Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

As a rule, Light does not cry.

He is twenty-seven years old and very brave. He is sure of himself and his place in the world and so it does not phase him when unexpected things come his way. He weathers all storms with poise and grace.

But it’s been three hours and no one has shown up to his cupsleeve event.

Shoulders up, back straight, he stares out the glass door of the cafe to the street outside, where the snow is falling in waves. His eyes are entirely dry.

He’d gotten here at seven-thirty this morning to set everything up, then barricaded himself beside the door. The cafe is nicely decorated in reds and blacks, the fancolours of RE:4PER; he’s got twisted streamers and balloons which he’d picked out carefully from a multipack, and confetti in the centre of every table to pull everything together.

More importantly, there are pictures of Beyond Birthday everywhere. He’d spent weeks sifting through ethical fansites and their official accounts to print enough to cover the walls in a collage of wicked smiles and sharp eyeliner and multicoloured hair from every era. He’d even taped up a real tour poster from their second album which he’d bought off eBay for thirty-five dollars plus shipping. This is, technically, a celebration of RE:4PER’s new album, but really it’s mostly for Beyond because he’s the best of them and no one loves him like Light does. He needs to be cared for and protected.

There is Beyond leaning into a mic, Beyond extending his arm on the stage with eyes cleaver-sharp, Beyond perched beside the ocean with cotton-candy hair, laughing a rare bright laugh.

Beyond is the subvocalist and lead dancer of RE:4PER, the best group in the world. They aren’t the most famous, yet, but they are the greatest, because they are the most talented and the most innovative and because they love their fans the most out of everyone.

He is also Light’s best friend. They have not met but this is true anyway. Beyond’s account is the first thing he reads every single morning. It’s the last thing he reads before he goes to sleep. Beyond had told him — and everyone, but Light most of all — that if he waits long enough the whole world will blossom for him like a rose and he will be able to drink the nector from it and that will be his reward for choosing to survive.

When Light looks at his pictures he knows that there will always and forever be someone who loves him, and he knows he can live, and now that he’s brought it to this cafe other people will know that too and so he’s done something real and important for the world.

Except no one has shown up.

He bites at the inside of his mouth, then glances back at the interior of the cafe.

It’s a gigantic cafe by Toronto standards — enough room for four tables and a bookshelf along one wall where they sell albums from groups that aren’t as good as RE:4PER. Along one wall there’s the bar, where they sell coffees and lattes and bubble tea and cute baked goods in the shape of animals on a glass shelf.

He’s pretty sure the baristas are looking at him with something like pity. He doesn’t want that, but he’s not sure what else he wants instead. He’d talked with the manager — a man around his age, impressively tall and broad-shouldered with a serious face and a friendly voice — quite a bit while he was planning the event, and he’d been so excited.

His decorations still look perfect. Utterly flawless, because no one has been here to touch them.

His face feels strangely prickly. He is really very determined not to cry, but he thinks he might possibly end up doing it anyway. Either that or he’s just going to start screaming into his hands or possibly at someone. He’s about to get started on one of the two when the door swings open.

For a second he’s certain it’s Beyond. It’s not entirely impossible — he advertised the event on Twitter, and Beyond obviously has that. But his vision resolves and he sees that it is not.

It’s a tall boy — a man, really — with black hair that falls all around his face, now crusted with snow, and big dark eyes ringed with liner, cut into sharp wings. He’s wearing a long black jacket with a bright red Canada goose logo on the sleeve. The cold comes in with him, sharp and bright, and so does a flurry of snow which swirls around him like something out of a children’s picture book, as if he weren’t a person but rather some sort of fae being.

Light swallows against a sudden flush. He doesn’t have a type because his love for Beyond is pure and clean and singular and so he would never be attracted to another person. Not that he’s attracted to Beyond, either — he simply loves him, and is dedicated to him as a priestess to a god.

The man doesn’t look frightened, exactly, but he does look alarmed, as if the presence of another human being is unexpected to him. It’s an expression that Beyond would never have. Beyond is always certain and brave. He is untouchable unless Light needs to touch him and then he is gentle as a hand laid across a forehead, sweet as honey in milk.

Light pushes a sign-up sheet towards him.

“You can put your name on here for future events,” he says. He’d prepared for this. He knows this script. His plan is back on track. “And you can buy a raffle ticket for two dollars.”

“Oh,” says the boy. He’s got a surprisingly soft voice — gossamer, like the thrum of insect wings. “Hello.”

“Hello,” says Light, then turns to fumble with the freebie packs. He pulls one out and hands it to the boy. “You’re one of the first fifteen, so you can have one of these. It has stickers and a magnet and some photocards. They’re not real. I printed them at Staples.

“Oh,” the boy says again. He carries on staring at Light. Light shakes the freebie pack at him, and he takes it with two fingers, as if it might get him dirty.

“You can buy a raffle ticket,” Light informs him. “The money is going to be donated.”

“I see. Ah. Do you take credit?”

“No,” says Light. “I do not take credit. I take cash. You can put it in this bucket.” He pushes the bucket forwards. The boy fumbles in his pocket and pulls out a battered leather wallet. It looks like it was probably expensive twenty years ago, before it got torn up and water-stained. He slips out a toonie and drops it into Light’s bucket, where it falls with a lonesome rattle.

Up close Light can see that he is maybe older than he’d seemed. He’s wearing so much makeup that it’s a little difficult to tell, but Light can see the faint lines of crows-foot wrinkles in the corners of his eyes, a few strands of grey glittering against the stark black of his hair. He’s maybe Light’s age, or possibly a little older. There’s a silver cuff on his left ear, which looks alarmingly cool.

Light breaks a raffle ticket off his loop and drops half into his raffle bin; he hands the other half to the boy, who looks at it for a second, then puts it in his pocket.

“You need to write your name, phone number and raffle number on the sheet,” Light tells him.

The boy does. Light peers over.

L, it says, and nothing else.

“Your full name,” he says.

“I don’t want to do that,” says L.

“You have to. If someone else has the same first name it could get mixed up.”

L looks down at the list. “But there’s no one else on it.”

“It’s the rule.”

“Okay,” L says. “You can take me out of the raffle, then.”

Light can feel is eyes beginning to prickle. “But you’ve already paid.”

“Alright,” says L, with an alarming degree of gentleness. “Look. How about this. I’ll put a number after it. See?” He writes down 001 after his name. “There. Now I’m L 001. If another L shows up, they can use their full name, or 002 if they prefer.” L reaches over, and for a second Light thinks he’s going to pat his hand, but instead he taps the table twice, gentle in the movement. “Now it’s all differentiated, and everything will be alright.”

Light swallows. He doesn’t know why this makes him feel the way it does. “Okay,” he says. “Good luck.”

“Thank you.”

He points towards the bar, where the baristas are very clearly looking at them. “You can go there,” he says. “They have the cupsleeves. You can get one for every drink they buy, and if you buy a cake they’ll give you a second one. If they run out, you can come here and I’ll give you one.”

L glances down at the sign-up sheet. His name is still the only one on it. Light pulls it away. He doesn’t want L looking. It feels strangely vulnerable, like being caught in his underclothes. “It’s private information,” he says.

“Right. Of course. I’m going to go buy a drink now, Light.”

Something about that sets off alarm bells in Light’s head, but he’s not sure exactly why.

He watches L go. In all the pink and sugar-spun colours of the cafe he looks like a spot of spilled black ink, entirely out of place, until he reaches the decorated back of it, where he suddenly belongs, wreathed with the decorations Light has placed there. He heads for the counter, then brushes the snow out of his hair.

He doesn’t move quite like Beyond, but if he looks close enough that Light can see them blur together in his mind if he squints.

Light watches him purchase one of the bubble teas that he’d helped design and pretends it’s Beyond buying it instead. The drink is black sesame with crushed strawberry and strawberry popping boba at the bottom so it’ll look red and black, just like RE:4PER’s colours — the baristas had smiled at him when he explained how it was meant to work. It looks kind of muddy, actually. In his mind it had been bright, like blood against iron. But the real thing hadn’t stacked up.

