(no subject)

[knights_say_nih]

Title: Misunderstandings
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Light/L
Disclaimer: So not mine, wish they were.
Summary: L doesn't understand what's gotten in to Light. Or that the rules of the game have changed. There's a hell of a lot L doesn't understand, and that's just not right. Featuring a memory-loss!Light, who is very young, and a jaded, angrier L, who never lets an inch of it slip.

Author's Note: Light/L! I finally wrote some! Why does my favourite pairing have to be so flipping finicky?

L doesn’t understand any of it. He thinks this is probably a watershed occasion. Even at his most confused, he tends to be able to put bits and pieces together, maybe not the whole story, but the outline of the puzzle. After all, he traced Kira to Japan, from Japan to a student of a specific district, from that student to a police man’s family, all the way down to too-pretty-for-his-own-good Yagami Light.

He doesn’t hesitate to admit that there has been a certain perverse enjoyment in the chase so far. If it had been fencing, he would not have hesitated to say that Yagami Light parried his blows with impeccable skill.

Impeccable was not a word he used lightly. And, perhaps this was like fencing, only the list of casualties was mounting, wasn’t it?

They danced verbal circles around each other. They brushed each other’s arms, reaching for paper. Comfort-zones abandoned like the foil that comes around chocolates as they each strive to prove that they’re absolutely completely at ease with each other.

Light has nothing to hide, says the pad of his thumb that smoothes chocolate off L’s bottom lip.

L smiles instead of spits at him.

Words hang unspoken between them, and both of them pretend that their supposedly timid kisses don’t come along with a little bit of teeth. Light has to cover his vicious hickeys with turtlenecks and foundation L steals from Misa’s purse.

Then, everything had changed, and L didn’t understand any of it any more.

It starts with an uncertainty. Light ‘might be’ Kira. L doesn’t understand this, why he’s doing it, what he means by it.

It progresses from there into full blown lunacy.

One moment Light is carrying on an innocuous conversation with him. L is oh-so-solicitously checking in on him. The next, his eyes are wide open and L can see that his heart rate is increased, his breath is short, and he is frightened.

Kira is frightened. He’s never seen anything like this from Light before. He doesn’t fucking understand it. It could be an act, but Kira is a better actor than this. He would make up something convincing.

It had been a game until then, like the most complex chess match with only two pieces that really mattered, dancing around each other and colliding, pulling back and circling again. All of a sudden, it’s like Light has lost the queen. Lost his composure.

L tries comforting him. He tries talking to him rationally. He tries outright goading him. There is not a single glimpse of the shrewd coldness he’d seen in Yagami Light before he was imprisoned. Temper, to be sure, that’s there, but unschooled and hot. He has to wonder if it’s a side effect of the confinement. He has to wonder what on earth he’s going to do.

He does what he always does. He comes up with a plan.

The plan goes off without a hitch. Of course it does, he is L. He planned for every contingency.

But he still just doesn’t understand. How it is that Light would let his own father put a gun to his head and pull the trigger. How he made his very pupils dilate in terror. How it is that L might have been so very wrong (he couldn’t have.) The plan serves only to confuse matters further. Light seems to prove his innocence. All three passengers of the car survive the trip.

L also doesn’t know if he’s going to survive the week if Light keeps having nightmares about his father shooting at him.

“No,” whimpers Light in his sleep, “Father, I love you, please, please,” and it’s not that L needed the sleep, because he was resting against the headboard with a laptop on his knees, to permit Light what he needed to remain functional, hampered by the handcuffs that attached them. It’s that the nagging feeling that he can only presume is guilt is decreasing his efficiency by at least 60%.

This is unacceptable. He doesn’t even understand why the feelings are there in the first place. There was nothing else that could be done. It was simple and efficient, and he has no real regrets. He smothers it, the surge of whatever it was, and watches Light dispassionately. The experience may have been traumatic, but it was necessary.

He will just have to keep on playing, and assume that the parts of Light that were Kira are gone. Or at least, dormant.

The question really is, will they reawaken?

He misses the rules of the new game somehow. Assumes they’re playing, when Light tugs him closer by the chain of the cuff. Accepts the hand stroking the thin skin of his wrist with a little smile. Touches in return, soft and easy on the way up the stairs to the bedroom they share. Licks up Light’s golden throat like it’s made of candy.

Light pulls off his clothes almost shyly, and pulls off L’s clothes almost reverently, whereas before he’d been all ‘worship me’ and L doesn’t quite understand how the loss of a power could change someone so completely.

It’s very easy to blame his confusion on Light’s wandering fingers and mouth. He’s been with lovers before, but Yagami Light is the first to trace each rib with his tongue, to kiss the back of his knee just to see if he liked it, to graze teeth gently down his shoulder. He seems to want to know everything.

