. “So I’m clever and dangerous. You’re flattering me.”

“I’m accusing you,” L said. “And I’m not sure which part disturbs you more.”

For the first time, Light’s posture changed. He shifted his stance, just enough to signal he’d registered the hit.

“You really think I’d incriminate myself with this presentation?”

“I think you’d weaponise it,” L replied, unblinking. “You’ve always preferred moves that feel like cooperation.”

There was a pause. Light moved to the table, pressing his fingertips to its surface. His voice lowered just slightly.

“Is it that hard for you to believe I want to stop KIRA?”

L moved closer, enough to stand just at the edge of his shadow. “It’s not hard to believe,” he said. “It’s hard to trust.”

Light chuckled, almost soundlessly. “Then trust the evidence.”

“I trust patterns,” L murmured. “And the pattern here is that wherever KIRA adapts, you are already there.”

Light straightened, chin lifting half a degree. His voice lost none of its charm. “You’re chasing phantoms.”

L’s expression remained unchanged. “Only because one of them keeps talking back.”

This kind of debate had been going on for months.

Light and L were like two blades endlessly testing for the first crack in the other’s steel. Never shouting, never stumbling. Just quiet, merciless dissection of each other’s logic. Every meeting felt less like a strategy briefing and more like a slow-burn courtroom drama no one had consented to attend.

Aizawa had taken to calling them "the philosophers" when they weren’t in earshot. Matsuda, in private, had suggested putting them in a locked room with one chair and no cake to see who came out alive.

But Misora watched with a different kind of calculation. She didn’t care who sounded smarter. She cared who looked less surprised when KIRA struck again.

And so far, it wasn’t Yagami.

Light’s voice broke the momentary stillness like a scalpel slicing through gauze.

“So let’s take your assumption at face value,” he said evenly, as if moderating a university panel. “If I am KIRA—or close to him, as you so persistently suggest, then you’re saying I’ve created a persona, embedded myself in the investigation, cooperated, contributed, presented you with evidence, and consistently avoided detection?”

He didn’t wait for a response. Instead, he gestured to the monitors with one hand, his stance widening just slightly. “That doesn’t sound like someone clinging to delusion. That sounds like someone in control.”

L watched him with that same stillness. “You mistake control for justification,” he replied. “KIRA’s ability to remain hidden doesn’t prove his righteousness. It only proves his patience.”

Light gave a soft, incredulous breath. “Is that what you think this is about? Righteousness?”

“I think it’s about fear.” L took a slow step forward. “Fear of insignificance. Of chaos. Of a world where nothing has meaning unless someone—you—assigns it.”

For a moment, Light said nothing.  And in that moment, the loathing settled.

This wasn’t the loud, adolescent type of hatred, the kind that slams fists or shouts obscenities. This was something quieter and refined. Matured like wine in a cellar or a weapon forged over years. Light’s hatred had shape and history, and was the kind of hatred that knew its target intimately.

Because it had to.

To kill something cleanly, you must first understand it.

And L was an anomaly. A sleepless, twitching, sugar-saturated anomaly.

He crouched like a marionette out of place. Dressed like someone who had lost a bet with a laundromat, pale as mist, posture wrong, presence stranger still. And yet he stood there—unapologetic. Close. Watching. Interrogating divinity without blinking.

That was the unbearable part.

L had no right to stand this close. No right to step into Light’s radius, trailing data and suspicion, as though the throne were a bench anyone could sit on. No right to stare across tables with those obsidian eyes that didn’t reflect awe or fear, only scrutiny.

He was still just a man. Admittedly brilliant, yes. Perhaps the most brilliant Light had ever met, but still governed by human frailty. Still confined by sleep, breath, blood. Still chained to procedure, caution, and hesitation.

Light had seen what humanity did with such limits. He had watched systems collapse under indecision. Watched the guilty escape through paperwork and the innocent drown beneath bureaucracy. He had seen judges laugh at grief; seen corrupt men shake hands behind podiums while entire cities burned behind headlines.

And then the notebook arrived as a mandate. The universe didn’t ask him. It crowned him.

He didn’t kill for vengeance or pleasure. He killed with precision. With a name. With a time. With the clarity of a scalpel. He executed from a distance—clean, undetected. A ghost with a gavel.

And it worked.

Crime withered. Nations recoiled. People began to behave again. He had restored order. And he had done it through fear. That was the truth no one liked to say aloud: fear works.

Yet L still stood there, dishevelled and defiant, speaking about fairness, due process, second chances as though the world had ever deserved them. He clung to outdated ideals, to these systems that never functioned as if ink on paper had ever stopped a gun.

Light clenched his jaw.

"You can’t punish crime before it happens," L had said once.

Absurd.

That was what society was built on: prediction, patrols, locks, cameras. Preemptive control dressed up as protection. And L knew this, but he still clung to crumbling scaffolding, mistaking delay for justice. It would have been tragic, if it weren’t so infuriating. Because L wasn’t just wrong.

He was in the way .

For all his intellect, he failed to grasp what Light had become. He didn’t see justice refined. He didn’t see a god who had transcended courts and cages. He saw a criminal with delusions.

And still, he came close.

Too close.

Every time Light felt victory settle, L would circle back. Nose to the scent, gaze locked to the pattern. No proof, no evidence, only instinct sharpened into weaponry.

And that— that —was what made Light burn. That a mortal could draw so near to omniscience. That L’s eyes lingered just long enough to make even a god nervous.

Because L made him perform. Forced him to rehearse, to adapt, to smile, to pretend, and to walk the line between brilliance and suspicion with painful precision.

He hated that.

He hated playing along. He hated masks. Hated strategies. Hated adjusting.

All of it felt beneath him.

But he had to do it.

Because no ruler reigns unchallenged. And no god is safe until every prophet of doubt is erased, and L was the prophet. He wasn't a believer, wasn't even a denier, and he didn’t kneel.

He stared. He refused reverence. Refused even rejection and simply watched. 

A rival.

And Light could not abide rivals. Because rivals imply equality. And Light didn’t share thrones.

L should have seen it. Should have recognised what KIRA truly was. Should have known that this was the next stage in human governance. A world ruled not by forgiveness, but consequence. Not by process, but purity. Instead, L kept dragging questions into a room where answers had already been written.

“Do you still recognise humanity beneath the numbers?”

What a pathetic question. As if humanity had ever been more than numbers.

Light let the loathing curl in his chest. Let it stretch out, uncoiling like steam from hot steel. Then, deliberately, he folded it away. Breath by breath, he locked the fury back in its gilded cage. He straightened his back and lifted his chin.

And when he looked up again, he was Light Yagami once more. The composed public figure, the trusted face of justice, the Task Force's rising authority. There was no heat in his voice, no trace of unease. Just poise, control… and something unreadable behind his eyes.

He folded his arms with quiet grace. Then, softly, with the elegance of a scalpel pressed to silk: “Well, Ryuzaki. I suppose we’ll ju—.”

The door opened abruptly, and loud. 

“Ryuzaki!” Matsuda’s voice crashed into the room like a dropped plate.

There was a beat of silence before a collective, quiet exasperation washed the room. The particular silence reserved for moments when no one was surprised, and yet everyone felt slightly betrayed.

Light’s smile froze in place like a corrupted file as he turned to see Matsuda. L turned his head by exactly six degrees. His eyes narrowed minutely , as though assessing whether Matsuda’s entrance qualified as a personal attack. Naomi Misora didn’t move from her seat in the back corner, but her pen tapped once, harder than necessary, against her notebook.

“Yes, Matsuda-san,” L said, tone perfectly flat. “You’ve entered the room and we’re all aware. What would you like to contribute?”

Matsuda rubbed the back of his neck, gaze skittering nervously around the room. From L, to Light and to the others before it went back to L.  “Ah, yeah, sorry, I just—I’m not sure where to start but—uh…” He trailed off. His fingers hovered uncertainly near the doorframe.

The room stared back at him.

Light’s brows ticked up by a hair. Aizawa exhaled through his nose, slow and pointed. Misora didn’t even bother to turn her head; she just glanced sideways over her glasses with a deadpan expression that said whatever this is, it better be extraordinary .

Matsuda, to his credit, tried to hold L’s gaze. He managed it for three seconds before his shoulders hiked and his eyes bounced away, like a child caught with his hand in something fragile and state-funded.

L blinked slowly.

Touta Matsuda, he thought to himself, was a man whose entire presence gave the impression of someone who had just realised he had forgotten something important but couldn’t remember what. Nervous energy wrapped in a suit that didn’t quite fit. 

Endearingly well-meaning but terminally out of his depth.

He was the type who turned panic into posture, standing tall when he should have sat, saluting when he ought to whisper, apologising even when no one had blamed him yet. And yet, somehow, he always stumbled forward with just enough clumsy honesty that no one could bring themselves to push him back.

L had once described Matsuda to Watari, quite sincerely, as a 'harmless variable with occasional usefulness and the social instincts of a soaked Labrador.'

Now, watching him dither in the doorway with that familiar awkward grimace, L felt no irritation. Only curiosity. Because today, Matsuda’s nervousness didn’t feel ambient.

“Ryuzaki,” Matsuda said again, straighter now, as though he had finally wrangled his posture back under control. “I, uh—I need to confirm something with you. Just—before anyone jumps to conclusions.”

L said nothing. 

“I mean—I’m not saying anything is wrong,” Matsuda added hastily, “but it might be. Possibly. Kind of. But I didn’t do it. Or I mean—I didn’t know. I didn’t bring anything in. Not on purpose. Please don’t—uh—look at me like that.”

L was, in fact, looking at him like that.

That slow, head-tilted stare. The one that didn’t need volume to be intimidating. It was the kind of look that made grown men feel like they had said something incriminating in their sleep.

Matsuda swallowed. “I just—I mean—” he ran a hand through his hair. “Could you not be, like, suspicious or... weirdly calm and terrifying about it? I genuinely have no idea what’s going on yet, I swear.”

Another pause, and still no blinking.

Matsuda’s voice dropped an octave into pleading. “Just… promise me you won’t freak out.”

“I don’t ‘freak out,’” L said flatly, without blinking.

“Right. Sure. Of course you don’t,” Matsuda muttered under his breath.  He straightened a little, forcing a nervous smile as his gaze darted around the room. “That goes for everyone else too, by the way. I need all of you to—uh—not freak out. Please. Just… hold it together for like thirty seconds.”

From his place at the monitors, Aizawa raised an eyebrow. “What is it that’s got you pacing like a nervous intern, Matsuda?”

“I’m not pacing,” Matsuda said, then immediately realised he was, in fact, shuffling in place like a man waiting for bad test results. He stilled. “Okay, fine. Maybe a little. But seriously, I need you all to keep calm and open-minded, because what I’m about to show you is… um. Strange.”

Light looked over with his usual perfect composure, arms crossed. “Define ‘strange.’”

Matsuda’s mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again, as if trying out several drafts of an explanation and abandoning them mid-launch. Eventually, he just sighed. And then, with the bravado of a man jumping into cold water before he could talk himself out of it, Matsuda turned back toward the slightly ajar door. 

“…You both can come in now,” Matsuda said, barely above a whisper.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then came the soft patter of bare feet and the door creaked open another inch.

And through the gap stepped a small boy with dark-hair, solemn, with eyes too old for his face and a deliberate, careful way of moving that made the air shift with him. He walked in with all the composure of someone who had weighed this moment in advance. Measured its risk and accepted the consequences.

Behind him, an even smaller boy hesitated at the threshold.

Then, almost reluctantly, he crept in too. He clung to the back of the older one’s shirt, half-hiding behind him as if the very floor might open up and swallow them. His other hand clutched the remains of a half-melted strawberry. His eyes flicked nervously from adult to adult but somehow managed to overlook L, mouth sticky with icing and apprehension.

That was when the silence shattered.

A collective breath was taken, and halted.

Aizawa’s brows flew up. Mogi took half a step forward, instinct taut. Ukita let out a startled, “What the—?” before catching himself.  

And Light—

He didn’t move. But his stillness was a little bit too perfect and a little too studied and looked more like a containment than a surprise. 

Then, without a sound from his chair, like he had detached from the room’s fabric itself, L rose. In his typical way, he didn’t speak. Just stood there, body angled ever so slightly forward, as though instinct had pulled him upright before thought could catch up.

His eyes locked onto the older boy.

And the older boy, who seemed to take this staring as a contest, mirrored L. He just returned the stare, steady and unblinking, with a strange, grave calm that belonged to someone far older than his years. The room might as well have vanished around them; neither seemed to notice anything else.

They simply regarded each other, quietly, like two chess players at the start of a very long game. Then L’s gaze shifted, slow as water over stone, to the younger one behind him. 

Still half-hidden behind the older one’s shirt, the small boy was too distracted to notice him. He was craning his neck instead toward the far wall, where a stack of surveillance monitors blinked like Christmas lights. He squinted at them with the glee of someone spotting something exciting, one foot lifting off the floor in silent excitement.

His fingers still clung to his brother’s shirt. Still sticky, and still pink with strawberry jam. Utterly unaware that the world had narrowed to a breath between him and the man who now stood not three paces away.

And L was fixated there, eyes flicking between them again.

“What the hell —!” Naomi Misora suddenly jolted upright in her chair so hard her notebook slipped from her lap. Her pen froze mid-air as her eyes darted between the two children like she was scanning a hallucination. “Whose kids are those?!”

And just like that, the room exploded.

Chairs screeched back against linoleum. Papers fluttered to the floor like frightened birds. Ukita half-rose from his seat with the kind of movement that suggested he might be going for a weapon until he actually saw them: one barefoot, frosting-smeared gremlin, and one solemn-eyed miniature strategist. He froze, caught in a battle between instinct and reason.

“Matsuda!” Aizawa’s eyes snapped wide open as he turned sharply to him. “What kind of sick joke is this?!”

“Kids?!” Mogi echoed, incredulous, head whipping from the boys to the door and back again.