Outside the snow is falling thicker. He always forgets how quickly this happens — the grey sky has gone white, and the glass is fogging up at the corners. The cold is palpable now.

He looks back. The boy has found a seat, now, the one at the back nearest the biggest poster of Beyond, the one where he’s sitting high up on a metal beam, staring to the side of the camera, a bruise-purple sunset behind him. L carefully arranging the cupsleeve around the drink, resting it there without locking it into place. He takes a photo. Then he takes it off and places it next to him. He straightens it with two fingers, then takes a sip. He scrunches up his nose, then starts tapping away at his phone.

Light had designed the cupsleeve himself in Photoshop. He’d bought Photoshop just for that, actually. It had seemed like a good investment. He can make edits with it later, if he wants. Maybe gifs. He’s never done that before but he thinks it might be fun. Often in the evenings he feels very sick and alone and he doesn’t like that — he needs something to do with his mind and his hands so he won’t do the things he does, won’t leave himself shaky and ill, sometimes crying but sometimes not, the exact opposite of numb, not peaceful or alive but panicky, his nerves rubbed sick and raw. It is so very hard to be alive and he thinks it would be easier if he were making gifs.

It’s sort of lonely here, all by himself at the door. Or, no. Not lonely. He’s just alone. That’s all.

He decides it’s his duty to make sure his guests are having a nice time.

He stands up and walks over.

He’d assumed that L was texting, but he turns out to be typing into some sort of word processor. He’s doing it impressively fast — Light wasn’t aware that you could type that quickly without a keyboard. He squints to see what it is, but L abruptly puts his phone down, then spins to look at Light.

“Yes?”

It should sound aggressive, but it doesn’t. He sounds like he really wants to help.

His eyeliner, inexplicably, looks even better under the flourescents.

“Are you having fun?” Light asks.

“Yes,” says L, and to Light’s surprise he breaks into a bright smile. It’s a sweet sort of smile, a child’s smile, guileless and joyous. He waves a hand towards his surroundings. “This is very nice. I didn’t think anyone would do anything just for him. I was worried you would cancel it.”

“Why would I cancel?”

“Because of the blizzard,” L says.

“It’s not a blizzard.”

“It is,” L tells him, without a hint of argument in his voice. Somehow, it still leaves no possible room for disagreement.

“Anyway,” says Light, then hesitates.

He used to be really good at talking with people, but he’s lost the knack. Years ago he had as many friends as he could possibly have wanted, and more besides, but now he spends most of his time alone; sometimes he hangs out with his parents or with Sayu. Sometimes his old friends come around, but something always seems to go wrong. They look at him like they pity him. Or he says things he regrets later, or at least knows he’s supposed to regret.

It’s fine, he supposes; there’s nothing to be done. And anyway it doesn’t matter because at the end of the day his real friends are RE:4PER, who are always there for him no matter what. They do lives for him and he can open up his phone whenever he feels like it to look at all their messages, which were meant for everyone but also just for him.

L tips his head towards the chair across from him. “Do you want to sit down?”

“I have to watch the door.”

“But you’ll see it from here. It’s alright. If someone comes in, you can get up and walk over.”

It’s bizarre how much he looks like Beyond. Disagreeing would be like turning down a request from Beyond himself. Light walks around the table and sits, then turns his chair at an angle so he can keep lookout.

L beams at him. “I like what you did with the decorations. It was you, wasn’t it? Did you do the whole thing?”

“I did.” Light looks back at the photos on the walls. It calms him to look at photographs of Beyond. “I printed them from Staples, too. They know my name there.”

“That’s very nice. Which one is your favourite?”

Light thinks about this for a second, then nods to the massive poster on the back wall. This is an official one. In it, Beyond is sitting cross-legged on a beanbag chair, looking directly into the camera. The room he’s in has been decorated to look like a bedroom from the 90s, all filled up with knick-knacks and plush animals and posters from bands that don’t really exist. There’s an electric guitar leaning against one wall, and a lava lamp on the other.

It looks exactly like bedrooms did when he was a child. Not his own bedroom, but the bedrooms of children he’d known. His was always very tidy. Now, when it’s not decorating his cupsleeve event, he has this photo in his room, which is the same room he’d grown up in. He likes to sit in front of it and think about what things were like when he was worried about math and was happy and good and clean. Unbroken.

“That one,” he says.

“I like that one, too,” L tells him. “It’s from their second album, isn’t it?”

“Dream version. I pulled A's photocard, though.”

“Mm. I always pull A. It’s a bit of a curse.”

“I don’t think he’s a very good singer,” Light says.



“Mm. No. I don’t either. Beyond is much better.”

Light stares at the photo.

“It’s got my favourite song on it,” L says.

“Oh.”

“Do you want to know which one?”

“What? Oh. Sure. Yeah.”

“Winter Rain,” says L. He says this very casually. Light turns back. L is staring at the poster on the wall, his eyes somewhat distant. “I like that line … what is it.” He says the line, but he says it in Korean.

Light doesn’t speak anything apart from the odd phrases nearly everyone picks up after spending enough time watching interviews, but he’s heard this song so many times that he knows this line. If you bloom, I’ll bloom too.

He feels something in him blossom.

He has these lines written on a poster on his wall; he has them saved as a screenshot inside his phone; maybe someday he’ll even get something about them tattooed on his body — a flower, maybe or the rainfall it receives.

The song was a gift from the group to him. It’s about a person who suffers and suffers until they bloom beneath the rain. It’s about being fed instead of destroyed.

“The tears that fell became a soft rainfall,” he says. “And watered the weeds which grew from impure ground.”

L smiles. He looks like he’d expected this somehow. He sings the line, sort of — or rather he sings it like a melody, his voice rising in Korean that Light knows but can’t speak. He has a nice voice, silver, shivering within itself; he might be a decent singer if he were trying.

Light says the words inside his head. My hands trembled like the monarch’s wings, but I drank the nectar that you grew.

“It’s like that interview,” he says.

L’s eyes light up. “His birthday live.”

“Yeah. Two years ago.”

“Yes. That’s the one. Where he says — what was it?” He tilts his head towards Light and — although he’s not sure how — Light is very certain that he knows them already, that he just wants to hear them spoken allowed by someone else.

“You have to promise to take care of yourself.” Light knows these words like a prayer, and he repeats them in the rhythm of Beyond’s voice, lilting, falling into itself. “The world is a difficult place, but you have to promise that no matter how hard it gets you’ll think of me and stay. You have to survive at all costs.”

“Yes,” says L. He’s smiling, still, but there’s something a little odd in it. Not something bad. He just looks very intense all of a sudden, and maybe a little sad, too, his eyes perhaps a little wet. Which makes sense. Beyond is important. His words are important. Maybe they’re the only things that matter, really.

Light has been following them. Trusting them. For years, now, he’s been surviving.

There are footsteps behind him. He turns and looks up to see one of the employees walking up behind him.

His name is David Cheung. Light knows him because he’d helped organize this event. He’d been the one who suggested that they use black sesame for the drink, to get the colours right.

“Excuse me,” David says. “We’re going to close the cafe.”

For a second Light thinks he’s mishead. “What?”

“The cafe. We’re closing it.”

It’s three hours early. The event is supposed to go on fr another two hours, and then he’s got another hour to get everyone out and clean up. He’d thought maybe he could make friends during that time. “Why? You can’t close it.”

“Because of the blizzard. Some of us need to drive home.” He waves a hand vaguely towards the other barista, who smiles at Light.

“No,” Light says. He can see what they’re doing, these baristas. They’re trying to make Light feel stupid because no one showed up except L. People could still come and David knows that because he doesn’t want them to because he wants to make Light look like an idiot in front of L, who he just met, and who could maybe be his friend, and Light simply will not allow that to happen. And besides, who the fuck drives in Toronto? This is clearly a lie. “You aren’t going to do that. You’re going to keep the cafe open as long as you said you were going to. Because you made a commitment.” He makes his voice as firm as he can.

