Work Text:
Dream of the beach. Look each way
For the dim glow of light.
Dan Albergotti, THINGS TO DO IN THE BELLY OF THE WHALE
“We need to wash your suit.” L declares, propping his hands on his hips.
“No.” Light says immediately.
“Filth is - ”
Light presses a tongue to his teeth, leans back on his armchair. He’d listen - and he did, he listened three years ago, pitting brilliant minds against brilliant minds, spinning up extravagant delusions - but L doesn’t mean any of the shit he preaches, so he gets himself comfortable and absently watches L’s mouth move, chapped lips twitching and quirking up, full of false animation.
He is a simple creature with simple purposes: everything he says or does is to annoy Light, or annoy Light. Germs are a real concern, he’s saying, dark hair falling into his eyes, the undiagnosed scoliosis crunching his spine, the shirt he scavenged from the creaking wooden depths of the wardrobe in this house sagging off his shoulders, hypocrisy is a good look on you. There’s a yellowed spot on the hem that he hasn’t bothered washing off, nonsensically explaining himself with we must preserve domesticity, Light-kun and ambling away.
The piano is tuned, but the windows are boarded shut. The door is unlocked, but handguns are lined up on the dining table. The ventilation shaft rasps hot air into the house but at night they take turns keeping watch, and L, for all his oddities and whims, makes breakfast, washes the plates, cleans the muck and dust off the tabletops.
Affordances, L does love that word.
“You,” L says calmly. “Are not listening.”
“Brilliant deduction.” Light mouths the chipped rim of his mug, imagines, for a brief second, the hot bellow of steam and the promise of flavor. It’s impressive that they have drinkable water at all, but - he braces himself and drinks - dishwater, he makes a face, more like.
“You’re sweaty and you stink.” L says frankly.
“You expect me to shower every day? You were telling me just yesterday how important it was to save water..”
“Your suit is sweaty and it stinks.” L amends. “Sentimental value is not like you, Light-kun. If you have a reason, put it into words.”
Thing is, L knows why he’s objecting.
“I don’t want to.” He grits out, faint, baseless irritation curling up. Sentiment isn’t like him - it’s pragmatism, is how he’s convincing himself. His suit is too threadbare, worn too thin, to survive a wash cycle, and if he doesn’t have a suit, doesn’t have his Death Note, he has nothing to build himself into, build himself for.
Thing also is, taste is subjective and my powers are limited, Light-kun, is what L would probably say if Light asked him for cleaner water, and then he would command death herself to bend to her knees, pry the morbid determination from her sealed lips, and ask - demand - for unpoisoned rainfall. Just for a second. Just for a minute. For Light.
He complains, L adapts, he lashes out, L sedates him, and then caters to him.
Light waits.
Hair curling into his nape, breath low, sweaty and too warm but he won’t dare roll up his pants. He sinks deeper into the armchair, and he’ll never admit it, but he likes this house even more than the last. Won’t ever admit that he liked the last one, but he doesn’t need to. Even though he took the lighter from the drawer - his hands that poured the oil, his feet striking the floorboards, his feet fleeing, his body of cowardice, his mouth contorting around his ocean of resentment as he yelled and yelled, L doesn’t need an admission to know.
L knows everything. He is every specter from Light’s childhood, he is the crumbling edges of the desolation, he is every phantom peering their mutilated heads through the shattered windows along the street, he is the unassuming weight of judgement. Light hates it, hates it. He thinks he might die without him.
L is unfit to be an omniscient narrator. Light is too proud to be the rat in the maze. Still, the bottom of his shoes are gritty with sand.
L softens. “There’s a laundromat opposite the street. I can modify the machine so that the spin cycle is considerably slower. Please, I sleep beside you. The stench lingers on your body.”
“Don’t smell me. That’s fucking gross.”
“You’re fucking gross. You’re right next to me and unfortunately, I’m not willing to asphyxicate myself just so I don’t smell you.”
“Don’t sleep next to me then. There are plenty of bedrooms here.”
L smiles, and Light immediately knows what’s coming, braces himself for it, because L will bend backwards for Light’s impulses, his idealistic notions, but uh oh, Light’s forgetting again. The Death Note is hidden on his body, he has his little toolbox of sedatives. It’s Light’s most favorite and most hated part: the reminder of the upper hand. Always subtle.
“Because I love you.” L drawls, tongue sliding across his teeth with sarcasm. He started saying that ever since they came back from the beach, and Light hasn’t been able to get him to stop.