“Wait, wait, wait —I didn’t bring them!” Matsuda blurted, waving both arms defensively like a man caught in a crime he didn’t understand. “I swear to God, they were already inside when I got there!”

Naomi pointed a sharp finger toward the hallway. “Inside where?”

“The kitchen!”

“The kitchen ?!” Ukita’s voice pitched up like he was choking on the word.

“They were eating Ryuzaki’s cake!” Matsuda added helplessly. “I don’t know how they got past the locks!”

“That’s ridiculous. No one is supposed to enter this building, let alone this room!” Aizawa snapped. “There are biometric locks—!”

“They were already inside,” Matsuda said again, louder this time, with the ragged insistence of a man desperate to sound sane in a world that suddenly wasn’t. “In the kitchen . Eating Ryuzaki’s cake. I walked in, and they were already there !”

“What?!” Ukita looked like he had aged five years in three seconds.

“I didn’t bring them!” Matsuda snapped, and it was perhaps the first time he had sounded remotely stern in recent memory. He ran a hand through his hair and took a breath. “I don’t know who they are. I don’t know how they got past security. Or the locks. Or anything . That’s why I came here!” He gestured wildly behind him, to the still-slightly-ajar door. “I thought Ryuzaki should see them first. Before someone starts yelling ‘spy’ or ‘ghost’ or God knows what.”

A long silence followed. One of those uncomfortable loaded ones where everyone in the room looked at each other and arrived, simultaneously at the same truth that this wasn’t a prank. And this wasn’t normal.

Then, almost as one, they all turned toward L.

He hadn’t moved, or even so much as twitched. His posture remained loose, slack, almost indifferent yet his gaze was fixed, unbroken, anchored to the two small figures standing close to the door. As if the entire room, with its rising voices and disbelief, had peeled away like wallpaper. 

Gone. 

Irrelevant.

“Ryuzaki,” Naomi called out, her voice tighter now, laced with something between concern and urgency. “Do you know whose kids those are?”

L didn’t answer.

He just stared again. 

But Light, who had been watching it all with the placid expression of someone who really ought to look more surprised, now tilted his head slightly. Not toward the boys, but toward L .

Because something wasn’t adding up.

The room had erupted into chaos. Mogi’s voice had risen. Ukita had half-drawn his badge. Naomi yelled, and seemed to already mentally mapping out security breaches. And yet L , of all people, hadn’t asked a single question.

Not how they got in.

Not who they were.

Not even why they had done it.

Just... silence. And a stare so focused it might’ve been dissecting atoms.

And the boy, the older one, wasn't even frightened.

Even with half a dozen officers staring at him like he was a time bomb in a cardigan, he stood calmly, shoulders squared, back straight, mouth tight but controlled. As if he were the one evaluating them .

Light’s eyes narrowed.

He flicked his gaze between the boy and L. Then back again.

The hair. The jaw. The way his eyes didn’t flicker away under pressure. There was something… disturbingly mirrored in it. Too mirrored. 

That presence. That—

But then he looked at the smaller one. Still half-hidden, jam-sticky fingers clutching at his brother’s shirt like a life raft. Chubby, and wide-eyed, head down like he was bracing for punishment. His free hand was curled inwards, thumb tucked anxiously under his other fingers. A nervous tic.

One Light had seen before.

Light observed the boys to L, back to the boys, and to L again. They looked too much like him. The older one even held himself like him. 

If the Task Force didn’t know better, the boys could have easily been mistaken as L’s ki—

Wait, what? 

Light’s breath caught in his throat.  eyes widened slightly and his heart thumped a bit faster. The thought hit Light like a piano dropping through the ceiling.

No. No, it couldn’t—

He hadn’t even had time to form his first sentence, when he saw L let out a small sigh like something inevitable had finally arrived.

“Leo. Oliver,” L said softly, addressing the two boys in English. 

Every head snapped toward him.

The older boy—Leo—stiffened almost imperceptibly, then let out the tiniest breath, the kind a person might release when a countdown finally reaches zero. His chin rose, calm and composed as ever, but there was a faint pink bloomed across his cheeks. Embarrassment, restrained and carefully managed like he hadn’t quite expected this many witnesses.

"Hi, Dad,” he said quietly as if he had rehearsed it in his head a hundred times and still wasn’t sure if he had said it right.

But the word ‘ Dad’ had barely left his lips when another reaction came. The smaller boy—Oliver—jerked his head up so fast he nearly lost his balance. His wide eyes locked straight onto L’s face, the surprise blooming into joy in less than a second. His fingers slipped from Leo’s shirt as he gasped—

“Daddy!!”

And then he was off.

Sticky fingers, jelly-stained oversized t-shirt, tiny socked foot thumping against the tile as he sprinted through the gap in the stunned crowd.

“Daddy! Daddy!!” he squealed with a high-pitched and ecstatic sound, arms thrown wide like wings as he barrelled toward L.

A soft whumpf as sugar-sticky limbs wrapped around L’s knees with surprising force. L swayed, only just managing to shift his weight before nearly toppling onto his chair. One bare foot dragged slightly backward. 

For one precarious moment, the world tilted.

“Ollie,” Leo murmured, still by the door, his voice a resigned sigh of older-brother exasperation. “Mum told you not to tackle people.”

“Oopsies!” Oliver giggled, peeking over his shoulder at Leo with zero remorse. “Sowwy! ” He flashed a gap-toothed, unapologetic grin before spinning back toward L, eyes wide and glowing. “Daddy… up… Up, Daddy!” He reached up with jammy hands, fingers opening and closing in the universal toddler command for lift me now, or I will shriek.

L stared down at him, at this small, sticky, jubilant creature clinging to his trousers like a barnacle. His expression didn’t even change, but something in his posture softened as he blinked once again.  

Then, with the resigned air of a man who had just realised his life would never make sense again, L exhaled a quiet sigh and crouched.

Oliver’s arms shot up triumphantly.

L picked him up with careful hands like he was handling a live grenade covered in icing. The child launched into him like a missile, arms flung around his neck, face immediately pressed into L’s shoulder.

“Daddy!” he squealed happily, legs kicking against L’s side with pure, kinetic joy. “We miss you, Daddy!”

L was still for a moment, still kind of processing what was happening. One arm hooked around Oliver’s back, the other bracing beneath his knees. His head tilted slightly, dark eyes unreadable.

"You’ve grown,” he murmured softly, only the child could hear.

Oliver giggled and nuzzled into his shoulder more, muffling something about cake and buttons and dinosaurs. 

Behind them, the room had turned to stone.

Every member of the Task Force stood frozen, as if a record had skipped and no one knew whether to laugh, panic, or call the HR. 

Ukita blinked, mouth slightly open. “Daddy…?” It came out cracked. Like the syllables were physically painful to form “Ryuzaki,” he tried again, his voice climbing an octave in disbelief. “You— you have kids ?”

Even Mogi’s jaw visibly slackened, which for Mogi was the emotional equivalent of a scream. Naomi Misora didn’t say a word. But she did slowly lower her pen, tapping it against the table once. Then again. The sound was the only thing anchoring the room to reality.

Light was still standing in his previous place with his arms still folded, watching the whole interaction unfold with growing incredulity. His eyes sharpened, brow creasing just enough to suggest he was no longer simply observing, but also dissecting.

There was something more going on here. 

“Ryuzaki,” he said at last, his voice low and too calm. “What is this?”

L, who had turned slightly to adjust Oliver’s position against his shoulder, flicked his gaze toward Light lazily.

“It looks,” he said evenly, “exactly like what it is, Light-kun.”

Then, without further explanation, he approached Leo, who was still lingering by the doorway. The small boy looked like he wasn’t sure whether he was about to be grounded or knighted.

L walked a few steps more before he paused in front of Leo, tilted his head, then lifted his pale hand. Leo flinched slightly, eyebrows twitched as if he was bracing for a physical impact before he felt a hand hovered on his head, and his hair was gently being ruffled. 

Leo’s shoulder stiffened, before it went relaxed as he looked up to see his father’s face and saw him giving a tight-lipped smile which he wasn’t quite sure what it meant. L’s expression didn’t shift as he turned back to the stunned room.

“I’ve been preoccupied with the Kira investigation,” he said flatly, looking at Leo then at Oliver. “Apparently, my sons decided it was time they paid me a visit.”

Not a blink. 

Not a waver. 

Just the familiar flatness of his voice. But to the task force, it landed like a controlled detonation.

The silence cracked.

“I knew it!” Matsuda burst out, pointing a triumphant finger like he had cracked an international code. “I knew they were yours! They talk just like you—especially this one,” he added, gesturing wildly at Leo. “He even threatened me with percentages!”

Leo turned his body slightly t Matsuda, lifting one of his eyebrows and clearly unimpressed. “I didn’t threaten you. I only presented outcomes .”

But it was Oliver who stole the moment.

Still clinging to L’s neck like a jam-smudged scarf, he bounced excitedly in his father’s arms, beaming like he had just been handed the universe on a string. His legs kicked the air with uncontainable glee.

“Daddy!!” he cried happily, words tumbling out in a single breathless river. “Mister No-Fun Police say no cake but Leo say it’s log-i-cull! ” He pronounced each syllable like a spell, eyes wide with pride.

L blinked once, a hint of amused smirk curved in the corner of his lips. “I see.”

Misora looked at Matsuda sharply. “Did he just call you—?”

“Yes,” Matsuda muttered, shoulders deflating.

Ukita gave a strangled sound somewhere between a laugh and a protest. “I don’t—I’m sorry, can we go back? Sons ?”

Mogi slowly sat back down. “This feels like a hallucination.”

Light, still standing there like a statue, hadn’t moved an inch. But his eyes narrowed further, now watching L like a man who had just discovered the final puzzle piece didn’t quite fit and was wondering who swapped it.

L exhaled. It was a quiet thing, but not tiring. As though he were releasing exactly enough air to soften the absurdity thickening the room without indulging it. Then, with Oliver still tangled around him like ivy, he turned toward Leo. 

Without a word, L reached out and placed a hand gently on Leo’s shoulder.

The boy looked up to his father again before he felt his father give the faintest nudge, enough to guide him toward the threadbare sofa beneath the observation monitors. Leo obeyed, knees locked tight as he walked. L followed, and once they reached the couch, he lowered the smaller child down with careful, methodical motion.

“Sit, Leo,” L said, tapping the cushion.

Leo sat.

Oliver plopped down beside his brother with all the grace of a beanbag tossed from a height, one socked foot swinging wildly off the side. He grinned up at L, then scooted even closer to his brother until their legs touched. Still buzzing. Still holding onto a giggle. Still pink-cheeked and smudged with icing.

L gave his boys one final look before he straightened slowly and turned back to face the room. He folded his hands behind his back.

“Yes,” he said calmly. “They’re my sons.”

The news delivery was very L. No dramatic pause. No fanfare. Just the truth dropped like a stone into a still pond, and the ripple was instant.

Naomi stared at him with the flat, shocked intensity of a detective watching a suspect willingly confess to a triple homicide. “You really have children ?”

Ukita actually rubbed his eyes. “Real, biological children? Like—yours?”

“Yes,” L repeated, final. 

“Since when ?” Ukita managed, still looking between L and the two boys like they might vanish if he blinked too hard.

“Since my wife gave birth to Leo,” L replied, as though it were the most pedestrian thing he could say right now. “Eight years ago.”

There was a moment of pure, suspended silence. Then Matsuda, who had been doing increasingly theatrical double takes, finally erupted. 

“YOU HAVE A WIFE?? ” 

His voice hit an octave that made Oliver giggle again. Leo winced and muttered, “Here we go…”

“Yes, Matsuda,” L blinked slowly. “That is generally the required condition for someone to be my son.”

“But—but— when ?” Matsuda flailed, looking personally betrayed by the very idea. “Where? Who ? Are you serious? You, married ?!”

“Seriously?” Naomi deadpanned, turning her head just enough to squint at him. “That’s the part you’re stuck on?”

Matsuda pointed vaguely toward L, still stunned. “I just— look at him! He doesn’t even sleep, how did he find time to get married ?”

From his seat, Leo offered dryly, “I assume the usual method.”

Matsuda blanched.

Even Mogi blinked slowly, like someone rebooting after a power outage. His brows furrowed in the expression of a man who had just discovered his microwave had a secret family.

Aizawa opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried again. Eventually, he turned to Light, looking faintly stricken. The silent plea on his face said: Please tell me you understand what’s happening, because I’m not convinced I do.

Light didn’t look back. His gaze was locked squarely on L. And in his mind, the numbers were already racing.

Because this… this …wasn’t just a surprise. It was a problem. A gap. A deviation from everything Light thought he knew about the man across from him. 

L had never once spoken of family, or lovers, or even foreshadowed the idea that he had one. He wasn’t supposed to have history. L had been a myth before he was man, an untouchable intellect in a shapeless void. But now, sitting plainly on a Task Force couch, were two very physical, very real contradictions to that myth.

Sons.

Children.

He watched the way Leo sat upright, eyes scanning everything, his hands folded too neatly in his lap. And Oliver—fidgety and chatty and messy—who was now very busily trying to poke Leo’s cheek with a half-melted jelly bean on his fingers. 

Leo and Oliver.

Light’s eyes narrowed further. He was going to find out where they came from. How this happened. And why L had never once said a word. Not that he really cared about L’s personal life, but because something about this—about them—felt off like a misstep in choreography. A skipped line in the music.

And Light Yagami didn’t like missing beats.

“Ryuzaki,” Naomi said at last, arms crossed tight against her ribs. “You’re being very calm about this.”

Her voice was low and incredulous. She was watching him like she expected a confession to unravel, or for him to peel off a mask and reveal someone else entirely.

“I don’t see the point in unnecessary noise, Misora-san,” L replied flatly, with the same inflection he might use to describe cloud cover. “The facts remain constant. I have sons. They were not supposed to be here. Yet they are. That is now an unchangeable condition.”

With that, he stepped toward the table that was still piled with files and the remnants of a lemon chiffon cake and reached for a stack of napkins Watari had left earlier. The motion was almost absurdly domestic. He walked back to the direction where his sons were sitting. 