David’s face goes a little flat, as if Light had been shouting at him, which isn’t fair because he isn’t — he’s speaking a little loudly, maybe, but he’s allowed to do that, because he’s being polite. It’s okay to be loud as long as you’re polite. He has to stand up for himself.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he says, his voice suddenly clipped and professional, as if they hadn’t been friends just before this. He doesn’t sound angry. He just sounds resigned. “There’s nothing we can do.”

“No,” Light says, and he can hear his voice going a little high, a little whiny, maybe — not whiny, actually, just upset, which he’s allowed to be, because something is going wrong and his feelings are valid and he shouldn’t keep them all inside. “No. You can’t. You’re not allowed. You said. You promised. I put it on Twitter. People are going to come.”

They’re going to show up and Light’s not going to be there and Beyond won’t be either and they’ll think Light lied and they’ll think Beyond can’t be trusted and all he’d wanted to do was to make this perfect little space for everyone, somewhere for people to know they’re loved and important and that they’re going to live and everything will be alright except now he’s made the exact opposite of that and everything is going to go wrong.

“I’m sorry,” David says again, even though he obviously isn’t. “You’re going to have to leave.”

“No. Fucking —“

Suddenly there’s an arm on his shoulder. He looks down.

L is staring up at him with big dark eyes. He looks like some sort of strange and gentle forest creature, something endangered and in need of an esoteric food source.

“Hey,” he says, soft. “Let’s go somewhere else. We don’t need to be here. Won’t it be nicer somewhere else?”

Light almost snatches his arm away. He probably would, if L didn’t look so much like Beyond. “Fine,” he says. “Fine. Fuck this. This place is shit, anyway.” He spins around and looks at the man. “David Cheung. I know your name. I’m going to put it on a Google review.”

The man just stares at him. He looks so tired.

“Fuck you,” Light says. He can’t stand the way David is looking at him, as if he’s acting stupid or crazy or wrong when all he’s doing is explaining the situation.

L tugs at his sleeve. “Come on,” he says, very gently. “Let’s head out, Light.”

Light starts towards his posters so he can collect them and bring them home, but David steps in front of him. “No,” he says. “Out.”

“I need my things —“

“I’ll get them,” L says, “Don’t worry. Here. How’s this. Why don’t you wait outside, and I’ll be right out after you. I know how much they matter. I won’t let anything happen to them.”

If Light doesn’t think too hard he can almost imagine that it’s Beyond talking to him.

He wants to badly for someone to be nice to him because all of this is simply unbearable and he has to do it alone all the time and it just isn’t fair. Someone should take care of him. Someone should tell him it’s okay. He deserves that.

He doesn’t actually like looking people in the eyes but L is looking at him so intently, with such gentleness.

“Fine,” he says, then storms away from the table, past the desk where he’d been handing out his raffle tickets, and out through the door.

It’s snowing hard, now. The sky has gone a colourless grey. In the overhand the snow isn’t that bad but he can see that if he steps just past the stoop it will buffet him. As it is, the wind simply carries the snow past him. It covers the whole world in a fog of white; it whistles in his ears. It’s going too fast and too hard to get into his little safe corner. There’s no one outside but him. The whole world is empty except for Light.

He crouches in the corner. His face is very wet. He wipes at it but it just gets wet again. He guesses he’s probably crying but it doesn’t feel like he is. His chest hurts and his stomach feels hollow. He wipes at his eyes again.

He turns back. Inside, he can see L talking to the baristas. He’s handing them bills, blue and green, crumpled up in his fist. They don’t look happy, really, but they’re taking them. He looks away again.

Everything he did was justified. He hadn’t said anything that wasn’t true, and they were the ones who were breaking all their promises. They’d told him he could have until four o’clock and he’d believed them and now if anyone else shows up he won’t be here and they’ll think he lied to them. There’s no one he can trust. He can’t be trusted.

He pulls out his phone and logs onto Tumblr and explains the situation, and then the door opens behind him and the heat rushes out so he slips it back into his pocket and looks behind him.

L is walking out through the door. He’s wearing his long black Canada Goose jacket again, and he’s apparently found Light’s poster rolls behind the desk because he’s got those in his arms, too, wrapped up in black plastic bags. Light’s red North Face coat is slung over one of his arms, and his Duffel bag is in the other.

“You forgot your coat,” L says. “You must be cold.”

Light stands. He takes the posters from L first and puts them into his Duffel bag, where they belong. His raffle box and his entry prizes and his RE:4PER stuffed rabbit with the pierced war are in there already. He zips it up, takes his coat, and puts it on.

He’s not sure he feels any better, but he does feel less cold. He digs into his pocket for his black mittens and toque, puts those on, then hoists the Duffel bag up and slings it over his shoulder.

“Shall we go somewhere?” L says.

Light feels very hollowed out. “Okay.”

L looks at him for a moment. “Alright,” he says. “Well. I’m not sure who else is likely to stay open. Would you like to come to my place?”

He’s about to say that of course he doesn’t want to do that — for all he knows, L could a a serial killer, and anyway nearly anything corporate will stay open until the snow caves their roofs in and possibly even past that — but then he thinks of the evening that’s waiting for him at home.

His home isn’t bad, exactly. It’s perfectly fine. He likes his parents, and he likes Sayu; he even likes his bedroom with all its books and its little TV. When he sits on his bed and reads his books he knows he’s safe. But he gets so tired of it, of sitting along in his bedroom watching videos while he can hear his parents moving around downstairs, worrying.

They don’t say it, but he knows they do. He can see it on their faces. He can feel the way they fret in the quietness of their movements. Sometimes in the night they’ll knock on his door, pretending to want one thing or another, but really they’re making sure he’s alive and he hates knowing that’s his fault, hates that they think he might die, and worst of all he hates the terror that they might be correct.

He won’t kill himself. But years ago that might have been taken for granted.

“Sure,” he says. “Yeah, sure, fine.”

L smiles bright.

Chapter Text

L’s apartment, bizarrely, turns out to be in Yorkville.

Obviously Light is aware that people live in Yorkville, but it doesn’t feel like it should be allowed. It’s something that people on television do. Not even people on television, really, because no one sets shows in Toronto. Margaret Atwood lives here, and so do people with very high heels and felt coats who like to watch the ballet and buy Nespresso machines with rose gold furnishings.

It’s stupid. It’s like living in Beverly Hills or Kyoto or Manhattan. He’s never actually met someone who lives in Yorkville, much less someone roughly his own age.

He often forgets that people like him live real adult lives. Everyone he works with is a teenager, or else barely out of university.

“How much does your apartment cost?” he asks over the squeal of the subway car. One of the trains on Line Two has been making this noise since he was a child. It’s painful but familiar. It’s an old friend. The car is packed with people in massive coats; someone’s husky is dripping water onto the floor.

“Thirty-five hundred,” L tells him. It’s hard to hear him through his mask, which is black, and which makes him look even more like Beyond than he did before. Light’s is also black and smells like some mysterious chemical. His mother bought a multipack from Costco. “It has a den.”

By the time they step out of Bay station, it’s snowing so heavily that he can barely see where he’s going. In theory there’s a sunset happening, but it’s been rendered invisible; the only sign of it is a slight darkening of the grey that’s become the sky.

The wind shoves him backwards as he walks. It feels a little like being on some half-forsaken polar expedition. He follows behind L like a bird in the wake of another’s wings, duffel bag clutched to his chest to reduce the likelihood of its contents getting wet. L has his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

L leads him through the brick streets and past the massive picture windows which display delicate clothes he could never afford, down a street bordered by trees swallowed in snow, and then into the sudden warmth of a pristine little condo building.

The lobby is painted in shades of cream. There are grey sofas huddled around an electric fireplace, and a massive abstract painting of red stripe against a navy background. He’s pretty sure it’s a knockoff of the Voice of Fire.