He thinks he’s raising the stakes, posing a challenge, when he flips Light onto his back, and reaches for the hand lotion with clear intent.

There was a 39% chance of this happening, so he should have been better prepared, but if Light thought he was expecting it then some of the power of the situation would be lost. In fact, a 62% chance that Kira would use this as motive to pretend to panic and call a halt, they by officially bringing him ‘closer’ and into L’s trust, and still forsaking the physical component. L does not want to make this that easy. Still, next time he will have something more appropriate on hand.

He looks up, expecting to see Kira in Light’s bright, earnest, intelligent eyes.

Kira is hidden. There is nothing there but dazed lust and affection.

This frustrates L into sliding two bony fingers forwards a few seconds too fast. The lies in Light’s eyes distance them somewhat, and he becomes Yagami again, not Light, because it was different when it was polite (transparent) deception. Now L can’t see him, it’s like the dishonesty is really there for the first time, and it makes his heart beat faster.

Yagami’s eyes go wide and fill with trepidation.

L can tell he thinks this is going to hurt. That it already does.

He crooks his fingers, rather than consoling the liar, and Yagami’s spun-sugar body arches and his hands shake. His eyes close tight, his mouth makes an ‘o’ of surprise, and L feels tension easing in his chest as the situation changes and it is not his composure that is lost.

He slips into him, bends the golden-boy of the investigation team nearly in half, with his long, strong legs hooked over L’s bony shoulders and head thrown back on the pillows, and his face full of delicious abandon. L kisses him, like he can drink up Yagami’s sweet cries and distant, treacly moans. He thinks distantly that he should not be doing this.

Not so distantly, that he would like to devour Yagami Light.

No murderer should be allowed to move like this in bed, or to mewl in protest when the kisses stop, like they meant something, or to come without a hand touching him. No murderer’s hips should feel like this under his hands, cut glass bone and pleasant muscle. Yagami’s fingers stutter up L’s back, and the gesture and everything conflicts violently with what he knows in his heart to be true.

L comes, and all of Yagami’s sweetness leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. He knows his anger is born of his own shortcomings, his frustration at the difficulty of the newest puzzle, so he doesn’t apologize, but he does whisper,

“Light is beautiful like this.”

Yagami smiles at him like he has the moon in his pocket, and lets his legs fall down to the bed as L pulls away. A shadow of pain crosses his face. There is a long moment of silence, as their heart rates slow. They even begin to breathe in unison, as though they were the same. As though L could not feel miles of distance between them.

‘I am nothing like you!’ He wants to scream.

Light speaks first;

“Are... we going to keep doing this?”

L smothers the faint twinge of anticipatory lust that brought forth, and clothes himself in raw determination. He needs it, lying naked on the ruined sheets like this. On the ruined Yagami Light, with bruises dusting his neck and shoulders and his legs sprawled wide for L.

“Excellent strategy.”

He thumbs his bottom lip and starts lying to himself, with determination, thinking that if Kira wanted more information on the investigation that this would be the way to do it, and before the concept is fully formed he knows that Kira would know better than to be so blatant. He actually starts to say as much, thinking seriously as he does that he hates second guessing himself. He hates that Yagami makes him do this.

He misses seeing Light’s face change. Blinks in shock when he’s shoved off the naked teenager, and just about snarls in some frustration as he’s dragged forcibly off the bed by the cuff, stumbling awkwardly after Light’s fleeing form.

There is just enough chain for Light to get into the bathroom before L gets his balance. The chain is just thin enough to fit in the crack between the door and frame. It’s just short enough that when Light hits the floor, L is dragged down too.

He doesn’t understand.

He doesn’t understand how it came to lying on a hotel room floor, head rested on his extended arm, trying to cajole Yagami Light into coming out of the bathroom, only to get a few venomous words in return and then heavy silence.

He doesn’t understand how he could have lost control of this so completely. He doesn’t understand how he ever thought it was a good idea to take a teenaged mass murderer into bed to begin with.

Most of all, though, he doesn’t understand how he could possibly understand Yagami Light so little as to be unsure for a whole hour whether he was scheming L’s murder, or trying not to let him see him cry.

Time passes, and then the silence is broken;

“I don’t want it to be true.”

Yagami’s voice is steady and low, strained but not broken, coming sullenly from under the door. He has regained the most of his composure, L thinks, which is good, because he can’t be lying on the floor coaxing teenagers all night.

He doesn’t know why he says it, but he does.

“Neither do I.”

L doesn’t understand any of it, and he hates it.