L looked to see Leo and Oliver, noting the remnants of the cake on them. “And they appear to have eaten my cake,” he said without affect, crouching before them like a gaunt, eccentric ghost of a fatherly routine. 

Leo, caught between residual pride and rising guilt, gave a small shrug. “Technically, it was unattended.”

Oliver, cheeks glossy with icing, blinked up at his father. Then, without a shred of shame, he stuck out his tongue to show off the last smudge of his cake on it. A badge of victory.

L said nothing.

He simply began dabbing gently at Oliver’s chin with a napkin. Then his hands. He held Oliver’s small fingers in one hand and delicately wiped the jam and icing away with the other, murmuring something too soft to catch. Then he moved to Leo, brushing icing from the boy’s collar and knuckles with the same clinical care he used on crime scene photos.

"Daddy," Oliver said happily. "My heat go boom boom cwack when Daddy is not with me."

L paused mid-wipe.

A tiny twitch pulled at the corner of his mouth, something so dangerously close to a smile. He resumed wiping Leo’s hand without comment, though the strange little smile lingered, as if his brain were still processing the phrase boom boom cwack like a piece of baffling forensic evidence.

The Task Force stood frozen and gaping in silence so absolute, it had the weight of reverence. Even Aizawa, who had once wrestled two suspects simultaneously in an alleyway, looked like he had been hit with a tranquilizer dart.

Ukita exhaled one word, as if it had escaped him against his will. “…What the hell am I looking at?”

L inspected both of his sons one last time, eyes flicking from collar to cuffs to the last traces of frosting at the corner of Oliver’s mouth. When he seemed satisfied, he gave the faintest hum under his breath and refolded the napkin into a small square. He placed it neatly on the table beside the lemon cake's demolished remains, then dragged an empty chair forward with one hand and positioned it squarely in front of the sofa.

The legs scraped gently against the tile.

He sat.

No longer the distracted father, slouched creature with a sugar addiction and a thousand crime patterns in his head—L, now, was the detective. Straight-backed, eyes sharp, gaze locked to the boys. 

Leo stiffened slightly. His shoulders squared, chin dipping half a degree. Oliver, on the other hand, was entirely unbothered. He leaned happily into his brother’s side, small feet swinging off the edge of the sofa as he stared up at the ceiling and clearly still thinking about cake.

“I apologise, everyone,” L said clinically to the room, without turning his head. “It appears we will need to pause the Kira discussion briefly. We have… a situation to assess.”

No one responded verbally. But chairs were quietly reclaimed, pages rustled back into notebooks. Aizawa adjusted his glasses with a sigh that sounded like surrender. Naomi sat down onto her chair, folded her arms and leaned back. Even Mogi, ever the stoic, sat forward by a fraction of an inch.

They were listening.

L didn’t acknowledge any of it. His focus was now entirely fixed on the sofa in front of him.

“Leo,” he said calmly. “Oliver.”

Both boys looked at him.

“Mind telling me,” L continued, voice steady and clinical, “what this is all about?”

Leo met his father’s eyes without flinching. “Do you mean why we’re here, or how we got in?”

“Both,” L replied. “But start at the beginning. Where is your mother?”

“Mummy bake!” Oliver blurted with a sunny little bounce, as if that alone explained everything. “Mummy make lemon cake! And it go wiggle-wiggle in da oven!”

L’s brow inched upward, a slow, skeptical arc. Slowly, he shifted his focus to Leo, wordlessly requesting clarification.

Leo, composed as ever, glanced toward the digital clock mounted on the far wall. “Mum’s home,” he said plainly. “Twenty-one minutes ago, she was in the kitchen checking the oven. The cake wasn’t fully set yet.”

L’s gaze didn’t shift, but the air around him sharpened. Still, he said nothing. Leo seemed to pick up on the silence. He straightened a little.

“She was distracted,” he elaborated, hands folding neatly in his lap. “Ollie and I, we left while she was occupied.”

“You snuck out of the house,” L stated plainly. 

“We exited strategically,” Leo corrected.

L continued staring.

“Fine.” Leo’s shoulders dropped half a centimetre. “Yes, Dad,  we snuck out.”

L continued to study them, voice calm but edged with the kind of precision that made grown detectives sweat. “And do you know that you’re not permitted to be on this floor,” he said, each word clipped and deliberate, “let alone inside this room?”

Leo nodded. “Yes,” he said, eyes down for a moment before rising again to meet his father’s gaze. “Mum already told us not to go here or anywhere near this floor.” 

“And yet,” L said, “here you are.”

Leo’s lips pressed into a firm, flat line. He didn’t look away, but a flush spread over his cheeks, blooming high into the tips of his ears. The shame didn’t come from being caught—it came from disappointing the one man whose approval he measured himself against.

“Sorry, Dad,” he murmured. “It won’t happen again.”

Oliver, who until then had been lightly kicking his socked foot against the edge of the sofa with the idle energy of a sugar-charged toddler, paused. His smile faded as he looked up and caught the expression on Leo’s face who was never nervous, never unsure, never wrong. 

But now… Leo’s ears were pink. His voice was quiet. His shoulders looked small. And suddenly, the room didn’t feel like a fun adventure anymore. And that was how little Oliver knew something was wrong.

He turned slowly toward L.

“...Sowwy, Daddy,” he said, voice tiny. His fingers curled into the hem of his shirt as his eyes searched L’s face for something, like that aching, childlike dread of disappointing someone you love.

Oliver’s small apology lingered in the air like a feather drifting down after a storm. L’s eyes flicked between his sons, the silence stretching just a second too long. L’s gaze was never cold, but just calculating and measuring as if he was trying to understand them as only he could.

Then, L let out a low,tired and unmistakably paternal sigh. The kind of sigh that suggested this wasn’t the first time, and definitely wouldn’t be the last. Of course the sticky-fingered four-year-old and his unnervingly tactical older brother would find a way through the most secure layers of the building just to eat cake and derail a murder investigation.

“…I see,” L said at last, his voice turning gentler now, but still carrying the same weight it always did in interrogation rooms. 

Before he could say anything else, a sharp buzz erupted from his pocket. The sudden sound cut through the room like a gunshot, and the Task Force members watched as L reached into his trousers and retrieved a small, outdated flip phone — battered, slightly scratched, and clearly not standard Task Force issue.

Nothing about that small thing didn’t scream private . 

A few eyes widened.
L never used personal devices. Not for Task Force work, not for idle communication. Not ever . Even Watari, who handled everything from L’s meals to international assets, contacted him through secure, encrypted systems. No one had ever seen L answer a call .

Except now.

L glanced at the screen.

Leo, seated upright and composed until then, suddenly went rigid. His spine straightened another half-inch, his eyes widening in something that looked very much like horror. There was only one person who knew that number. Only one person who had ever dared call it.

And that person was currently supposed to be at home and baking lemon cake.

Oliver’s reaction was more primitive. He flinched, went still, then slowly pulled the edge of his shirt up over his face, until only his wide eyes were showing above the fabric.

Light shifted slightly in his seat, gaze squinted as he catalogued everything. 

L flipped the phone open with a soft click , raised it to his ear. “…Yes.”

There was a pause. Then a burst of noise that was too faint for anyone to make out exact words, but unmistakable in tone. A woman’s voice. Frantic. Emotional. Possibly yelling. Light couldn’t hear the details or the exact words, but the cadence was rapid-fire, high-pitched, and chaotic. Somewhere between fury and sheer maternal panic.

Leo winced, his body stiffening like a guilty convict awaiting sentencing. Beside him, Oliver instinctively shuffled closer, one hand sliding toward his brother’s sleeve, and his eyes were wide.

L didn’t speak immediately. He simply listened with that neutral expression he always had on his face.  Then, with quiet precision, he pulled the phone slightly away from his ear, just enough to spare his eardrum. A fraction of a beat passed before he brought it back. 

“…Love.” he said softly. 

It was the softest word Light had ever heard come out of L’s mouth. Not the deadpan or bored tone he usually uttered, but a quiet and soft and almost too loving tone . Like L had switched frequencies entirely, like this voice was something that belonged to another version of him that was less ghost and more human.

“Hey,” he said gently. “Calm down.”

Another pause. 

“I know,” he said again. “They’re alright. I’ve got them.”

The voice on the other end didn’t stop immediately, there was a stifled noise, something like a half-sob and half-plea. 

“No, no,” L said, slightly firmer, “they’re not hurt. A little sticky, yes. Possibly over-sugared. But intact.”

The chaos continued in miniature. Oliver visibly wilted. He tugged on Leo’s sleeve, whispering, “Mummy’s crying.”

“I know,” Leo muttered, rubbing a hand over his face.

“I’m sorry,” L said into the receiver—barely a whisper now, and not to the boys. “I should’ve set more layers. They must’ve slipped out while you were—yes. I know. I know.” There was a long, strained pause. Then a quiet exhale, as if surrendering to the inevitable. 

“…Now?”

There was a short, urgent burst of sound on the other end that was too garbled for anyone else to catch. But before L could respond or object, the line abruptly disconnected.

The screen blinked once, then went black. L pulled the phone and stared at the screen in his hand for a full beat, like he was calculating the probability of survival.

Then, with the slow, weary air of a man who had just accepted defeat by forces greater than Kira himself, he closed the flip-phone with a soft snap , slid it back into his pocket, and looked at his sons.

“Your mother,” he said flatly, “is on her way here. Now.”

Oliver gasped in full horror, Leo visibly paled. “Now-now??”

“Yes,” L confirmed grimly.

There was a beat of tense silence. Then Leo, ever the tactician, straightened and turned to L with a controlled whisper, but still sharp urgency. 

“Dad,” he said, “you have to help us.”

L looked at him for a solid second before what looked like a tired amusement of someone who had once tried, and failed, to hide a broken vase from the very same woman.

“As much as I would like to,” L replied, “you know who the real boss is.”

Leo winced. Even Oliver whimpered faintly, like the word Mummy alone carried gravitational consequences.

“And there’s not much I can do when she’s furious,” L added. “At best, I can delay sentencing. Maybe secure a plea bargain.”

“I’ll tell you how we got in.” Leo said immediately as he leaned in like he was brokering arms over international lines.

“That’s not a bargain,” L replied, arms folding neatly across his chest. “That’s a legal obligation. I was about to ask you before your mother’s call disrupted the interrogation.”

Leo didn’t flinch. “Even if I did tell you how,” he said calmly, “there’s no way to verify I’m telling you everything.”

There was a pause. L’s gaze sharpened. “Are you… attempting to withhold information from me as a form of leverage?”

“I’m clarifying terms,” Leo replied to his father, dead serious. “Conditional transparency. I will provide full disclosure if, and only if, you secure leniency from Mum.”

From beside Leo, Oliver nodded sagely as if he understood what his brother and father are talking about.  “Mummy gets reawy big-voice angwy,” he added in a whisper, eyes wide. “Like dwagon.”

L tilted his head, eyes narrowing slightly as he regarded both boys with that signature, unreadable cool, clinical stare like he was assessing a pair of morally ambiguous rodents caught mid-heist. 

“You do realise,” he said, voice even, “I am a detective. I will find out regardless.”

“Yes,” Leo said calmly. “But you’d waste twelve hours, two keyboards, and at least one surveillance server reboot. This way is more efficient.”

L’s brow twitched. For a moment, just a moment, it looked as though he might actually smile. “That’s tempting, Leo,” he murmured. “But I’m a detective, son. I’m trained to—”

“Yes, Dad,” Leo interrupted politely, but confident, “you’re a detective. The detective . But you’re also a husband who lives in perpetual caution of his wife’s temper.”

L blinked slowly, eyes squinted. “What exactly are you implying?”

“I’m saying,” Leo replied, folding his hands in his lap like a tiny lawyer about to deliver closing arguments, “I won’t tell Mum about the coffee incident.”

L’s posture stiffened just a fraction, the kind of infinitesimal shift only those who studied him closely would notice. There was something flickered on his eyes as his brain, for all its speed, seemed to stall briefly on one specific memory he’d tried very hard to suppress.

“…What coffee incident,” he asked, though it sounded more like a formality than a real question.

Leo arched an eyebrow. “The one involving her painting. The one she spent eight straight hours on. The one she thinks was ruined by a stray cat.”

L’s eyes narrowed. “You… weren’t even in the house.”

“You left the camera data synced to the cloud,” Leo replied, tone polite but firm, like a particularly helpful auditor. “The original footage was still stored in your local archive before the deepfake overwrote the stream. Very smooth masking work on the window reflection, by the way. But you missed the timestamp metadata.”

L exhaled slowly through his nose. He glanced up at the ceiling like a man searching for divine intervention, or perhaps a skylight to leap out of.

“That information,” he said carefully, “was supposed to be redacted.”

“It was supposed to be deleted,” Leo countered, folding his arms. “I have the original clip backed up. With annotations.”

A beat of silence passed. L looked at him, face unreadable but for the faintest twitch at the corner of his eye. “You're blackmailing me.”

“I’m negotiating, Dad.” Leo replied smoothly. “It’s mutually beneficial.”

L’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t.”

Leo leaned forward slightly, voice dropping to a quiet, reasonable register. “She still brings up the bookshelf incident, and that was three years ago. Three. You blinked and she ordered a ten-hour silence. You want that again? ”

L visibly tensed. Even the Task Force, though entirely unaware of the bookshelf incident, collectively twitched like something seismic had shifted in the room. Naomi squinted. Mogi blinked. Matsuda leaned in like he was watching a live wire spark.

“I was framed in the bookshelf incident,” L muttered defensively.

Leo’s expression didn’t change. “She doesn’t care. You know she doesn’t care. Facts don’t matter once the wooden spoon comes out.”

That landed like a dropped piano.

The silence that followed was so absolute it seemed to hum. L’s hand dropped to his lap, and he gave his son the kind of long, haunted stare he usually reserved for suspects who had gotten away with it once.

“You’re eight, Leo,” he said at last. “This level of manipulation and psychological leverage should not be this developed.”