There’s a concierge behind the desk, who waves to L has he passes; L offers her a nod, then keys both of them into the elevator bay.

“They’re meant to ID you,” L says, “but they never do. You can always tell when someone’s new because they’ll give you a terrible time bringing your own visitors in. It’s a bit of a hassle, really. It isn’t as if we’re awash in crime here.”

L’s own apartment opens with a keycard, too. Something about this feels vaguely scandalous. It’s like checking into a hotel. It’s the first time in a while that he’s been to someone else’s home.

It looks exactly how he’d imagined the apartment of someone who lives in Yorkville might. It’s sleek, all in off whites with slate accents. He can see a kitchenette around the corner — doorless, but set apart from everything else, a wild luxury in the city. There’s even a closet by the door, half open, in which he can see a washer and dryer crammed in amongst the coats. Also, it’s huge. It must be at least six hundred fifty square feet.

Along the back, there’s a picture window which takes up the entire wall and looks out onto a landscape that is now nothing but grey, the snow falling too thickly for anything to look distinct. There’s a slate couch perpendicular to it, facing a giant television set with a screen tilted slightly away from the window.

There is something intimidatingly adult about all of it. Or else there would have been, if it weren’t for the way L has decorated it.

The entire thing is covered with posters. They’re on every wall Light can see, covering them up so he can barely see any of the paint — an explosion of colour, bright hair against dark backgrounds, bursts of fire from their second album, carnival wheels and cotton candy from their third. Most of them are framed, which gives an odd but not unpleasant effect. It looks the say Sayu’s bedroom used to look, all made up with posters she cut carefully from Tiger Beat magazines, but dressed up.

He’s got posters of every member of RE:4PER, but mostly of Beyond, which is how things ought to be. Light recognizes most of them from the first printing album bonuses, but there are also a few from more esoteric sources — one is of Beyond from their second concert in Seoul, and another is from their first Seasons Greetings, which had been serial killer themed and is now maddeningly difficult to get ahold of.

L must see him looking because he smiles at him. Light decides he likes that smile; he’d like to see it again. He doesn’t know how to make it happen, though. He seems to be doing it somehow but he’s not sure how.

“I’ve been collecting them,” L says. “I get them framed at the print store.”

“Yeah,” says Light. He looks around. “How long have you liked them?”

“Since their second album,” L says, and Light feels a strange rush of envy that he’s known them longer. He breathes in, and lets it pass. It isn’t easy to do that and he realizes this means he’s healed. “They showed up in my YouTube recommendations. I wish I had a cool story. It was that song, FLOWER:TONIGHT. What about you?”

“I saw them on television,” Light says. “When I was at McGill. Studying to be a lawyer. I’m a lawyer, now.”

Really it was after he’d dropped out. Been kicked out. Whatever. There was some mix-up about plagiarism, which just isn’t the sort of thing he would do. He’s not that person. His skin crawls. He lifts his hand to his mouth and bites the back of it. He doesn’t want to think about it. For a second he think he’s going to cry, which would be embarrassing, and also strange, because he’s not upset, because he’s not thinking about it.

He’d been lying on the couch; he’d been there for weeks. He’d been curled up with a blanket around him and a bowl of uneaten soup that his mother had made for him on the coffee table and he’d been so hungry but he couldn’t move and Sayu had sat down beside him and turned on the television and he’d seen them. He’d seen them. Movements sharp and bright, like nothing he’d ever experienced before; bigger than life but simple. Easy. He could reach out and touch them.

There were five of them — three boys and two girls, which he’d learned later was unusual. They were dressed in black faux leather and harnesses and draping cloaks with hair in candy colours. And there was Beyond, the most important one of all, whose name he hadn’t yet known, looking right at the camera, right at him, eyes raven-bright.

He’d sat up and Sayu had looked over at him and flipped over to YouTube and found him another video, and then another, and then she’d tapped around in her phone for a little while and come up with this beautiful thing, which was a variety show where they could talk right to him and play games just for him and he’d laughed for the first time in months and her smile, watching him, had been so bright, and he’d known that he was going to be okay. Because he could be happy, which he’d forgotten.

Their fan name is Killers, which is maybe a little silly, but he’d become one of them in that moment and from then one he’d been fine. He belonged somewhere. To someone. He had a purpose.

He’s been quiet for too long. He realizes this when L says his name.

He looks up. L says it again. He has the sense this has maybe happened more than once. “Yeah?”

“Do you like cats?” L says.

“What?”

“Cats.”

“Sure, yeah, I guess.” He shakes his head. He doesn’t have a strong opinion on them.

“Fantastic,” says L. He clicks his tongue. “Jiji, come on.” Nothing whatsoever happens. “Hold on. I’ll get her. You can put your coat by the door, by the way.” He’s already stripping off his own, kicking off his boots as he does. He tosses his coat into a little pile of boxes by the door. Light stares at it — it seems somehow rude — then decides he probably ought to do what L had said. He pulls off his coat and throws it onto the mess.

Light bends down to untie his boots. The snow is already melting off of them; he’d knocked it off as best he could, but everything trapped in the laces and beneath the tongue is coming off anyway. He’d be more worried if L’s weren’t doing the same. The entranceway is pristine, without any of the salt stains that usually accompany winter. This is surprising, given how careless L is being with his clothes; already the water is beginning to pool, viscous with snowmelt, filled with detritus from the street. There are stones and dirt and little bits of dead foliage on the tile. They’ve had snow for a week and a half and he can’t imagine how L has managed.

He stands. L is meandering around his apartment, peering around his furniture. Light had been so distracted by the posters that he hadn’t been paying much attention to anything else, but he can see now that it’s very sparse — apart from the couch and the television, there’s not much other than two skinny bookcases places somewhat randomly in the middle of the wall and a table with a single chair in the centre.

The table is covered in the usual detritus of living — pieces of unopened mail, an open box of black masks, two bags of small batch coffee with a tiger on the back and white and yellow Hangul visible on the side, and a little collection of what look like alarmingly fancy cat treats. He’s cleared a little circle by the chair. There’s a green workbook in the space, opened facedown; Light can’t see the title from here. It isn’t particularly neat, but it doesn’t look messy so much as lived in.

L strips off his mask and tosses both that and his keys onto it — Light can see what looks like a handmade keychain in RE:4PER colours, red and black — then plucks a bag of cat treats off of it.

“She’s getting so lazy,” L says, then shakes the bag.

There’s a little meow and then the clatter of claws on linoleum. A black cat comes running out from around the corner.

She looks about a thousand years old. Light is pretty sure she isn’t lazy so much as on the verge of death. It’s possible she’s actually on the wrong side of the river. She’s all bones, and her fur is in disarray; she has a pronounced limp which gave the sense that she might at any moment teeter over and collapse. L kneels down and murmurs something to her that he can’t hear, then carefully smoothes down her fur.

There is something strangely familiar about her, which makes absolutely no sense — it isn’t as if Light has some sort of personal knowledge of other people’s animals, and he couldn’t exactly have run across her on TTC.

“Jiji,” he says, “this is Light. Light, this is Jiji.” He’s speaking to her as if they’re business partners. “Do you want to give her a treat?”

He really, really does. He wants to be her best friend. This cat is absolutely about to die at any moment and he would like to take care of her first. “Sure.”

L holds the bag out for him, so he pads over and takes it. They’re freeze-dried shrimp. The bag informs him that they are human-grade and also probiotic, somehow. He takes one out, then kneels down and holds it out for the cat.

She wanders over and puts her face against his hand, then does nothing whatsoever. She smells atrocious.

“You have to show her where it is,” L says. “She’s really lazy.”

Light is really very sure that this is not the problem. He taps the treat, and Jiji licks it up. She stands there for a moment, drools a little on his palm then walks back to L, who sweeps her up in his arms.

“Do you want something to eat? Or drink? I have tea. Or coffee. I’ve got decaf, if you’re fond of sleep.”