“You’re a fucking joke.” Light says, and his hands don't shake when he puts down his mug.
L sees it anyway, eyes tracing the space they would have occupied if they did. He spares Light the humiliation of smirking, if only because he already won.
*
He knows that L has things he doesn’t, withholding information he doesn’t know, balancing the axis of his world upon his pale, brittle fingers, knowing exactly what he’s doing and relishing it. His Death Note is locked inside the toolbox, except L has a roundhouse kick and trigger-happy hands, fumbling over labelled vials and clear injection tubes. Sees him all the way through. Peers through his flimsy pretenses with finesse but no grace, knuckling his cheek and passing him a mask the next, messing up his doses intentionally but making the bed every morning without fail, venturing too close and then laughing at what he finds. Everything is intentional, it’s part of the long game: how long can Light Yagami entertain me for?
It’s a meaningless world, and yet.
*
L fixes the machine.
Light looks up. “Already?”
L huffs. “Don’t doubt my abilities.”
“I don’t doubt your sleuthing abilities. Forgive me if I assumed that the world’s greatest detective knew how to fix washing machines.” He stands up, feeling oddly twitchy, fingering the button at his throat. If - when - he takes off his suit, it’ll start from there.
“We learned everything.” L crosses the room to pick up his plate, moving to deposit it into the sink. “Life skills class.”
“We?” He supposes it’s an understandable misconception, thinking of L as a vast entity, an organisation of many intelligent people thinking many intelligent thoughts huddling behind the spokesperson of a modulated voice and a letter, but he’s never thought of L as anyone apart from himself. Kill him, was his first thought, and death is only preceded by definition, an overwhelming sense of self. He could never think of L as a phantom. Ego, is the word, is the poison waxing his heart, is the heat slumbering in his lungs, we are one of the same.
L glances back, and he is always so ready to give things up, to let go. “A, B, and me.”
Light snorts. “What happened to C, D, and F?”
“It wasn’t meant to be a letter system, but A never told us his name and Beyond thought it was funny. A, B, and L. Guess who the imposter is.” He laughs dryily. “Childish ostracisation, I suppose? They resented me and worshiped me, so they resorted to throwing sticks and stones. Well, sort of. Beyond had unconventional means.”
“So B stood for Beyond.” Light smirks. L talks a lot, nowadays. “I wonder what L stands for.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“I would, actually.”
“No.”
“I don’t even have the Note. Humor me.”
“Ha-ha.” L says flatly. He dries his hands and walks back, standing next to Light. Today, he is 25 or he is 28. “Ha-ha.”
Light thumbs his cuffs, stands straighter. He smiles - hasn’t had to do that in a while - and feels, imperceptibly, L stiffening next to him. A year chasing Kira and even now, his body hasn’t unlearned the instinct: the immediate reaction to undisguised malice. “L. I love you. Tell me your name so I can fall onto my knees and profess my undying love for you.”
He expects a scoff.
L jerks around, yanks his hair, and fucking bites his mouth. The dry line of his lips parting, quaking, over his own, teeth scraping his capillaries, breath hot and clotting -
He flinches away immediately. “What the fuck.” He breathes, licking his lips instinctively and regretting it, words rasping out, flimsy.
L looks up unblinkingly at him. “Take off your clothes.”
His pulse jerks. “What the fuck. Pedo - ”
He catches L’s condescending grin too late, but by then the damage is irreversible. “The laundromat.” L says, dragging his vowels. He doesn’t sound winded at all. “We’re cleaning your suit. Remember?”
Very calmly, Light steps closer, contemplates for a moment, and then punches him.
*
The last person he unbuttoned his suit for was Misa. He didn’t hate her, he couldn’t help it, and she was never disgusted.
He doesn’t remember her much - not nearly enough - but he remembers the feeling: her lips pressed to his fingers, her eyes glazed with adoration, the comforting - verging condescending - sweep of her hand through his hair as he succumbed to the doubt, burning with baseless rage, desperate and hopeless annd swinging the Death Note around like a fist. Misa, swaying to the thump of his heart and hugging him very closely, her perfume cloying under his tongue, watching him fall apart over himself.
He was suitless and godless, and undignified, but she was never disgusted. Never with him. The feeling wasn't relief - it could be - but it wasn’t. She was devoted to his potential, obsessed with who he could be, and he respects that, he had - has - his fantasies and she had - has? - hers.
In the end, they’re both selfish people.