Leo offered a small shrug, mouth twitching into the faintest smirk. “Genetics.”

L stared at him.

Stared harder.

He pressed his lips together, seemed to have lost in a deep thought. Then, with the deep, resentful gravity of a man losing a game he invented, he slowly sat back and said, “Fine. Talk.”

Leo gave a tiny, polite smile. “Thank you,” he said. “Now, I want you to tell Mum that us being here was part of a challenge you gave us.”

L blinked.

Light blinked.

Matsuda’s mouth fell open.

“I’m sorry,” L said blankly. “You want me to… lie. To your mother. On your behalf.”

“I want you,” Leo corrected, “to frame it as an unsanctioned real-world infiltration simulation. One that Ollie and I completed without external help. Technically speaking, that’s not a lie. You are the one who said infiltration was the ultimate test of deduction and creativity.”

“That was about bank vaults,” L said tightly.

“Well, this floor has better encryption than most banks,” Leo countered. “So you should be proud.”

“I’m mortified.”

“That’s a form of pride,” Leo replied smoothly. “Just inverted.”

Oliver, who had been quietly trying to make his entire body disappear behind Leo’s shoulder, suddenly poked his head out.

“If Daddy tells Mummy it’s a game,” he whispered urgently, “maybe she won’t take the iPad.”

L turned slowly toward his younger son. “She’s absolutely going to take the iPad.”

Oliver gasped, clutching his face. “Noooooo—!”

“We have to try,” Leo said firmly.

“You’re negotiating like criminals,” L said flatly.

“You raised us,” Leo returned, without a hint of irony.

There was a silence so heavy it nearly had shape. Then L sighed, rubbed his temples slowly, and muttered with the weariness of a man facing the guillotine, “Watari, if you’re listening… please start prepping the evacuation protocol.”

Somewhere at the back of the room, L could hear Matsuda mumble something about not believing the greatest detective was losing to an eight-year-old. 

And, as if things couldn’t get any worse, there were footsteps approaching from the hallway. It was more controlled than how it should be, like someone who knew exactly where they were going, and why the people on the other side of the door should already be afraid.

Another step followed, and another. A rhythm of finality. Sharp heels, maybe, or boots. Something unforgiving, something that didn’t flinch.

The task force had just enough time to glance at one another in bewildered, dawning horror before the door swung open with a creak that sounded louder than thunder in the silence.

There she was.

Framed in the doorway like a perfectly composed threat—hair wind-tangled, cheeks flushed, breath caught somewhere between panic and fury. An apron clung crooked at her waist over a lilac-flowery summer dress, one hand still gripping her phone like it was a weapon.

There was no mistaking the beauty in her face. Her honey eyes scanned the room passing over Aizawa, Misora, Light, even L himself until they landed, unerringly, on the two smallest beings in the room.

Leo stiffened. Oliver shrank against him, half-hiding, one hand fisting the fabric of his brother’s sleeve.

“LEO THOMAS! OLIVER JUDE!” 

 

Chapter 2

Light had always prided himself on being observant.

Long before the Death Note, before L, before the chaos of gods and notebooks and all the games that came with them, he had understood how to read people. Watching people revealed far more than words ever could. One could understand a lot by just observing the tilt of their jaw, a twitch of their eyes, the breath that was held too long. Most people were transparent and easily predictable.

But this... whatever was happening in front of him now wasn’t a puzzle he had prepared for.

From his place near the monitors, Light sat with his usual impeccable posture, arms crossed, and composed face that was casual enough to seem unbothered, but just curious enough to look natural.

He watched as a tiny dark-haired toddler came barreling into the room like a sugar-high comet.  Light barely had time to blink before the boy launched himself into L’s feet. And L… caught him, then crouched down and scooped the toddler up like it was second nature. Like he had done it a hundred times before.

A child. A real, living child. 

The kid clung to him, both arms looped around L’s neck, tiny hands grasping at hair and collar like he never wanted to let go. He was squealing something in half sentences, breathless, excited, and his face was smeared with what looked like frosting.  And the strangest part was that L just let it all happen. There was no flinch or awkwardness, just a steady calm that could only come from familiarity and normality. 

Light’s first reaction was denial, there’s no way this is real. But then came the second thought, and that one was worse: it was real.

The smaller kid, Oliver, was still talking and kicking his legs against L’s side, sticky fingers leaving trails of sugar across L’s black shirt. L didn’t even blink. He adjusted his hold slightly, murmured something low, almost private, and the boy leaned into him more like the sound alone made everything right in his tiny world.

And then Light’s gaze shifted to the doorway, to the other child.

He looked older by maybe four years than Oliver. Taller, clean posture, and alert eyes. Still young, but sharpened around the edges. He stood with a calm that was too composed, too calculated, and it made Light’s skin itch. It wasn’t natural for children to hold themselves like that, not unless they were taught and trained from the day they were born. 

And there, Light thought, narrowing his eyes, was the first problem.

L had never spoken about family, not even once. No mention of lovers, no hint of a wife, not even the faintest suggestion that he had ever belonged to someone or that anyone had ever belonged to him. He had always been an enigma: brilliant, erratic, unreachable. A man made of silence and shadows, spun from dust and riddles.

And yet now here he stood with an icing-smeared four-year-old on his hip and a tactical miniature watching from the doorway.

Two sons.

Light’s gaze swept from Leo’s composed stare to the sticky grin on Oliver’s face, then back to L, who was now crouching to dab at the younger boy’s chin with a napkin. The domesticity of it was absurd, offensive, even. Like a god pulling on an apron and started making lunch. 

There was something deeply unsettling about it all, and not just the normalcy rather the quiet ease of it. As if this version of L had always existed, just hidden away, and now it had surfaced with no warning and no explanation. 

It felt dangerous.

Light noted as the Task Force had gone completely silent. Aizawa looked like he was watching someone sprout a second head. Ukita hadn’t blinked in what had to be half a minute, and Naomi was sitting so stiffly Light thought she might actually start throwing chairs just to reset reality. And Matsuda, poor Matsuda was still standing in place, eyes wide, expression blank, like the shock hadn’t quite finished settling in.

And Light… watched.

Oliver giggled as L reached over to straighten Leo’s collar. His voice was high and full of sugar, the words tumbling out with unfiltered affection.

“My heart go boom boom cwack when Daddy is not with me.”

The sentence hit Light harder than it should have. His spine stiffened and something inside him curled in response to that sound. 

Boom boom crack.

He had heard that before, a very long time ago..

“Light doesn’t get it, does he?. When he ignores Misa,  her heart just goes boom boom cracks like it actually breaks.”

 It came rushing back

He remembered a high-pitched, breathless, and clinging voice.  He saw the hallway again—the one from university, bright and crowded and full of noise. He remembered the fur-trimmed coat, the manicured nails gripping his arm too tightly, the blonde hair that shimmered under the fluorescent lights. The mascara smudged under her eyes. How irritated he had felt and how he had smiled anyway.

It wasn’t often that Light felt his own heart misstep, stutter, or pick up pace.

But now it did.

The room seemed to muffle around him, the edges of sound dulled like cotton had been stuffed into his ears. Time blurred for a second. He was back in that hallway. Back in those moments. And back with her .

It could have been a coincidence.

Just a child repeating something ridiculous. Something that he might have picked up from a cartoon, or some overly dramatic TV drama. Kids said the oddest things and they mimicked adults all the time. He knew that.

The phrase didn’t have to mean anything.

And yet…

Light’s mind raced, already calculating the statistical improbability. That same clinical, calculating precision whirring beneath the surface and tearing apart the moment from every angle. The phrase the boy used. The voice. The strange, offbeat cadence. It wasn’t just similar, it was exact . Word for word. Tone for tone.

Of all the things a child could say, out of billions of combinations and thousands of sentimental clichés, and the endless pool of childish expressions, why that ?

What were the odds? One in a million? One in several?

Maybe more.

He didn’t like that feeling. That tight, crawling unease in his gut like a hand was slowly reaching backward through time, dragging something ugly into the present. Because deep down, beneath all the logic and rational dismissal, something inside him whispered that it wasn’t a coincidence.

And it terrified him more than he cared to admit.

Light watched again as L smiled faintly after the small boy spoke like it wasn’t the first time he had heard it. Like this wasn’t just some accident or fluke, but something rehearsed and familiar. As if these children weren’t a disruption at all, but part of a life L had kept tucked neatly away, sealed off from the rest of them like classified documents in a vault no one else was allowed to open.

A life he hadn’t shared.

A life Light wasn’t supposed to see.

L said something then, too soft for the rest of the room, but Oliver leaned in, giggled, and buried his face into L’s shoulder with a kind of affection that didn’t feel new. It felt lived-in. Leo, by contrast, didn’t move. He stayed perfectly still, eyes scanning the room with unnerving precision. He was watching everything: the distance between people, the angle of the nearest exit, the way Matsuda’s hand twitched when he didn’t know what to say.

A strategist. Already.

The wrongness crawled under Light’s skin like static. The longer he watched them, the way Oliver’s mouth curled when he laughed, the slight pitch of Leo’s brow when he challenged an adult, the more Light began to feel the threat of familiarity and memory become real. 

No.

Not possible.

These were children. Two small, sticky-fingered boys who should have been stacking blocks or babbling nonsense about cartoons. Not reading the room like trained observers or throwing out psychological traps with the easy, natural rhythm of people twice or three times their age.

Light watched as L took a seat directly in front of the two small boys. His voice wasn’t harsh, not even raised but it had that same deliberate cadence. The one Light had heard him use in every high-stakes interrogation, the cool, clinical rhythm reserved for Kira suspects, terrorists, and government traitors.

And yet the boys didn’t flinch. They didn’t squirm, didn’t cower, didn’t even blink the way most adults would under that kind of scrutiny. One of them even had the gall to look sweet and calm, and almost annoyingly innocent.

“Do you mean why we’re here, or how we got in?” he heard Leo asked. 

Light felt something tighten in his chest. He had watched men break down under less pressure. He had seen monsters weep and scream and beg when faced with L’s methods. But this? This wasn’t a child speaking. That was a calculated, measured and strategic move that L, to no one’s surprise, matched it without missing a beat.

Then, from beside Leo, came a sudden burst of pure chaos.

“Mummy make lemon cake!” Oliver announced gleefully. “It go wiggle-wiggle in da oven!”

The syllables tumbled out like confetti. And Light, who had grown up surrounded by politicians and prosecutors, found himself staring again. Because There was something about the way Oliver said “wiggle-wiggle” —the way his whole face lit up, his smile far too big for someone that small, eyes squinting shut with joy, voice pitched with musical, nonsensical delight—

God… this couldn’t be, right?

It was just a phrase. Just random, childish nonsense.
But—

Boink-boink —that’s what she used to call the buttons on his blazer, poking them with her nails when she was bored. Snuggle-monster , she had whispered once, trying to tug him back into bed when he was already halfway out the door. Happy-dizzy , she would say whenever she spun in circles too fast, collapsing in a heap on the carpet. And once—just once— wiggle-wiggle , as she danced barefoot across his dorm in mismatched socks, cupcake in one hand, claiming it was “for balance.”

He remembered the lilt of her voice that was too high, slightly off-beat, never in sync with the world around her. Back then, he had found it maddening, irritating, and stupid.

But this?

But there was nothing stupid about this.

Light swallowed.

His throat was dry.

His mind, the rational and logical part,was already insisting it was nothing. Just coincidence. A child echoing something random. A trick of memory.

But the rest of him wasn’t so sure.

His thoughts snapped back to the present when L pulled a small flip phone from his pocket. Light’s eyes narrowed as he watched L answer it.

And everything shifted.

“…Yes,” L said softly.

The voice on the other end wasn’t clear, but the tone bled through. A high-pitched, rapid, cracking with panic. It was the kind of voice that could only belong to a mother—breathless and frantic, straining to stay coherent through fear, like every second she didn’t have an answer was a second she couldn’t breathe.

And it sounded too much like her.

He stared.

The rest of the room had gone still, frozen in place like they were watching reality fold in on itself. Naomi’s hand was clenched tight around her pen. Matsuda’s jaw had dropped completely, his expression somewhere between panic and awe.

Then he heard L speak again in that unusual soft and almost tender way.

“…Love.”

Light’s stomach twisted.

That… couldn’t be real. L didn’t say things like that. L didn’t feel things like that. He didn’t do love. And yet there he was, murmuring apologies into the phone like a man stuck between battlefield strategy and a domestic meltdown.

When the call ended, L slid the phone back into his pocket with an air of resignation.

“She’s on her way,” he said simply.

Light barely had time to process it before the boys reacted. Leo visibly paled and Oliver sucked in a sharp gasp.

“Dad, you have to help us.”

Then he watched as the negotiations began. Logic. Tactics. A bribe. Leverage in the form of a “coffee incident” to “bookshelf incident” Light didn’t know the details of. 

“You’re blackmailing me,” L said at last.

“I’m negotiating,” Leo replied.

And somewhere in that exchange, somewhere between the dry retorts and tired sighs, Light felt the realization drop.

He never meant to think of her, honestly. 

But somehow, she lingered. She always did.

Misa Amane belonged to another life entirely, one that moved too fast, burned too bright. All sharp heels on tile floors, cloying perfume in his pillows, and emotions that came too big and too loud. She cried too easily, laughed too hard, and loved him far more than what was reasonable.

He had tolerated her for a year. That was it.

Twelve months of chaos and chipped nail polish on his glassware, lipstick smudges on his collars, arguments that sparked from nowhere and ended in long, pointed silences.

It was just a year. And yet somehow, her memory had stayed with him until a decade after. 

It wasn’t love. He was quite certain of that. It wasn’t anything so noble or tragic. She clung too tightly, gave too much, wanted more than he ever planned to give.

He had never asked her to stay, but he hadn’t expected her to leave either.

And yet, one day, she simply did. No fight, no storm. Just a single bright yellow sticky note stuck crookedly to his bathroom mirror, written in pink gel pen and covered in glitter hearts and a little sketch of a bunny waving. 