“Regular coffee,” Light says. It’s only a little past five, and he drinks so much caffeine that he’s usually fine; if it keeps him up, he’s got his vape tucked into his duffel. He points to the bags on the table. “Can I have that?”

“No. You can have a Nespresso pod. I have … mmm. Arpeggio, Ispirazione Napoli, Ispirazione Roma, Kazaar, and Seasonal Delight Spices.”

“Why can’t I have that?”

“Because the French Press isn’t washed and I don’t want to wash it. But the Nespresso pods are delicious. You’ll love them.” He walks in the direction of the kitchenette. Light goes to follow, but L points to the sofa. “You can wait on the couch. I’ll bring it over when it’s done. If you haven’t got a preference, I’ll make Arpeggio.”

Light heads over. The cat squirms out of L’s arms and follows Light, then preforms a surprisingly athletic leap onto the soda. Light sits down and she crawls onto his lap, where she lies down, reeking, and falls asleep.

He pets her. She’s incredibly greasy but also very soft. He decides he likes her. Animals don’t usually like him. Dogs shy away from him or growl, which makes him feel horrible; he’s always heard that it’s a red flag if dogs dislike you. They can see whatever ugly thing that lives inside him. But this cat knows him. She knows he’s good after all.

L’s couch is neat and soft. There is a blanket folded up neatly at one end of it, and a travel mug with a plastic straw on the low coffee table in front of it. It reads KILLERS in bright red font, then something below in Korean which he can’t read. Under the coffee table, there’s a pack of water bottles and, beside that, a paper box of empty bottles.

He opens up Twitter, just for something to do while he waits. His mother has texted him twice — the message cuts off, but he can see it’s something to do with the snow. He should text her back, but he doesn’t want to. It’s embarrassing to be an adult who has to text his mother when he’s doing things. He should live the sort of life where it isn’t an issue.

He taps into the RE:4PER account. They don’t actually post very much, but he likes looking at it anyway. There’s nothing new today, but he scrolls through for a little while, then flips back to his timeline and freezes.

Right there, on the screen, he can see a picture of the drink he designed, with his cupsleeve wrapped lightly around it.

For a second he thinks maybe the cafe has uploaded it. That would be nice -- it would mean they realized he was right after all and he wouldn’t have to be angry with himself for being perhaps a little more insistent than he might have been if he were feeling better. If he’d been the way he had been, years ago, sweet and patient with everyone around him.

But it isn’t from the cafe. It’s from Rainfalls.

He stares at it.

There’s a strange sort of familiarity to Rainfalls’ profile picture. It’s a drawing of Beyond’s face that someone had done for him, looking up into the sun with a smile on his lips. Light hates it but he sees it so frequently that it has become a stable point in his life.

The photo Rainfalls — L — had taken is really nice, actually. The drink is in focus, the edge of the counter artfully out of fuzzy in the back. He’s overlaid a light filter over it and made the blacks and reds look rich and full. It looks better in the photo than it did in real life. It looks exactly the way it was supposed to. It’s like L had reached into his head then pulled it out.

The caption reads: Good luck on the album, Beyond! We're all cheering for you! ^_^ Then there's writing in Korean. Light has seen these particular characters often enough to recognize them as I love you.

There are footsteps, and Light looks up to see L walking over to him, looking quite placid with a mug of coffee in either hand and a giant bag of senbei tucked under one arm. “Here you are,” he says. “This is a like a restaurant, isn’t it?”

Light stares at him. “What the fuck,” he says.

L’s face goes still. He flicks his eyes down to Light’s phone. “Is there a problem?” His voice is very neutral.

“Yes. Fuck. Did you know? Are you laughing at me? Did you record me in the fucking cafe?”

“What?” says L. He looks genuinely thrown. “No. I didn’t record you. Why would I do that?”

“To post it online. To make fun of me.” Something occurs to him. “That’s how you knew my name! Jesus.” He shifts to stand, but the cat doesn’t move at all; if he tries, he’ll simply fling her onto the ground, and he hates L but he doesn’t want to kill his cat. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Light.” L puts the drinks down. “You’re the one who’s been harassing me online. Have I ever done anything to you?”

“I don’t care what you’ve done to me.” He really doesn’t. The cat twitches in her sleep. “I don’t matter. I’ve seen how you talk about them. And I’ve seen the stories you write. You talk about them like they’re animals. It’s disgusting, it’s practically assault —”

“It really isn’t,” L says. He sets the senbei down. “I understand that it’s upsetting to you.”

“You made them hurt each other.” His face feels very hot and wet.

“What? In my fic? They didn’t really do any of those things, Light.”

He wipes at his face. He’s pretty sure he’s crying, but he doesn’t know why. He feels calm. He’s laying out his concerns very evenly. That’s his right as an adult. It’s communication. He doesn’t go to therapy anymore but they’d told him he was supposed to do that. “They did. In my head. I hate you. I hate you.” He wipes at his eyes again. His fists come away wet. His throat hurts.

“Yes,” L says, softly. “I can see that. I’m sorry. I should have told you that you — ah — knew me. But I thought — well, there aren’t many of us, you know. In this city. I didn’t think you’d mind so much once we met.”

Light pushes the heels of his hands against his eyes. “What do you mean there aren’t many of us?”

“Of people who love him,” L says. “It’s just you and me. We’re all alone.”

Light looks up.

L is staring down at him, wide-eyed, earnest.

“I’m going to go home,” Light says.

He can’t read the expression that flickers across L’s face. He doesn’t like it as much as when L had smiled.

“Okay,” says L.

Light pulls up Google Maps, then stares at his phone. “The train isn’t running,” he says.

“No? Maybe it’s because of the blizzard.”

“It’s not a blizzard,” Light says. He wishes everyone would stop calling it that. It freaks him out. He switches to the GO Transit website — there’s a red extreme weather warning across it, and then a note about a derailment.

He hears a sound come out of his mouth that he hadn’t intended to make, a sharp whine that sounds like metal grazing across metal. “How am I going to get home?”

“The GO busses, I suppose. But they’re a bit of a mess because of the — snow. How did you get here? You’re from Mississauga, aren’t you? They’ve had service disruptions all day.”

His dad drove him in. He doesn’t want to say that. It makes him feel like a child. Then something occurs to him, and he looks up sharply. “How did you know that?”

L stares at him.

Light pushes his hands against his eyes again.

“Look,” L says, softly. “You can try to make your way back if you want, but I expect it’s going to be miserable. Or you could just stay here. I promise I won’t bother you. You can leave in the morning and we’ll never talk again.”

Light thinks about this.

The thought is repulsive, but the alternative would be to climb onto one of the GO busses and hope for the best. He hates them at the best of times, and he doesn’t want to get trapped along the side of the road in one. And anyway he doesn’t want to go back to his little childhood room to lie on his bed and think about everything that’s happened today; he can already feel the hollowness settling in, the sensation terrifyingly familiar.

“Fine,” he says. “Fine. Sure. Whatever. Okay. I’ll stay.”

L sits down beside him, then picks up his coffee and takes a sip. “Right,” he says. “Fantastic. I’m glad this is going to be really normal.”

Chapter Text

L’s food selection is, in Light’s opinion, slightly questionable.

After Light had skillfully avoided L’s attempts to draw him into conversation, L had made some vague declaration about time and hunger and grouchiness, then disappeared into the kitchen. Now, with a flourish, he’s setting two styrofoam bowls of instant Ichiban udon directly onto the coffee table. He isn’t even using a coaster.

It’s a step up from ramen, but Light feels it’s a host’s duty to provide their guests with something that isn’t instant. Beyond would never do this.

L hands him a pair of slightly wet chopsticks to eat with — he must have just washed them — then sits down with a pair of unopened takeout ones for himself. The chopsticks are dark wood with a blue asanoha pattern. They look very expensive. L’s say irasshaimase on their flimsy paper.