*
But he does take it off, again. Button by button, his own fingers partaking in the methodical process of his own deconstruction. Start from the throat. Bare the untouched line of his neck, breath throbbing. It’s clean, efficient - a routine he’s performed before, except there’s no mirror, no air conditioner humming in the background, no hot bath drawn for him. Every door awaiting his entry, back then. Here, there are too few doors and he’s sick of the symbolism, superimposing the past onto the present and in the spaces that don’t fit, finding only jagged disappointment, stumbling through his crumbling fantasies, his orderly expectations, his mantle of godhood. He extricates his hands from the sleeves, and feels, for the first time in too long, the perpetual heat dissipating. He swings it onto the hanger and stares at his - after all, it is his only, and it is only a - suit.
He doesn’t want to be a bad person.
Here’s a lie: he’s relieved that L doesn’t kiss him again.
*
L flips down the liquid cap and pours detergent into the small compartment. He turns back to Light, clicking it shut. “Technology is marvelous but nobody’s around to appreciate it.”
“Don’t say things just for the sake of saying them.”
“I like listening to myself talk.” L says nasally, pinching in his nose, in the worst impression of Light he’s ever done. “Monologuing is my favorite hobby. I like my voice so much that if I was just a smidgeon more self-absorbed, I’d abandon my wonderful ambitions of being a detective and become a voice actor.”
“Oh shut up.”
L scrunches up his nose. “No, go again. That’s a lame comeback.”
“I’m not stooping to your level.”
“I thought you wanted to drop to your knees and profess your undying love.”
He’s been doing a very good job not thinking about it until now. “That was before I realised you’re a deranged, delusional pervert.” He snaps.
L nods sagely. “It’s okay, Light-kun. I know how hard you try to dissociate and detach yourself from your identity. It must shock you that other people can tolerate such grave and inaccurate insults about their personhood and remain unaffected.”
“Fucker.”
“You really have to stop with that word.”
Replying is easy. Light presses the machine to start the spin cycle, feeling too warm to warrant shivering but still feeling shivery and exposed. The shirt and pants he’s wearing are too small for him, hitching above his ankles and snagging over his shoulders, but it’s the cleanest thing he could find.
The tumble of the washing machine is soothing. He fixes his eyes on the wall clock - it’s broken, of course - and drifts outside of himself. Are you bad? Are you evil? What would everyone think? Who are you without the things you snatch and the people you exploit?
He should start washing his suit more often.
L snaps his fingers. “Hey. Hey. Don’t dissociate on me. Have some self-discipline.”
“I’m not - ”
“Magazines!” L gasps. He scuttles over and carelessly skims the dust off the wilting rack. “Do you think Amane is in any of them?”
Misa, he thinks, except he doesn’t think about Misa. Suspects that this is one of those things that L knows but will never tell him, and she isn’t worth the effort.
“Can you stop interrupting me.”
“You’re just a terrible conversation partner.”
Light doesn’t dignify him with a reply. He takes a seat and watches L flutter around in faux-excitement, thumbing yellow pages apart, putting on another childish display to get a rise out of him. It annoys him, but he understands - he appreciates it. His paper throne is decaying - so what is the point, what is the purpose, what is human existence but a cumulative sum of the things you have, the people you meet, and if so what is he now, fraternising with the hallucinations in his dreams and suitless, godless, undiginifed - but there is his suit washing, there is L flipping through magazines, there are the clean tiles underfoot, there is something - there’s a name for it, not-love - that he has to occupy, to be occupied with.
“I don’t trust you.” L tells him, not looking up from the page he’s squinting at. “I won’t ever tell you my name, and I won’t ever give you the Death Note. Which is also because I care about you, and I don’t want you to die.”
Light is sick of this iteration, so he brushes his finger against his lips, and he’ll name this an excavation, not a deconstruction. L is digging, always looking, always searching, for Kira. Uprooting his defenses, barelling through his complexes, disassembling Light so that he can put him back together so that he can do it again. It’s not a relief but consider the washing machine, consider the suit, consider his entire existence padded at the shoulders, cinched at the waist, narrowed into one expensive sheet of fabric.
It’s not a relief and in principle, he doesn’t like being known. There’s a word for it. A name. He hasn’t said it, and he never will.
“I know.” Light says. He’s tired. L grins, and Light knows it’s not over. They will never be, existing permanently in the temporary. He drags his mask to his chin and looks at the timer on the washing machine.
It’s a meaningless world, he closes his eyes, and yet.
24 minutes left. And then he can put on his suit again.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done.
Dan Albergotti, THINGS TO DO IN THE BELLY OF THE WHALE