“Lighttooo! ♡ Misa got tired of being sad, so she’s going to go be fabulous somewhere else! Don’t forget to eat, okay? Also, Light is welcome for cleaning the sink. Bye-bye~!

✧ Misa Misa ✧”

He had stared at it for almost twenty minutes before peeling it off the mirror, crumpling it in his hand, and tossing it into the bin.

Part of him felt relieved.

No more shouting matches over things that didn’t matter. No more glitter in the drain. No more weepy voicemails at 3 a.m., or irrational meltdowns over what he had or hadn’t said, done, implied, or felt. 

She was gone and for the first time in a long while, he could breathe. 

A week later, Misa Amane announced her retirement from modeling in a one-minute press conference. No questions, no farewell tour. Just a dazzling smile and a vague, cheerful line about “new adventures.”

No new photoshoots, no tabloid drama, no late-night scandal. It was as if she had been plucked from the world entirely and erased in the same sudden, surreal way she had once entered it.

Light, true to form, carried on.

He finished his degree with honor, accepted the early recruitment offer from the NPA, and climbed ranks with terrifying ease. Charm, intelligence, and ambition carved his path like a scalpel through soft tissue.

He didn’t think of her for years, not until the day he turned twenty-Eight. 

His then girlfriend, now fiancée, Kiyomi Takada had surprised him in his Tokyo apartment with a cake she had special-ordered and carefully cut herself.  She kissed him on the cheek, and smiled with immaculate lipstick and called him Light-kun with a practiced kind of warmth. 

And for one breathless second as the candlelight flickered over her face,  that fleeting, annoyingly unwelcome feeling crept in.

He wished it wasn’t her.
He wished it was Misa instead. 

He wasn’t sure what made her come to mind that time, but he was still quite sure he didn’t love her. Misa had been a phase—a loud, glitter-covered chapter of a stupid young-adult life he had long since edited out of the story.

But somehow, in that still, perfect moment, he found himself wishing the evening was messier. 

Because Misa would have nearly dropped the cake and laughed too loudly. She would smear frosting across his face and sat on his lap uninvited, and make a show of feeding him the first bite with her fingers, humming some ridiculous song while doing it.

She would have ruined the moment in all the ways that made it real.

And for reasons he couldn’t explain or even willing to admit—not then, not even now—he missed that. 

He missed her.

From that night on, she returned to him. Quietly at first, then slipping into his mind like background static. Sometimes he caught a trace of her perfume on a passing stranger.  Sometimes a turn of phrase, or a laugh that was a little too bright in the room he was in. 

And then, during long, restless nights when sleep slipped further and further away, she would appear in his memory again. He’d see her in his old kitchen, barefoot and humming, talking to herself as she stirred a cup of tea that was more sugar than liquid. Muttering nonsense about how the spoon needed to “feel loved” or the tea wouldn’t taste right.

And in also in those moments, when everything was still and quiet and too late to take anything back, he would wonder— what if she had stayed?

Not as a distraction or as the glittery chaos he had once dismissed her as.

But as something else entirely.

Because when he imagined the world he still meant to shape as KIRA, he found himself thinking, absurdly, that Misa might have belonged in it. Not Kiyomi, polished and perfect and politically poised, who smiled like a campaign poster and nodded at all the right times. No, it was Misa he pictured beside him.

Unpredictable, too loud, too much, but loyal to the core and boundless in her devotion. The kind of woman who would have stood next to God without blinking, who would have gone down smiling in his name.

She had never asked for explanations or demanded proof. She had believed him, even when she shouldn’t have. Loved him, even when he didn’t deserve it.

And there was a strange, bitter sort of logic to it. Because gods didn’t need equals—they needed worshippers, and fanatics. Someone who would follow them not because it made sense, but because it had to be them.

She would have followed him anywhere.

And for the first time in years, Light found himself wondering what it might have been like to build a new world with someone who didn’t need to be convinced of it. Someone who would’ve offered her blood before he asked.

It was ridiculous. All of it. And yet… he remembered.

Eventually, he gave in and tried to look her up.

It started with a simple name search. Then deeper. Public records, archived footage, old modeling contracts, contact databases—anything he could get his hands on. But every lead curved back to the same dead end: that short retirement press conference, a few lingering commercials, and fan blogs locked in time like digital shrines.

And then nothing. No sightings. No scandals. No marriage records. No obituary.

As if she had simply stepped off the world and vanished. And Light, who prided himself on answers, couldn’t find a single one. Which only made her linger more. Because absence, he had learned, had a weight all its own. 

And sometimes, the things you discarded were the ones that found their ways to haunt you the longest.

And now, sitting here watching L of all people struggle to negotiate with his own sons before someone the three of them clearly shared a quiet, terrifying reverence for—

Light felt something begin to burn in him. 

It crept beneath his ribs like heat rising from a long-sealed wound. Because somehow, impossibly, it felt like they knew something he didn’t. Like they had claimed a part of something he had never realized he wanted until it was too late.

“You raised us,” the older boy said to L, with that clinical confidence only children who had never feared being wrong could muster.

Light’s gaze flicked toward him, and he looked back.

It was just a brief glance, but in that single moment, something twisted. He saw that same glint she had when she was pretending not to gloat, or when she tilted her head just so and let the silence do the talking, or when her mouth said one thing, and her eyes dared you to believe it.

It struck him like static, prickling against his skin.

And before he could even process the shift in air, the faint scent of something like sugar and wind and memory, or the unbearable familiarity of it all… the room changed again.

Footsteps.

He heard them  approaching from the hallway with controlled and steady pace like someone who knew exactly where they were going. And why the people on the other side of the door should already be afraid.

Another step.

Then another.

The task force barely had time to exchange glances, bewilderment flashing into a kind of slow, dawning horror, Before the door swung open.

And there she was.

Framed in the doorway like a perfectly composed threat.

Hair tangled from wind. Cheeks flushed. Breath caught between panic and fury. An apron— an apron —was tied crookedly over a summery lilac dress, the strings twisted like she had put it on mid-sprint.  One hand gripped her phone like it was a weapon.

Light forgot how to breathe.

Ten years of silence.
Ten years of absence.
Ten years of wondering if he had imagined her altogether.

And now here she stood, more vivid than any memory he had preserved of her. And she was real. 

Her eyes swept the room, sharp and searching. They passed over Aizawa, over Misora. Paused barely on him. It wasn’t  long enough to say anything, not even long enough to hurt. Then her gaze snapped to the boys.

And everything in her face changed.

“LEO THOMAS! OLIVER JUDE!” 

The force of it cracked through the room.  And Light… just sat there, stunned, as the entire world tipped sideways.

Misa Amane hadn’t simply changed.

She had evolved .

Gone were the chaotic colors, the skull rings, the clashing bows and mascara tears. In their place stood a woman—breathtaking, composed, unmistakably powerful. She didn’t have to raise her voice to command the room. She simply was , and that was enough.

Light watched as Leo stiffened instantly. Oliver shrank back against his brother, one small fist gripping the fabric of Leo’s sleeve like it was the only thing tethering him to the ground.

She took four steps forward with the quiet, purposeful grace of someone who had nothing to prove yet somehow still managed to make everyone feel like they were the ones being evaluated.

Her eyes held the same intensity without scolding or shouting at anyone. She just stood there in front of her sons, close enough from Light now that the scent of lemon and sugar and something faintly metallic carried into the room like a warning.

And in that instant, watching her command the room with nothing but her voice and presence, Light understood something that made his stomach twist.  

Whatever life she had built after him, she had done it without him. Completely.

 

******

 

 

“LEO THOMAS! OLIVER JUDE!” 

The names rang louder than the volume warranted, reverberating through the bones of everyone in the room.

And there she stood, framed in the doorway, furious and breathless. Her hair was wind-tangled, cheeks flushed with exertion and fear, and she radiated the unmistakable energy of a woman who had just sprinted through a fifteen-story building without blinking.

Her apron was still on, half-slipped at the waist over a summery dress patterned with tiny violets. A smear of flour clung stubbornly to one shoulder. In her right hand, she clutched her phone like a weapon; her left hand twitched helplessly at her side, as if still trying to reach for the two small bodies who had vanished from her home without a trace. 

Her honey bright eyes were a little bit swollen and rimmed red, spoke of someone who had cried hard and fast, then forced herself to stop, bottling it all just beneath the surface. There was no tear left, but the storm still lingered.

They watched as their mother crossed the room with those crisp, deliberate, inevitable steps. No one dared speak.  Not even Matsuda, who could usually be counted on to blurt out something ridiculous at times like this.

Even the air seemed to withdraw from her path, shrinking back under the sheer gravity of her presence. 

Leo froze.

Oliver whimpered.

Misa stopped just a few feet from them.

“Do you have any idea what I’ve just been through?” Misa’s voice cracked, sharp as a whip, and still wobbly with the tail-end of panic. “I turned around for two minutes—just two minutes ! And you—!”

She cut herself off before the words collapsed under their own weight. Her chest rose and fell quickly and eyes burned into Leo first, then Oliver. Her mouth opened again as if to scold, but instead her lips twitched downward, caught in something softer. Something fractured.

“How many times do I have to remind you both that you are not permitted to be anywhere on this floor?” 

Neither boy answered.

Both looked down. Oliver’s bottom lip trembled. His small hand crept instinctively toward Leo’s hand, seeking shelter.  Leo didn’t move at first. His jaw was tight, back straight, eyes fixed on a spot on the floor. Then he shifted slightly and let Oliver’s hand clutch his. 

Oliver gripped it tight.

Neither of them dared to speak. The silence between them buzzed with guilt, thick and prickling.

The silence buzzed, thick and electric with guilt. It pooled between them like water rising too fast.

Misa’s gaze never wavered. She stared at them as if imprinting the sight of their whole, unhurt bodies into her mind, afraid to blink in case it vanished. Legs swinging off the couch. Shoes still half-untied. One-socked tiny foot. 

Relief and fury tangled in her chest.

She inhaled slowly and controlled, but it wasn’t not enough. Her hands hovered at her sides like she didn’t trust them not to shake. One lifted slightly, as if to reach for them… or maybe just to anchor herself to something real.

Her jaw clenched hard.

“And what in the world,” she asked, low and cutting, “are you even doing here ?”

There was a beat of silence.

“My coworker found both of them under the kitchen table,” L said mildly as he stood, brushing off his sleeves lightly. “Eating my cake.”

He even chuckled with that soft and unbothered tone like it was genuinely amusing. Misa’s head snapped toward him.

“Are you laughing?” she demanded, voice pitching higher in disbelief. “I ran through fifteen floors like a madwoman looking for them—and you’re laughing?!”

L blinked. “It was a good cake.”

“Ryuzaki, I swear—” she exhaled sharply, pressing a hand to her chest like she might physically hold the rage in place. “One of these days I’m going to actually throw a chair. Not at them. At you. ”

“They were hiding very quietly,” he added, as though that would help. “Very well-executed stealth.”

“Don’t encourage them! ” she snapped, spinning back toward the two boys on the couch like a storm changing direction. “And you two! How—how in God’s name did you even get in here?!”

Leo opened his mouth.

“Nope! Nope. Stop right there. I’m not doing this today.” She raised both hands like she was blocking the answer physically. “I don’t want to know which alarm system you bypassed or how many retinal scans you faked or whatever ridiculous Ocean’s Eleven nonsense you pulled this time. I just—” She dragged a hand down her face. “I just wanted to frost a cake in peace. One cake. That is not a high bar.”

Oliver raised a hand halfway, as if to offer something helpful.

“Nope.” Misa pointed at him. “Not a word, baby, I’m sorry. My blood pressure can’t take it today.”

There was a pause.

“I’m sorry, Mum,” Leo said quietly. “We just wanted to see Dad.”

Misa’s expression faltered. 

The words landed harder than anything else. She knew that they weren’t meant to wound, and yet they did, cutting straight through the last threads of her scolding. She felt it instantly, that dull ache rising behind her ribs, climbing up into her throat and settling like a bruise. A soft, awful weight of guilt that came not from what they had done, but from why they’d done it.

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Her breath snagged. Her eyes flicked to Leo, then to Oliver whose head now half-hidden behind his brother’s shoulder and then, finally, to L.

He hadn’t moved much, but she saw how his gaze stayed fixed on the boys with a stillness that was too careful to be anything but guilt. The quiet kind. The kind that grew over days and nights spent saying just one more hour , until hours turned to days , and days turned into Leo’s silence at the dinner table and Oliver asking, again and again, when Daddy was coming home.

L’s hands were still folded loosely behind his back, but his posture had shifted. He straightened his back as he locked at his wife softly as if saying that he knew . 

Misa suddenly felt a sudden ache in her heart. Her mouth tightened and her hands dropped. “I already told you,” she said, voice strained but even, “Your Dad will come to see you both soon .”

“That’s what you said three days ago,” Leo replied pointedly. His fingers curled tighter around the edge of his trousers. “And Dad didn’t come.”

“He did, ” Misa replied. 

Leo blinked. “When?”

“Who do you think rerouted the internet in the bunker so your ‘homework project’ couldn’t launch that illegal drone over the city again?” Misa said, still visibly annoyed but less than before. “Or put new padding in your decoy backpack because somebody keeps hiding magnesium strips inside it like a tiny war criminal?”

Leo glanced away.

Misa advanced a step. “Who built the new deadbolt system for the laundry room after Oliver tried to ‘science’ the washing machine into a hot tub?”

“I thought Grandpa did those?” Leo said, genuinely puzzled.  He turned his gaze to L. “But how come we never saw you coming home?”

L exhaled and stepped forward without hesitation. His movements were unhurried and his expression remained unchanged. Then he crouched slowly in front of them.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’ve been so preoccupied with work and always come home very late. Then I have to go back to work before you both wake up.”

Something flickered in Leo’s eyes. A crease in his brow followed by a breath held just a second too long as if he had just realized something.

“You also fixed the chessboard,” he said slowly. “The one I dropped behind the bookshelf. I thought it was missing a knight, but it was back the next morning.”