Without asking, L turns on the television, flips it to YouTube, and turns on RE:4PER’s performance of FALLEN:NIGHT. Then he opens up his chopsticks, snaps them apart, and rubs their ends together. “What’s your favourite performance?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” Light says. L shrugs, then curls up against the arm of the sofa, catlike. He takes a handful of senbei from the bag and eats them.

It’s nice, actually, sort of. Light has never watched RE:4PER with anyone other than his family. Only two of his friends still speak to him, and he likes them — they’re nice to him, and they never get mad at him when he says the things he says — but often they talk to him like they’re at a sickbed. He can tell they’re only humouring him when he talks about RE:4PER, that they’re doing him a favour.

Often, he feels as though he couldn’t stop talking about Beyond even if he wanted to. It’s as something had crawled down his throat and forced it out of him.

He glances over. L is watching, really watching, his eyes wide and bright, fixed on the screen as if it were displaying some sort of holy object.

He looks back.

Beyond is wearing a long black cloak in this one, and a cropped top that shows his stomach when he lifts his arms. The others are dressed similarly. The dance involves a lot of body waves and hips, so he sees Beyond’s stomach often.

There are five of them — Beyond and Alter and Blackberry and Quarter and Blues-harp. Blackberry and Quarter are women, and the rest are boys, but the stylists dress them in more or less the same way, which Light thinks is neat. They dance in a way he associates more with girl groups than boy groups.

Alter is, by far, the most popular member. Light can admit that he’s attractive — he’s got a pretty face and a wraithlike way of moving. His eyes are gigantic and he always looks like someone has just told him for the very first time that bad things exist in this world. Unfortunately, he’s also evil, and untalented, and he sucks all the attention away from Beyond, and he should possibly die. Blackberry usually has long black with a streak of colour, which she plays with during interviews. Sometimes she chews on it then looks shocked when someone points it out. Light likes this, even though she is also untalented and takes attention away from Beyond, albeit less so than Alter. Quarter is beloved by lesbians, and she’s the one Light hates least — she flops all over the her chairs in interviews and growls in songs and rolls her eyes when people ask stupid questions and she’s had short hair since debut. She’s got a tattoo of a bone saw on her inner arm, which is very cool. Blues-harp is also in the group.

Right now, they’re in a formation, lifting Quarter above their heads. Her arms are spread, as if she were rising towards a god; her expression is simultaneously furious and ecstatic. Beyond has one hand under her foot and the other planted firmly on her back to keep her from toppling over. His expression is intent.

Beyond never laughs. He rarely smiles. He sits in the backs of interviews, unspeaking, watching, like a bird of prey looking over a domain which belongs to someone else but which could someday become his. When he does speak his voice is low and rasping; it sounds like something that’s crawled out a crypt. What he says matters because he says so little of it.

Many people don’t like him because they claim he’s mean or rude or he says things that are too dark but Light knows he’s just shy and careful and says the things which need to be spoken. He doesn’t pretend that things are good all the time. He tells people they need to survive even when the world is unbearable.

The song ends. He looks over. L puts on another one.

“Hey,” Light says. He feels very strange. “What era do you think had the best hair?”

L sits up immediately. That smile is back again, startlingly bright. “Carnivale,” he says, immediately. “I’m biased because it was my first comeback, but I really do think it was the best. Purple looks good on him, don’t you think?”

“Everything looks good on him,” Light says.

L nods, sagely. “That’s true.”

He wonders what L might look like with purple hair. He looks so much like Beyond that he might as well try. “I like it black.”

L beams at him, as if this were the smartest thing anyone had ever said. “Do you? I like that too. Which styling do you like best?”

And then they’re talking just as if they’re friends, just as if it were natural to do so, and Light finds himself leaning towards L to watch his dark eyes glittering, that bright smile spreading across his face.

Most of the time, talking is so difficult. He knows just what to say but he’s not always sure what it means. A conversation is a game he knows how to win. He puts the words in the right places and people smile at him and love him and take his side. Here, though, it’s simple. He knows RE:4PER more than anything on earth and so does L. All he has to say is the winter live or the photocard with the feathers and L knows exactly what he’s talking about and what it means.

And anyway L is just someone Light knows from the internet. Light doesn’t even like him. He doesn’t have to worry about saying everything in just the right way.

To his surprise and his bewilderment, he even finds himself barking out a laugh, the sound and the texture of it startling and half-forgotten and he thinks, well, maybe he can put up with this for just a little while.

After a while, L unfurls himself. “Well,” he says. “I’m exhausted. I suppose you’ll want to sleep. Let me show you where.”

Light had assumed he was sleeping on the couch. He’s never actually done that, but it’s what people do on television. Instead, L leads him to what is clearly his bedroom.

At the doorway, L turns back to him.

For a second Light thinks he’s about to be propositioned. Heat rises up along his throat; he’s never been with a man before, not really, not in a way that counts, and he doesn’t want to be with L but he thinks it might be interesting to turn someone down; novel, at least, a little glimpse of what he should already have had at twenty-seven years old. But L turns away and waves him in with such a prefunctory air that Light is abruptly, almost paralyzingly mortified. He can’t imagine where the thought had come from.

L’s bedroom is small, with more cream walls and a massive window overlooking the same scene as the one in the living room had. There’s a queen-sized bed with blue-grey covers and a proper headboard made of dark brown wood; it looks like something straight out of a catalogue. In the corner, there’s a desk with a blue iMac and a clutter of papers tossed over the whole thing. With a little jolt, he recognizes a CBT workbook — they’d given him the same one during his brief and mostly disastrous time in therapy. It’s in his bookshelf at home, half-filled, turned backwards so he doesn’t have to look art the spine.

“You can keep your bed,” Light tells him. This feels very obvious to him, but L only tips his head.

“You’re the guest,” L says. “It’s fine. The couch is comfortable enough.”

Light looks back at the bed. It’s unruffled, the sheets smooth and flat, the pillows arranged as neatly as a magazine spread. There’s no bedside table, just a power bar with nothing in it.

He’s suddenly very sure that L doesn’t sleep there at all, that the couch is his place, that he’s giving it to Light not out of kindness but because he doesn’t want it. He’s not sure what that means but he thinks it means something.

“Sure,” he says. “Okay.”

L nods to him, then walks past him to the drawers. “Do you want something to sleep in?” he says. “That doesn’t look comfortable.”

“I guess.” He’s wearing a button-up and slacks. They’re fine, if not particularly suited to sleep.

L digs around a bit, then tosses him a black T-shirt and sweatpants. “Well. I’ll leave you to it, then. The washroom’s just next door, if you need that.”

He turns and leaves.

Light strips out of his pants, and puts L’s sweatpants on over his boxers. It’s strange, being half-naked in someone else’s house. It feels bizarrely vulnerable. It doesn’t feel like it should be allowed.

He hesitates at his shirt, then pulls it off. He doesn’t like wearing short sleeves. He doesn’t like to look.

He puts on L’s shirt instead. It’s soft, and smells strangely of spice. He can’t quite figure out what it is. Cinnamon, maybe. Lavender, definitely. He grabs a bit in the front and pulls it to his face so he can breathe it in. It’s nice. He wonders if L would smell the same up close.

There’s a knock.

He looks up.

“Are you dressed?” L says, voice muffled through the door. “Can I come in?”

He’s like a cat, really, one of the ones that meows and scratches at the door when you leave them along for even a second. Light can’t figure out why he wants to be around so badly.

He considers. If he wanted to, he could simply put his own shirt back on. After a moment, he decides he doesn’t really care. “Yeah,” he says. “You can come in.”

The door opens. L walks in sideways, using his shoulder to hold it open; his hands are full of blankets. The one on top is very clearly one of the Chapters bookshop blankets, huge and soft and red, patterned with plaid. It looks like something meant for a cottage. “I’ve brought blankets,” he announces, redundantly. “In case you get cold in the night. It’s not usually that bad, but with the snow —”

He freezes.

Light looks at him.