“You favor the Sicilian Defense.” L replied slowly. “I thought you’d be annoyed without a full set.”

Oliver’s head perked up, his lips parting in a tiny “oh.”

“And the glow stars,” he whispered. “The ones on da ceiling. There’s a new pattern.”

“It’s Orion.” L murmured as he ruffled Oliver’s hair. “You said you wanted to learn the constellations.”

Leo stared at his father, a quiet pause settling over him. He had always assumed those little things just… happened—like Mum had done them, or they were coincidences. He hadn’t thought twice about the chess piece showing up again, or the glow stars being different. But now, hearing it said out loud, he realized those weren’t random. 

Dad had been there, just not in the ways he expected. 

“I thought the cookie jar kept refilling because Mum was hiding extras,” he said after a moment. “But it was you.”

L gave a small shrug. “I noticed you both always eat the oatmeal ones first.”

“I told you both that you need to be patient for a while,” Misa said, her voice somehow turned softer. “Because soon after he finishes this case, he'll be able to spend time with us again.”

L glanced over at the boys in front of him, their hands clutched nervously in their laps. L exhaled another breath before he looked up at his wife. 

 “I think they understand it now,” he said gently, “And I also think… they’re very sorry about it.”

Misa’s heart softened, but the edge of her annoyance was still there.  “Are they?” she asked.

Both boys looked up immediately.

Leo’s eyes flicked from her face to L’s, then down again. His throat worked once before he finally spoke, voice just above a whisper. “I’m sorry, Mum… Dad,” he said. “We won’t do it again.”

Beside him, Oliver’s feet shifted awkwardly on the couch cushion. He blinked up at them, lip wobbling slightly. “I’m sowwy, Mummy… Daddy,” he echoed, small and sincere.

Misa stared at them for a long moment, eyes hard. Her gaze moved slowly from Leo’s stiff shoulders to Oliver’s watery eyes, and then back again. Then she exhaled. One sharp, tired puff through her nose.

“Apology accepted,” she said flatly. “But don’t either of you ever do that to me again.”

“Yes,” they said quickly, in unison.

“Good.”

She gave them one more long, pointed look before flicking her gaze to the corner monitor, her eyes skimming over the security feed like a hawk. She clicked her tongue once under her breath, then turned back to them.

“Leo. Take your brother and go sit in the living room. This apartment’s living room, not ours. I need to talk to your father before I decide what to do with you both.”

The silence stretched a beat.

“…Are we in trouble?” Leo asked.

Misa raised an eyebrow. “Well, what does it look like?”

“But you said you accepted our apology—”

“I did,” she cut in. “And that apology means I won’t sell you both to the circus today.”

Leo opened his mouth.

“But,” she continued crisply, “that doesn’t magically erase the fact that actions have consequences. Especially ones involving full-scale facility breach, five armed police agents, and one near heart attack.”

“But we—”

“No buts,” she snapped. “Now go.”

Both boys sighed heavily, the dramatic kind only small children and the morally wounded could master, yet they didn’t move.

“Leo, Oliver,” L nudged them gently, “be good boys now and listen to your mother, alright? She and I need to talk, and possibly revise the zoo plan for this weekend.”

At that, both boys suddenly perked up like sunflowers in spring.

“We’re going to the zoo?” Leo asked, eyes suddenly hopeful and wide. 

“And see Mr Cwocodile?” Oliver added, ripping the hem of his shirt.

Misa didn’t blink. “Well, we were about to,” she said, coolly. “But now I’m not so sure anymore”

“No, Mum!” Leo pleaded, inching forward with wide eyes like he thought sheer desperation might buy him a miracle. “Please!”

“Mummy pwease! ” Oliver echoed with both hands clasped under his chin, eyes wide and shiny like he was trying to summon puppy magic. “I wanna see Mr Cwocodile.” 

Misa arched a brow. “Do you think children who didn’t follow what their mother told them to, deserve to go see crocodiles?”

Leo straightened. “I’ll come with you to your next spa appointment,” he offered quickly, as if this were a high-stakes negotiation. “I’ll sit really quiet the whole time. And I won’t complain about the smell.”

“Me hewp Mummy paint her toes,” Oliver added, puffing his chest like it was a heroic act. “With the pink one.”

Misa gave them a long, unreadable stare, the kind that made grown men rethink their life choices. “Oh, you’ll do all that, will you?”

Leo nodded furiously. “And I’ll even try that green smoothie you made that smelled like grass!”

“And I will eat bwocowi!” Oliver cried. “The gween bwocowi!”

A sound suspiciously like a snort escaped Misa’s nose before she caught it. She cleared her throat, arms still crossed. “Tempting,” she said dryly. “But bribery after bad behaviour is still bad behaviour.”

The boys wilted instantly.

She let them stew for a second longer before adding, “We’ll discuss the zoo later. After I’m no longer seeing double from the stress you two gave me.”

“Is that a maybe?” Leo asked carefully.

“It’s a ‘don’t push your luck,’ ” Misa replied.

Oliver sighed. “Okay…”

“Now living room. And don’t touch anything on the way. Not a button, not a switch, not a knob, not even your own faces.”

Leo grabbed Oliver’s hand. “Marching like ghosts,” he muttered.

“Good ghosts,” Misa called after them. “Polite ones. With quiet feet!”

As they padded off, the boys’ footsteps faded down the corridor like the tail end of a storm. Misa turned back toward L.

Then finally… finally …. she exhaled the breath she had been holding for what felt like an hour. It left her in a sharp rush, like a valve cracking under pressure as her shoulders dropped and the stern mask cracked.

The very next second, her feet wobbled.

L caught her before she stumbled. One hand curled around her wrist, the other steadying the small of her back. 

Misa pressed her face into his chest without even thinking. She didn’t sob or even shake. She just held onto him like she hadn’t quite convinced herself it was over yet. Like part of her was still sprinting floor to floor, searching for two small bodies who had vanished without warning. The panic hadn’t fully drained from her system; it still sat there, curled at the base of her spine, buzzing like static.

L didn’t speak. His arms wrapped around her slowly, with more pressure than his usual weightless touch, but not more than she needed. He dipped his chin just enough to rest lightly on her hair. One arm circled her back, the other anchored her against his chest.

They stood like that for a full minute. Maybe longer.

“I thought someone kidnapped them,” she whispered, raw. “I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if something happened… I could never .”

L didn’t respond right away. He just pulled her closer, as though he could physically shoulder some of that fear for her.

“They’re safe,” he murmured eventually. “They’re okay. And so are you.”

Her breath hitched. Once. Then again.

And then she let herself cry quietly, into his shoulder, into the space where logic stopped and love took over. Where no amount of brilliance could undo the panic, but the steady feel of him, real and warm and present, made it bearable.

******

 

 

“Hello everyone, I’m Misa,” Misa said, switching from English she used with her kids before to perfect Japanese, her voice was clear and formal. “I’m extremely sorry for my sons’ bad behaviour.” 

The room, still half-frozen from the chaos of earlier, and the sight of L becoming somebody gentler and softer around this woman, blinked in collective silence.

Misa took one step forward, hands folded neatly in front of her apron, and bowed deeply without hesitation. “It is my fault,” she continued, still bowed. “I will try to work on it more and become better.”

Aizawa looked vaguely horrified. Matsuda opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. Ukita coughed into his fist. Misora had the decency to look away with a twitch of a smirk as if saying I have been there. 

L, beside her, blinked slowly. “Misa,” he said softly in Japanese as he reached for her back and patted her gently. “This isn’t a parent-teacher conference.”

Misa straightened, smoothed her apron, and gave her husband a flat look. “Yes, well, that’s because at least in a parent-teacher conference, the teacher isn’t also the children’s father.”

That earned a cough from the corner that sounded suspiciously like a laugh.

Misa turned toward the others. “Please ignore everything you just witnessed in the past ten minutes. My children are generally very well-behaved. I promise. They’re just…” She paused, then added, “...half their father. And that’s where the occasional chaos comes from.”

L gave a small, entirely unrepentant shrug. “That’s accurate.”

“You’re Japanese,” Matsuda blurted suddenly from his seat, his brow furrowing like the realization had just physically hit him. “And you’re—Misa-Misa.”

For a beat, Misa said nothing, blinking once as she turned to look at him properly.

“I was,” she said smoothly. Her smile was polite and practiced, too polite to be warm. “But I’m not anymore.”

Silence rolled through the room again. A few eyes shifted away, unsure whether to nod, apologize, or pretend they hadn’t recognized the name. Mogi and Ukita exchanged a glance that very clearly said, I told you it was her.

Only Aizawa held her gaze. 

L studied his wife in silence, his head tilting just slightly at her phrasing.

Not I’m not her anymore.

Just I’m not.

Misa didn’t elaborate. Instead, she reached up and adjusted the twisted strap of her apron, the movement strangely elegant for something so domestic. She might have been adjusting a couture gown on a runway. The room somehow felt smaller around her.

Then, with a breezier lilt that almost masked the lingering tension, she added, “Now, I just have to decide whether my children are banned from cartoons and puzzles for the rest of the week… or the rest of their natural lives.”

That seemed to break the awkwardness.

“Go easy on them,” Matsuda said quickly. “They’re really cute, you know. Especially the little one—he called the crocodile ‘Mr Cwocodile.’ That’s gold.”

“He also disabled our main elevator lock once,” Misa replied without blinking. “At four years old.”

Matsuda winced. “...Right.”

“At this rate,” she muttered, smoothing her apron like it might iron out her frayed nerves, “I should start charging tuition.”

“Tuition?” Aizawa raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. Genius-level tuition,” she replied briskly. “Because clearly I’ve been running an elite school for miniature mad scientists and nobody thought to pay me for it.”

“I’ll speak to Finance,” L muttered.

“Please do.” She turned, half-serious. “And while you’re at it, maybe add hazard pay. Do you know what it’s like to find a plastic lizard in your shoe at six in the morning?”

“Emotionally distressing,” L offered.

“Exactly.”

Naomi tried to stifle a laugh and failed. Misa turned with a slow, practiced glare—one part tired mother, two parts former model—and raised a brow.

Naomi lifted both hands in surrender, still chuckling.“I’ve got two girls,” she said. “Not quite genius-level, but... those two are definitely a category of their own.”

“You’re telling me.” She said, her expression melted into a tight-lipped smile, something between exasperated pride and shared trauma. “Have girls, they said, right? Sugar and spice and sparkly clips. But I guess they turned the living room into a hybrid war room-slash-research lab by age three?”

“Oh, accurate,” Naomi affirmed solemnly.”And don’t even expect morning peace. Mine hold full-scale Barbie hostage negotiations before breakfast. Tactical demands and high-pitched threats. Once, they made my husband sign a treaty.”

“That sounds like Tuesday,” Misa said flatly. “Yesterday Leo tried to 3D print a key to the snack drawer using clay, Oliver’s crayons, and dental floss. He nearly took out the microwave.”

Naomi blinked. “And I thought mine were intense.”

“And it’s not even the worst,” Misa sighed, rubbing her temple. “Last year, Leo found some schematics online and convinced his brother to help him strap wires to my kitchen timer, a metal salad bowl, and my hair dryer. Called it a science experiment.” She gave a pointed look. “They blacked out half the house.”

“Damn,” Matsuda muttered. “That’s either terrifying or impressive.”

“And their dad,” Misa went on, glaring daggers at L, “walked in, saw the sparks flying out of the outlet, and calmly said, ‘Hm. Promising start.’”

L looked up, unbothered. “I was referring to the wiring layout. They nearly discovered a short-circuit bypass technique I didn’t learn until I was thirteen.”

“This is why our neighbors never talked to us!” Misa repeated, gesturing wildly now. “You remember Mrs. Conway from across the street? She saw Leo in a lab coat and safety goggles in the driveway building a potato battery empire and asked if we were testing chemical weapons.”

“They were very large potatoes,” L offered mildly. “Unusually conductive.”

“Ryuzaki,” she said, voice pitching high with disbelief, “she called the Homeowners Association,” she continued. “And can you just stop encouraging them for once?”

L blinked. “Encouragement is important for intellectual development.”

“Important?” Misa repeated incredulously. “You gave them blueprints.”

“They asked politely,” he said, as if that made it any better. “And Leo promised not to use real acid.”

“Oh my god!!” she groaned, rubbing her face with both hands. “Why did I even marry you?”

“Because I make excellent tea and our children are statistically fascinating.” L replied without missing a beat.

Misa made a sound halfway between a laugh and a strangled scream. “You were supposed to be the sane one!”

“I was never advertised as such,” he said calmly as he gently steered her to the nearest chair. “You married me with full access to my psychological profile.”

“That’s not an excuse!” she cried.

“It was peer-reviewed,” L added helpfully.

“Ryuzaki!” she wailed.

Aizawa had given up and was now pinching the bridge of his nose like it physically hurt to be witnessing this. Matsuda was red-faced and visibly convulsing in silent laughter. Naomi had turned away entirely, biting her knuckle like she was moments from losing all composure.

Misa spun toward them, arms flailing. “You’re all seeing this, right? I’m not hallucinating. This is what I live with. This is every day. So I sincerely apologize on behalf of whatever chaos he’s subjected you all to—past, present, and future.”

Naomi wiped a tear from her eye. “Honestly? I feel less bad about my kids duct-taping a Barbie to our Roomba and calling it ‘Operation Princess Recon.’”

“Your children are amateurs,” Misa muttered. “Leo hacked the school’s lunch schedule to trigger a dessert loophole.”

“Which was clever,” L said without looking up. “He exploited a recurring subroutine in the menu upload script.”

“He was six!!” Misa cried, flinging her hands skyward. “You should’ve grounded him! Not high-fived him!”

“I did both,” he said. “I multitask.”

“Help,” she whispered to no one in particular. “Please help me. I’m married to a cryptid.”

L tilted his head. “I’ve been called worse.”

“By me!” she pointed. “And I meant it!”

Matsuda leaned over to Aizawa. “Honestly, I kind of get it now.”

“What?”