It’s clear that he’s caught sight of Light’s arms.

They don’t feel like his, really. They feel like something he can use, now and again, to make himself feel better, to feel okay, feel like he can make it from moment to moment. It isn’t something he wants to do except for when it is and then he can’t help it.

His left is traced with scars, and with things that aren’t yet scars, leading up from an inch above his wrist; there’s another set, higher, up on his shoulders now hidden by the sleeves of L’s shirt, but they don’t really matter; they’re from the summer, from when he tries to hide, from when the has the presence of mind to care who might see. His right is clean below the shoulder, except for a knick just below the bend of his forearm.

L doesn’t count, not really. He’s not a real person. He’s just someone on the internet. Even if he’s here now, he doesn’t count.

He watches L’s eyes skitter up and down his skin, and then away, as if Light might not notice. People always act like he can’t tell where they’re looking. They think he doesn’t know his scars and his cuts have a gravity that swallows all the light in a room.

L draws in a breath, and opens his mouth.

“It’s none of your business,” Light snaps.

L looks up at him again. “No,” he says. His voice is quiet. “You’re right. It’s not.”

He looks — something. Light isn’t sure what. Sad, possibly, but not pitying.

“Survive at any cost,” Light tells him. His voice comes out more venomous than he’d expected. He’s not angry, not really. He just means it. That’s all.

L meets his eyes. “Yes,” he says, very softly. “You’re right. Of course you are.” He walks over and sets the blankets down on the food of the bed. “In case you get cold. If you need anything else, I’ll be on the couch.”

He smiles at Light, quick this time, something in it vaguely reassuring, then nods and leaves, letting the door fall shut behind him.

In the morning, Light wakes warm.

For a second he can’t remember where he is. The sheets are soft and heavy all around him; it’s comfortable in here, much more so than in his own room, which is perfectly pleasant but gets drafts in the night. Then he remembers — he’d gone home with Rainfalls, for reasons he simply can’t explain to himself.

With reluctance, he pulls himself out from under the sheets. They’re soft. He thinks it might be nice to hide in there all day.

Instead he heads for the bathroom. It’s small and neat and clean — small enough that he can touch either wall if he hold his arms out, but big enough that nothing has gotten crammed together. The walls are another exhilarating shade of cream, and there’s a clutter of makeup products which he cannot identify sitting around the edge of the sink. The black stick is obviously eyeliner and he assumes the several tubes and tubs that are the same colour as L’s skin have something to do with foundation, but he has no idea why there have to be so many of them. He can’t make heads or tails of the green one. Curiously, he squirts a little of it onto his finger, then rubs it into the heel of his hand, where it mysteriously disappears.

After a moment’s consideration, he decides he can’t just stand around playing with L’s makeup. He uses the washroom for its intended purpose and then, bereft of a toothbrush, squeezes a bit of L’s toothpaste onto his index finger and does his absolute best. It’s Sensodyne, tasteless. He rinses, then walks out into the main room.

The dawn light has spread across the apartment, golden still, casting long dark shadows across everything. He walks over to the window and looks out.

The snowfall has nearly ended. Now the snow drifts past, glittering and strangely idyllic. It’s left a heavy layer across everything — the streets, the expensive cars parked along the sidewalks which look sleek even half-buried, the trees whose naked branches look beautiful, new, laced with snow. It blazes white and blue and golden in the light; it’s nearly painful to look at.

As he watches, a flush of red spreads across it, as if the sun had dipped down to paint it on fire. He presses two fingers against the glass to watch, then turns and startles.

L is right there beside him, curled up on the couch beneath his blankets. They’re pale blue and he looks a little as if he’s been covered up by the snow too, a human shape but abstracted, safe but vulnerable within that safety. He watches that, too, the rise and fall of L’s body strangely comforting, then pads towards the kitchen, as quietly as he can.

He’s always thirsty in the morning, and he can’t remember if you’re supposed to ask before you fetch a glass of water from someone else’s home, but he doesn’t think L will care.

He stops.

The sink and the counter around them are filled with dishes.

They look like they’ve been tossed in there; they fill the entire sink then spread out across the counters. There are cups and bowls and plates and a wooden cutting board that looks expensive and a little garden of chopsticks sticking up from various vessels and scattered across the tile. The mess looks like the rings of a tree — he can look outwards and watch the utensils getting more and more esoteric. In the centre of the sink L has metal spoons and plates and mugs; leading outwards there’s a ramen spoon in a cereal bowl, a mixing bowl with bits of noodles still in it, an empty tin of conger eel with a cheese knife balanced across its top. Partway through, it looks like he’d used two reusable straws as chopsticks. At the very far edge, stacked on top of one another and spilling out into the remainder of the dishes, there are nothing but takeout containers.

This is no good. L can’t make anything like this.

There’s a cloth lying across the tap. He walks closer. Even from here he can see that the food has gotten crusted to the dishes. He turns the water to hot to fill the sink up, then starts gathering up the takeout containers and the tins strewn throughout the dishes. It feels like weeding a garden. He tosses them in the garbage, then steps back. Already it looks better.

He reaches for a bowl of what looks like the dregs of chilli, then draws back rapidly. There are maggots moving inside it. He uses the ramen spoon to scrape that into the garbage, then drops the now-empty bowl into his hot water. It should sanitize fine.

It takes a while to wash. He fills the entire drying rack twice; in between he carries everything out to the table in the central room. He can figure out where everything belongs later.

Once he’s done he cleans around the inside of the sink, which had gotten crusted with a thick slurry. He rubs until its shining again, then wrings the cloth out, rinses it, and washes off the counter.

He steps back. It looks nice, now. Tidy and clean.

He turns around.

L is standing in the doorway, watching him.

His eyes are very wide. Jiji is in his arms, nuzzling against his throat. He must have washed off all his makeup while Light was asleep, and his face looks softer without it. More human. He hadn’t done a particularly good job of it, though, and there’s still liner smeared around his eyes; his hair is wild and dark and soft. He’s wearing a grey hoodie, heathered. In the half-light, his pupils look black.

Light points towards the table. “I don’t know where to put those,” he says. Then, “If you put them away I’ll make breakfast. The French Press is clean, now.”

L stares at him. For a second it looks like he’s going to say something, but he doesn’t. Instead he puts Jiji down and walks over to the table, so Light heads for the fridge. It’s nearly empty but there’s a carton of eggs half-full, so he pulls those out to make something nice and warm for them to eat.

Chapter Text

He can’t sleep. He isn’t sure why. He’s done everything he’s meant to do — he’d turned his phone screen to blue at nine then laid beneath his sheets, breathing deep and trying to think of nothing. But his head still feels like there’s a hungry sort of animal in it, trying to gnaw its way out.

It’s not as if he isn’t tired. He’s done so little today but it feels like he’s been walking for days, the inside whittled out of him then filled up with an ugly rot. His skin prickles and his eyes hurt. He is sure he could cry for hours if he let himself.

But it doesn’t matter. Everything is still circling through him and he can’t do anything curl against his knees, his blankets pulled tight around himself.

At last he sits up and pulls out his phone to see what RE:4PER is doing.

It’s three AM, which means it’s five PM in Korea. Alter has taken a photo of himself in their dorm room, smiling at the camera. There’s Korean beneath it but he has no idea what it means, and anyway he doesn’t especially care about anything A has to say.

Beyond hasn’t said anything today. Light tugs at his hair and squeezes his eyes shut. He thinks maybe he’s crying. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t want to. He just wants to know what Beyond is thinking. It’s not fair that he can’t know.

He considers getting up and doing what he does. It would be easy. He knows it’s not supposed to make him feel better, but it always does, at least for a while, except for the times when it doesn’t.