“Why he didn’t need a TV,” Matsuda said. “This is better.”

L just sat down and sipped his tea and looked faintly pleased. Misa, on the other hand, dropped into a chair with the grace of someone teetering on the edge of a meltdown.

“The three of you always give me a heart attack,” Misa said, dragging both hands down her face as she glared at her husband. “They just hacked through the entire security system you swore up and down on your little sugar stash was the most impenetrable code you had ever written—and they’re still practically in their baby teeth phase!” she finished. 

“What’s next?” Misa threw her hands up. “Satellites? Global banking systems? Do I need to start baking cookies for the CIA now just to stay on their good side?!”

L tilted his head. “Would it help if I said their infiltration was technically part of a game I designed?”

Misa blinked. “What game?”

“The one where I update the bunker’s protocols weekly,” L said casually, “and they try to break in without tripping any of the security failsafes.”

She stared at him. “What did I say about  games and puzzles?”

“That they build character,” L replied flatly. 

“No,” Misa snapped, jabbing a finger in his direction. “I said limit them. Limit. As in maximum two per week. Fewer death lasers, more bedtime. Less codebreaking, more cartoons that don’t require a firewall to access!”

L rubbed the back of his neck and had the decency to look guilty, while Misa inhaled through her nose like it was the only thing keeping her from detonating. Her breath was shallow, her composure fraying, but somehow, she held the line.

“Can we call it a truce?” L asked, tone gentler now, edging into coaxing. “I’ll do the bedtime story tonight. You can have your usual full two hours of bath time. No interruptions.” He tilted his head, then added with just enough dry theatricality to provoke an eye-roll, “I’ll even pretend the towel warmer isn’t broken and microwave your pajamas like last time.”

Misa narrowed her eyes at him, lips twitching despite herself. “You didn’t.”

“I did,” he said blandly. “Twice. The second time I added lavender oil. You said I smelled like ‘expensive spa and mild concern.’”

“You’re unhinged.”

“And you married me anyway.” He leaned in a touch, unblinking. “Which, statistically, is your problem.”

Misa exhaled, long and tired and amused all at once. Then, without quite smiling, she leaned just slightly into him, nudging his arm. “Two hours. No interruptions.”

“Not even if Leo starts inventing jet fuel again?”

“Especially not then.”

“Done.” He lifted one pinky.

Misa stared at it like it was both a bribe and a lifeline. Then, with the resignation of someone married to a genius and raising two more, she hooked her pinky around his.

A second passed.

Then Misa stood up with the grace of a woman who had had enough for one day but still had dinner to make. She smoothed the front of her flour-dusted apron, adjusted the twisted strap over her shoulder, and turned back to the stunned task force with a tired, dazzling smile.

“I’d like to formally apologize for the past... twenty minutes,” she said, tone chipper but fraying. “My children are usually quite sweet and civilized. Except when they’re being raised by their father.”

L gave a tiny wave.

Misa ignored it.

“Don’t be,” Naomi said, half chuckling. “This case is extremely taxing as it is. I think this is the first time I laughed in months”

Misa exhaled, hand on her hip. “I’m glad my children could provide some much-needed comedy relief during your top-secret counterterrorism operation,” she said dryly, but not cruel. “Now, if you’ll all excuse me,” she continued briskly, “I’d like to remove them from this apartment room before they launch another unauthorized science project or start reverse-engineering the coffee machine again.”

“Technically it dispenses better crema now,” L offered mildly.

“One more word and I’m reprogramming your bedtime to eight-thirty.”

L went quiet. 

Misa stood in her place, straightened her posture, and faced the Tas Force and and bowed. “Thank you for your understanding.”

With that, she turned on her heels toward the exit door. 

“Misa.” someone called her. 

 

 

******

 

 

“Misa.”

The voice didn’t rise above the low hum of the room, but it cut through it cleanly. Crisp and deliberate. Too precise to be casual yet too familiar to be entirely professional.

Her name landed quietly in the air like a dropped glass, but impossible to ignore.

“Yes?” she said, too quickly. Her voice came out sharper than intended, and her body turned before she could stop it.

Her eyes scanned the room, searching with a careful alertness of someone trying to locate the source of a tremor they hadn’t expected. She looked past Matsuda, past the web of screens and cables, past the steady blink of surveillance monitors and soft electronic glow.

Then she saw him.

He was seated near the far end of the room, just behind Aizawa’s chair. She hadn’t noticed him before—or maybe she had, but her brain had filed him away as just another background figure. Another quiet shadow in a room full of them. But now… now she saw him.

He wasn’t hiding, exactly. But he sat in that specific way some people do when they want to go unnoticed just long enough to be remembered. Elbows rested lightly on the edge of the table and fingers laced under his chin. His posture was still, composed, almost studied. Waiting and watching. His gaze was fixed, cool, steady, difficult to pin down. If he had been observing her, he did it with the kind of stillness that left no trace..

Misa blinked once.

Her eyes narrowed slightly, like the figure might resolve into something else if she stared hard enough. For a moment, it felt like her vision had blurred, like her brain couldn’t catch up with what it was seeing.

And then it did.

Her eyes widened by a fraction. A breath caught high in her throat, sharp and thin. She could hear her own heart now pounding fast and too loud. The soft curve of her lips flattened. Whatever warmth or other expressions had been there a moment ago was gone, replaced with something colder and more brittle.

“Misa,” L called as he noticed her change in demeanor. “Are you okay?”

She didn’t answer.

Her mouth parted slightly, as if the name crawling its way up her throat had arrived uninvited. A name she hadn’t spoken aloud in years.

“Light,” she breathed quietly. Almost like she was asking herself whether it was real—or if a memory had just stepped out of the dark pretending to be him.

And then he moved.

One moment, he was seated. The next, he was already on his feet, striding toward her with the kind of single-minded focus that ignored everything else in the room.

She didn’t have time to step back.

Light reached her in six long strides and pulled her into his arms like he had been waiting years for it. His coat brushed her hip. His breath hit her hair—warm, sharp, too close. He smelled like cologne and something colder underneath. Something she remembered.

Something she hadn’t missed.

“It’s really you,” he whispered, his voice buried in her hair.

Misa froze. Every muscle in her body locked up. Across the room, L’s eyes widened slightly, and for one stunned second, and the entire room went still. Even the quiet hum of the monitors seemed to fall away.

“It’s been so long, Misa,” Light said. His voice trembled just enough to sound sincere. “I missed you.”

She didn’t breathe. Not when his arms tightened. Not when his chest pressed more firmly against hers, as if the longer he held on, the more he could rewrite everything that had happened.

Then, the spell shattered with a snap of spine-deep instinct.

She pushed him hard. Her hands slammed against his chest, sharp and instinctive, driven by something closer to disgust than surprise. He stumbled back, catching the edge of the nearest table. His heel clipped the leg of a chair and for a moment he looked like he might fall.

“Misa—” he said, breathless. His face was unreadable, caught somewhere between confusion and something too close to wounded.

He stepped toward her again, lifting a hand like he meant to touch her face. His palm hovered in the air between them, open as if he actually believed he had the right to reach for her.

He never made it.

L was there in an instant.

No warning, no words. Just one clean, silent movement. In another one step forward, and he was standing between them. He didn’t shove or speak, he simply filled the space that no longer belonged to Light. His shoulder brushed lightly against Misa’s as he positioned himself directly in front of her. He never looked straighter. 

Light stopped short.

His eyes flicked to L’s. The two men stared at each other, and for the first time, whatever mask Light had been wearing slipped just a little. The quiet calculation behind his eyes flickered.

L didn’t say a word. 

But he looked back with that flat, steady, unreadable at first glance that carried the weight of something much heavier. Despite the usual half-lidded laziness in his expression, there was no doubt about what was being communicated. Not a threat. Not a challenge.

A boundary. Cold. Final. Non-negotiable.

Light felt it settle into his spine, that creeping pressure at the base of his neck tightening and cold. He swallowed reflexively. There was something deeply instinctive in it, like standing too close to something that didn’t blink. A protective gravity, sharper than any warning. And underneath it, colder still, was calculation that was pure, clinical, and terrifying in its stillness.

He knew that L was, despite his appearance, terrifying. But this was different. This wasn’t the abstract menace of a man who could solve impossible crimes or unravel a person with logic alone. This was personal. Focused. Direct. The kind of danger that didn’t announce itself because it didn’t need to.

Light’s throat worked. He inhaled slowly, tried to recover the ease in his posture, the composure of the man he used to be. But his voice betrayed him when he spoke.

“Misa…”

He reached forward again, as if he could peel the moment back. As if he could get to her through memory or charm or force of will. But this wasn’t before , and L moved again. Light didn’t see the hand until it closed around his wrist.

Precise. Controlled. Effortless.

He winced.

“I don’t know what this is, Light-kun,” L said evenly. “But I would appreciate it if you kept your hands off my wife .” The words weren’t loud, but each syllable was sharp enough to slice granite.

Light froze.

The words hung there, quiet but unignorable.

My wife.

He hadn’t believed it. Not really, even after everything—the boys calling L “Dad,” Misa answering to “Mum,” the crooked apron around her waist, the way she had collapsed in L’s arms like she belonged there, the whole room folding around their domestic chaos like it was normal. He hadn’t let himself believe it.

But those two words—

My wife —landed like a blade.

They gutted him clean.

The breath left his lungs in a dry, soundless pull. His jaw was locked, though he hadn’t noticed until he tried to open it again.

My wife.

It wasn’t his word to flinch from. But still, it echoed like a slap across the room.

And for once, Light had nothing to say.

Light’s eyes dropped to where L’s hand still curled around his wrist, then flicked up—past the arm holding him back, past the calm, dangerous eyes—to Misa. She was standing just behind L, too close. Closer than she should’ve been. Her arms crossed tightly over her chest, shoulders squared with that cold, brittle edge she used to save for reporters and unwanted photographers.

But now it wasn’t for show. She wasn’t posing. She was protected.

She stood there behind him as if he was her protector, her safe place, and Light didn’t like it. She stood there behind L like he was her shield, her center of gravity, her safe place —and Light hated it. The feeling hit fast and hard, twisting low in his ribs, jagged and unexpected. It started in his chest, burned through his throat, and bloomed behind his teeth before he could reason with it.

Jealousy.

Irrational. Undeniable. Violent in the way it clawed its way up his spine.

Jealousy had never been part of his emotional vocabulary. He had dissected it in others, used it, manipulated it, but never once felt it himself. He was above that, or so he believed. But this… this was different. This wasn’t just possessiveness or wounded pride. It was the slow, precise horror of seeing something that had once been within arm’s reach now orbiting another center entirely. 

Misa standing behind L not as decoration, not as a shadow, but as something fiercely aligned, really unnerved him. She had never stood like that with him then. Not without needing to be seen. And now she didn’t look at him with longing or need or anger. 

She didn’t look at him at all. 

That, more than anything, unsettled him. Because in that stillness, in that choice, he saw the edges of something he had never bothered to want… until now.

Light’s eyes snapped from L’s grip back to Misa, then again, like a man trying to find solid ground mid-fall. He jerked his arm free enough to feel the shift of control return to his side.

“Tell me this is a joke, Misa,” he said tightly, the words gritted between his teeth, low and charged. “Tell me you’re not married.”

Misa’s jaw tightened, but her face stayed still and locked in a practiced stillness that said she had rehearsed the fallout in their mind a hundred times in her head. L’s eyes didn’t move from Light, but there was a question hung between them like a scalpel. 

“Light-kun,” L said, voice still level, but edged with something that wasn’t quite curiosity. “You’re speaking as if you know my wife. And you’re behaving… unusually yourself.”

Light didn’t blink. He held L’s gaze like a challenge, jaw set tight before it twisted into a smirk. “Oh, I know your wife very well.” His voice cut clean through the air—bitter, bright, and sharp with something he hadn’t meant to show. “Why don’t you ask her how well we know each other, then?”

Misa flinched, a breath caught where it shouldn’t have been. A quiet intake, stuck halfway up her throat. She didn’t gasp, didn’t break but her shoulders twitched, and L, standing that close, felt the unspoken coil of tension run through her.

L’s posture changed subtly. One shoulder angling back, just enough to face her without stepping away from Light. Only a slight tilt of his head and the soft, clinical cadence of a question. 

“Misa, is there something I should know?”

The words were neutral, as always. But the silence behind them wasn’t. It hummed with weight.

Misa didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes locked forward, straight into Light’s, cold and unmoved. Her hands stayed at her sides, fingers curled so tight into the fabric of her sleeves that her knuckles had gone pale. Her mouth pressed into a thin, deliberate line before she spoke.

“Nothing worth discussing,” she said. Her voice was steady, but drained of any warmth. Like a candle snuffed in a room that had already gone dark.

L watched her for a second longer, just enough. Then his gaze shifted back to Light and this time, the calculation in his eyes wasn’t masked. It was deliberate, open, and sharp.

Light didn’t retreat. He stood rooted, fury wrapped in restraint, jaw clenched hard enough to ache, eyes lit with something too raw to be hidden.

“You didn’t tell him?” he said, incredulous. “You’ve never told him about us?”

“There was no us .” Misa snapped.

Light’s mouth twitched. He stepped forward half a pace, some ugly flicker passing through his eyes—rage, disbelief, something wounded and ugly and exposed. “You said I was everything,” he hissed. “You said I was your reason to live. That no matter what happened—”

“I was stupid!” Misa’s voice cracked through the room like broken glass. It tore from the bottom of her chest, hoarse and furious.

L’s eyes narrowed. “Misa,” he said. “What is this?”

There was no softness anymore in his tone, not the dry indifference he used in arguments, not the quiet boredom that dulled most of his questions. Just precision. The clean, focused demand for an answer.

It made something in her spine go rigid.

Misa didn’t turn right away. Her gaze remained fixed on Light, her jaw clenched, throat tight, like she had been holding her breath for years and had only just now exhaled. Then, slowly, she shifted. Her shoulders dropped a fraction as she looked up at L.

She took a deep breath.

“It’s nothing, honey,” she said, and the endearment tasted strange in her mouth, too gentle for the bitterness around them. Still, her voice held steady like someone trying not to shatter glass with their next word. “Just a bad decision from the past. One I’d very much like to forget.”

Her hand moved before she could think, brushing his sleeve as if the touch was half reassurance, half apology.

L’s eyes flicked down to where her fingers lingered on his arm. His expression didn’t change at first, but something behind his gaze did. It softened, just briefly, in that imperceptible way only she could catch. He understood, or at least he was beginning to. But his eyes didn’t stay on her.

They returned to Light.

And then they didn’t move. His stare was sharp, unreadable, but alive with motion beneath the stillness. Misa could practically see the deductions firing behind his gaze, each word, each glance, each breath between them being analyzed and catalogued in silence. He was already stacking truths out of tension, out of posture, out of pain.

Light scoffed. The sound was brittle, like it had cracked on its way out.

“A bad decision,” he repeated, his voice dry, bitter, and faintly stunned. “Is that what I was?”

Misa didn’t blink. “Yes.”

The word landed with finality.

It cut through the air like a guillotine, clean and irreversible. For a second, Light looked like he had been struck—not with rage, but something slower, hollower. His lips parted as if to speak, but no sound followed. He just stood there, shoulders rigid, eyes fixed on Misa with a strange, distant focus. It wasn’t the kind of pain that screamed. It was the kind that rang quiet and deep, like a fault line shifting under old earth.

Something old and buried cracked inside him.

He inhaled sharply, blinked once, and forced something that looked like a smile. It twitched at the corners and trembled faintly, as though whatever held it together was already coming apart.

“Then why didn’t you tell him?” Light asked, voice low but rising, like the start of an accusation long overdue. “Why keep it secret if it meant nothing? If I meant nothing?”

He looked past Misa now, straight at L, his voice sharpening with every syllable.

“Or maybe that’s the point,” Light said, his voice growing sharper with every word. “Maybe he already knew. Maybe that’s why he hated me. Why he was so relentless. Why he kept accusing me of being KIRA—again and again—like a dog with a scent he couldn’t let go.” His tone cracked now, disbelief and wounded pride fusing into something bitter. “It wasn’t about justice. It was personal, wasn’t it? You never had a case. You had a grudge.”

L didn’t speak. He didn’t blink. But his gaze remained locked on Light. 

Misa stepped forward sharply, her voice cutting the air before L could even open his mouth. “No,” she snapped. The word cracked like a whip. “No. You don’t get to rewrite this.”

Light turned toward her, but Misa was already moving, her fists clenched and shoulders tight, her breath hard and controlled. Her eyes flared as she stared at him with a fury that had clearly been simmering for a long, long time.

“Before we got married,” she said, pressing each word like a strike, “my husband and I made a choice. A promise that we don’t chase ghosts. We don’t drag old mistakes into something we built with both hands. We don’t dig through the past just to poison the present.”

She took another step, voice rising with each word. “So don’t you dare put this on him. Don’t you even try.”

Light’s mouth opened, but she wasn’t done.

“He didn’t know who you were in my life. Because I never told him. I never gave you that power.” She pointed a shaking finger toward the door and toward everything he wasn’t a part of anymore. “And if he suspects you now? If he looks at you and sees something worth tearing apart? Then good. Because I trust him. I trust him more than I have ever trusted you.”

Light stared at her, breath shallow. But whatever anger had flared in him earlier was slowly bleeding into something more dangerous—wounded pride, raw disbelief, and something unspoken that trembled just beneath the surface.

“Trust?” he echoed, voice brittle with disbelief. A sharp laugh escaped him, empty and cruel. He took a step closer, his posture loose but his words sharper than glass. “You say that like you understand what it means.”

The words had barely left Light’s mouth before something colder settled into his expression. The brittle calm he’d worn like armor cracked, and what emerged beneath it wasn’t grief or confusion but something smaller, pettier, and far more dangerous. 

His head tilted, just slightly. His eyes narrowed, lips curling into something that didn’t quite qualify as a smile.

“Or was that it, then?” he said, his voice dipping low. “You left me… for him .”

Misa blinked.

“You vanished,” Light went on, his voice rising by a notch, more incredulous than angry now. “You disappeared with nothing more than just a note stuck on my mirror. And now, ten years later, I find you here ”—he gestured to the ring on her finger, voice curling—“wearing his ring and raising his children.”

“Let’s do the math, Misa.” His eyes flared. “Your eldest is eight. Nine years ago, you were pregnant with him. And you left me ten years ago. Don’t you think that’s… fast? To find someone new, move on, start a whole family?” His voice curled. “Unless it wasn’t fast at all. Unless this was already happening while we—”

Misa stepped forward. One sharp heel against the tile. Then another. L glanced toward her, slight movement, as if about to intervene.

He didn’t get the chance.

Her hand rose before anyone could react. And it landed with a sharp, ringing crack against Light’s cheek.

Hard. Clean. No hesitation.

The whole room stilled. Someone gasped audibly, probably Matsuda. Aizawa flinched, his eyes wide, shoulders tensing like he’d just witnessed a car crash. Naomi’s mouth fell open, and even Mogi blinked, stunned into rare visible emotion. L’s expression barely changed, but something in his posture shifted. 

Light’s head snapped to the side. His cheek was already blooming red, the imprint of Misa’s hand stark against his skin. He stood frozen, eyes wide in disbelief. His jaw locked tight as he struggled to speak, but no words came.

He looked up again, gaze locking into Misa but she didn’t cower. 

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” Misa said, low and seething. Her voice barely rose above a whisper, but the rage coiled inside it left no room for argument. Her chest rose and fell sharply as she fought for composure, but the weight of ten years pressed hot behind her eyes.

“You don’t get to accuse me—or even imply —that I left you for another man,” she snapped. “Not when you were the one who never treated me like I even existed.”

The room remained silent, thick with it. The only sound was the quiet hum of surveillance monitors behind them, and the faint after-ringing of her slap still hanging in the air.

Misa’s hands clenched at her sides. She didn’t care that everyone was watching. She didn’t care that L stood just inches behind her. For once, the weight she had carried for over a decade burned too hot to keep buried.

“I stayed beside you,” she snarled. “Every single time you brushed me off, every time I asked you if you cared and you gave me that stupid smile like I was a child asking too many questions.”

Light's mouth parted, but she didn’t let him speak.

“I gave you everything I had. Everything I could. And in return, I became invisible. A background fixture. Pretty. Convenient.” She continued, her jaw tightened. “The perfect girlfriend for a man who didn’t actually want one.”

A beat.

Light’s eyes flickered with something like realization. 

“Yes,” she said, catching it. “I know what you said that night after your exam. I heard you. You told your friends I was a ‘phase.’ A PR stunt. A little sugar to keep around until I stopped being useful.”

Light inhaled sharply, stung, but she lifted her hand and stopped him cold with a single, flat gesture.

“I might’ve been the one who left without saying goodbye,” she said, quieter but no less cold. “But how do you say goodbye to someone who already made you feel like you weren’t there to begin with?”

Her words hung in the air like a knife stuck in the wall.  Her eyes, rimmed with heat she refused to let fall, shifted toward the man standing beside her. L didn’t speak, didn’t even blink. He only watched her with that strange, unreadable stillness of his. But there was something raw under it. Something that let her keep going.

She looked back at Light, the hurt in her gaze now hardened into something crystalline. Something finished.

“You used to say my voice was annoying,” she said, voice low and bitter. “That it was too much. Too loud. Too emotional. That it gave you headaches.” Her laugh came sharp and humorless. “But guess what?” she continued, jaw trembling despite her composure. “My husband installed a goddamn voice trigger system in our house.”

Light blinked.

Misa’s chin lifted slightly, daring him to interrupt. 

“He programmed it so the lights in his office turn on when I say his name. So the coffee brews when I complain that I’m tired. So the music starts when I hum a certain song in the hallway.” Her voice wavered, just for a breath. “He recorded me reading the bedtime stories to our kids because he said my voice calms him down more than silence ever could.”

She took a single step forward toward the space between them.

“And when I got sick last winter and couldn’t speak for a week,” she said, quieter now, “he played those recordings on a loop. Because he missed my voice. Not for what it could do. Not for how it looked. Just for what it was.”

Her voice caught, but she didn’t break. She stared at Light like she had finally seen him as he was: a shadow she had once mistaken for shelter.

“So don’t you dare act like you ever loved me,” she finished. “Because love doesn’t tune someone out. And it sure as hell doesn’t act like hearing them is a burden.”

Misa gave him one final look, long enough to strip the last of the illusions between them. There was no hate in her eyes now, no fire, no theatrical cruelty. Just the quiet, brutal clarity of someone who had survived something she once called love.

Then, in one single graceful movement, she turned her back to him and walked toward the door. The silence in the room folded in around her like a held breath. But just before she reached the threshold, she stopped.

Without turning around, she spoke in that calm and clear tone, and with the unmistakable voice of someone who wasn’t asking for understanding. 

“Meeting my husband and deciding I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him within a year might seem fast to you. But for me?” Her voice softened, but every word landed like a nail. “It was the first time something ever felt right.” 

 

 

******

 

 

That same evening, the task force dispersed.

They packed up quietly, exhaustion pressed into their shoulders that wasn’t just from the day’s work, but from the emotional landmine they had all just witnessed. 

Aizawa grunted his goodbyes, muttering something about picking up extra pastries on the way home to appease his wife. Matsuda offered an awkward wave and slipped out humming under his breath, clearly still rattled but already planning to call his sister and tell her he was bringing over ice cream for the kids. Naomi took a long breath as she stepped into the hallway, texting her daughters with one hand and brushing her hair back with the other, her expression softening like she was shedding a skin.

Ukita left in near silence, clapping a hand once on Mogi’s shoulder as they exited the main room together, the gesture saying more than any words might have. Mogi lingered for a beat longer in the hallway, his broad form still as stone. Then, without a word, he pulled out his phone. There was a photo on the screen displaying two sleepy children crammed in one chair, tangled up in a blanket that clearly used to belong to him. He stared at it for a long moment, thumb hovering just above the screen, before tapping in a short message.

On my way. Missed you today.

Somewhere in the warmth of their own lives, each of them tried gently and hopefully to return to some small version of normal.

Back at their quiet and secluded residence, L stepped into his home and was nearly tackled by two small bodies the moment the door closed behind him. He stumbled a half-step back, caught by the full weight of their enthusiasm. Oliver was clinging to his leg, and Leo was already squeezing his torso, giggling in quick, breathless bursts.

L scooped them both up without hesitation, one arm beneath each, their laughter spilling into the quiet like sunlight through curtains. Small fingers tugged at his hair, poked at his cheeks, and jabbered stories into either side of his face with the rapid urgency only children possessed. Behind them, Misa leaned against the doorway of the kitchen, watching with soft amusement and something quieter, deeper, tucked behind her smile.

Later, when the children had finally tumbled into sleep with the limbs of small kings sprawled across their pillows, L found her on the balcony, barefoot and quiet under the first breath of evening air. He stepped beside her, and she leaned gently into him. His hand found hers, fingers twining without hesitation. She tilted her head to rest against his shoulder, and he pressed a kiss to her temple. 

There was nothing dramatic about it. Just something whole and real. And in that silence, their love breathed deeper.

Somewhere across the city, in a high-rise apartment dimmed by half-drawn blinds and the quiet hum of nothing in particular, Light sat alone.

His hand was open and motionless. In it lay something ridiculous: a glittery strawberry keychain with a plastic bow, its rhinestones half-fallen off, the chain bent, one of the eyes on the strawberry cartoon face completely scratched out.

He remembered exactly how it had landed in his palm. It was years ago, just after she had kissed his cheek and nearly knocked over his coffee.

“So Light doesn’t forget about Misa, okay?!”  

She had chirped, her voice sweet and dizzying like soda pop. 

“Even if Light’s brain is full of murder cases and exams and, like, super genius thoughts, he’ll see this little guy and remember, ‘Oh, right! Misa-Misa exists and she loves me soooo much!’”

He had barely looked at it. But he remembered tossing it into a drawer. Probably laughed. And definitely forgot but somehow never got rid of. 

And now?

He ran his thumb over the cheap sparkle like it might vanish if he pressed too hard. It meant nothing. It always had. 

So why did it hurt?

Why had he kept it?

Light leaned back in the chair, tilting his head to stare at the ceiling that didn’t blink back. And for one quick and cruel split second, his brain gave him a vision he didn’t ask for. 

A boy with Misa’s grin and his eyes, were wide, amber-brown and glinting with too much intelligence racing down a hallway lined with toys. Another smaller one with a mouthful of sweets, chestnut hair bouncing as he chased after his brother, giggling like he didn’t know the world could ever be cruel. And Misa… his Misa…laughing breathlessly as she caught them both, hair undone, arms full of life and love and chaos, looking up at him instead of… him.

And when she melted into someone’s arms, it should have been his .

He blinked hard, pressing the keychain against his chest like it might anchor something down before it slipped further away.

Light’s jaw clenched. He never cried. He never allowed himself to feel small. But somehow the silence in his apartment felt too wide tonight. And for the first time in ten years, he found himself whispering something aloud into the dark.

“…You really did love me, didn’t you?”

He didn't expect an answer.

But the damn strawberry kept smiling anyway.

Notes:

Thank you so much everyone for reading 💌

I hope this story reminded you of the love we lost, the love we found. Of how it broke us, shaped us, and somehow saved us. Of the ache of almosts, the weight of past mistakes, and the quiet strength it took to choose someone again and again, even when the world felt like it was on fire.

Light wasn’t perfect. Neither were Misa or L. But they were real. And in the end, they had found something worth holding onto ✨

I hope you felt it too... and I hope someday, you will find a love like that: soft, stubborn, healing… and maybe just a little bit chaotic💖🍓🕵️‍♂️

Notes:

Thank you for reading. Stay tuned for what will happen next!

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 2 of Domestic Mayhem in the House of Geniuses