The razor blades are right on his bedside table. They’re hidden in an empty box of Bonten rice candy. He buys refill packs and slips them out when needed, for this or for when he has to shave. A single-blade razor gives the cleanest shave and he likes his skin smooth and soft and smelling of sandalwood aftershave so men will turn to look at him and know he’s clean and handsome and doing everything right, that he could be kissed if they were so inclined, that maybe they’ll do it in their heads when he’s not there and the thoughts will drift towards him and make him whole. He blocks the box out of his mind when he’s not using it but he knows it’s there, his little escape hatch.

He stashes them everywhere, just in case. They’re here and they’re in the back of his phone case and a secret pocket in his wallet. It isn’t as if he needs them but he needs them to be an option.

But right now he lifts his head and picks up his phone again. He taps into YouTube and searches for RE:4PER’s performance of Winter Rain. They’ve never done a televised stage — it’s all been in concerts. He likes that; it means they’re just for him. For all of them, for the Killers, which is the same thing. People who don’t know RE:4PER shouldn’t be allowed to look at it because they wouldn’t understand.

When that finishes, he lets it autoplay the next song, and the next, and then the next. After the third he realizes that he doesn’t feel any better at all. He thinks maybe he feels even worse.

He puts his phone down and picks up the box. He opens it, then closes it. The paper is worn soft from all the times he’s done this. Maybe he’ll have to buy a new one soon. He can eat the candy then give Sayu the sticker. He opens it again and slides the refill pack out and looks and looks and then he puts it back and shuts the box and pushes himself out of bed.

His face is wet again. He opens his door and walks down the long dark hallway to his parent’s room.

If he were six years old again they would hold him and tell him he was alright. Maybe his dad would look under his bed and prove there was nothing there. He’s never been afraid of monsters but he liked when his dad looked anyway. It made him feel safe even if he was scared of something different. They’d let him sleep between them and he’d wake in the morning feeling okay because he was six and beloved and anything and everything could happen to him but he would always be saved.

Even as a child he was scared all the time but it was different then because that wasn’t his responsibility. Now he’s supposed to get better all on his own.

He opens the door. His parents are sleeping, soft lumps under the bed. Sometimes they wake up when he comes to them but today they don’t so he has to walk over himself.

His mother’s side is closest to the door. He lays his hand on her shoulder.

She shifts, and makes a noise that’s not quite speech, then sits up and looks at him. He can’t see her expression in the dark.

“Light?” she says. “Are you okay?”

He doesn’t know the answer. He stands there looking. Beside her his father is rising, too.

“Light, honey,” she says. “Are you hurt?” Her voice is neutral, but he can tell she has to work to make it so.

He wishes he weren’t the sort of son that made his parents worry. He makes them so scared because they don’t want him to die and they won’t believe that he doesn’t want to either.

He finds living vey hard and he isn’t very good at it anymore but he wants very badly to do it anyway. He needs to feel the bite of cold on his skin and hear Beyond’s music in his ears and someday taste the lips of another man. Even in the worst possible moments, even when existing feels like plunging his arm into glass he wants to be alive; he hurts himself because it helps to make that so but he knows they don’t understand and he can’t blame them for that.

“No,” he says. His voice comes out shaky and wrong. “I’m not hurt.”

“Do you want me to make you something to eat?” she says.

Beside her, his dad is looking at him. In the dark Light can’t see his eyes. They had better than ths, once. He had so much potential.

“No,” he tells her. Then, “Can I sleep in here?”

“Of course.” She flicks on the light and then all of them are there, both of his parents watching him with a calmness they must have practised in the mirror.

She stands up and gets the sheets from where they’re buried in the closet, then lays them out on the ground for him, beside their bed. He lies down and buries himself inside those blankets and shuts his eyes, then listens to her climb back into her own covers.

There’s a snap as his mother flicks her bedside lamp off again. The red of his eyelids goes black and he lies there, feeling not quite safe but something akin. He pretends he’s six after all and tells himself that it’s going to be alright.

And thing is he does believe it. He knows he’s not supposed to, that he’s supposed to sink into despair and helplessless and unending misery, but he does. It’s not forever. He’ll be good again. He doesn’t know when or how but Beyond says it all he time — he just has to hold on, he has to wait, he has to walk through the rain even when he can’t see anything ahead, and then he’ll bloom like the flowers that seemed dead beneath the earth.

He pulls the blankets tight. He doesn’t sleep but the sluggish daze that follows is close enough; it’ll tide him over until the next night.

Chapter Text

Light likes his job. He really does. He stocks the shelves and tells customers where to find the things they need and it’s important work because people need to know which albums they should buy and which photocards will make them happy; it’s the only thing which tethers so many people to the earth.

Alice and Will is a few minutes walk from Bathurst Station. It’s a Kpop and anime store, big by Toronto standards but crammed so full of albums and stationary that it feels tiny. There are anime posters on the walls and the ceilings which make it look like he’s being watched, all these sharply drawn eyes from shows he’s never watched staring down at him. It is always packed, and now with the customers here it is claustrophobic, sluggish with the heat from other their bodies, the sound of their voices echoing off of every surface. The colours are too bright and the sounds are too loud and he thinks of Beyond beneath the stage lights, his grace despite all else.

Today he is safe behind the checkout counter where no one can touch him. They talk to him all at once and they make his head hurt but they aren’t allowed where he is and so they can’t get close. He’s wearing his thick forest-greens sweater, the one that wraps him up and keeps him safe. His mask helps a bit; it keeps most of his expression to himself.

He’s supposed to chat with them, so he does, regurgitating sentences from his well of things that human beings are meant to say. When he works, his voice gets so artificially high that it hurts when he comes home.

His coworker is a girl named Linda, who is sweet, just out of university — OCAD — and trying to find work somewhere else. She’s full of potential and she isn’t very good at her job. Right now she’s talking endlessly with one customer while the rest of them mill about, unassisted, except for when they walk over to ask Light questions which he has to answer while he checks other people out and wraps albums with these stupid fancy bows they make out of ribbons and remembers to ask everyone if they collect points and if not would they want to start. His manager is somewhere in the back, doing something with stock or emails or something else that allows her to sit down and talk to no one.

But he doesn’t mind because he’s a team player and he never gives up. He knows the answer to every single question they ask. He is going to make their days good and he is going to make them feel valued, which could save a life; it’s these tiny interactions that matter, these things people carry home like glowing talismans in their pockets. His shoulders hurt from standing all day.

Whenever he gets tired he thinks of Beyond’s schedule. Beyond wakes up before dawn every single day to practise and work. He dances until his body falls apart and then he simply keeps going. A five hour shift would be nothing to him and so Light can do it too, no problem.

He’s drifting in and out of thoughts about Beyond’s schedule when the girl in front of him starts telling him about That Group.

Customers are always telling him about That Group. Either they think he’s never heard of them and must be informed, or they ask him for his opinions on outfits they wore one time six years ago.

“They’re unbeatable,” this girl is telling him as she drops a stack of albums onto the counter. “They’re the best in the business.” All the albums she’s buying are from That Group.

“They’re not,” Light says. He isn’t supposed to tell people this — his manager has informed him of this many times, but he’s so exhausted, and he has a headache, and no one is helping him.

She startles.

Light is pretty sure the customers aren’t entirely aware he’s human. Even when they treat him nicely, he’s decor to them. Sometimes they tell him strange things; they treat him like a confessional because he’s not real to them. They tell him about friends who’ve left them and illnesses they’ve kept to themselves; sometimes, if he isn’t well, if he hasn’t thought to hide them, they catch sight of his scars or his things-that-aren’t-yet-scars and their eyes get watery and they tell him about people they’d known or things they’d once done and they make him promise he’ll never do it again and he says yes, thank you, of course, because that seems to make them happy. Probably they’ll write about him in their journal later and feel better about themselves and it’s nice he can do that. He so often upsets people. He is a trigger and a point of concern. He is his mother crying in her bedroom and he is his sister’s first panic attack, but he can let a stranger think they’ve saved him and then maybe all this can be of use.

“They’re overrated,” he says. “You have to look at smaller groups. Under-appreciated groups.”

“What?” she says.

“You should listen to RE:4PER.”

“I mean,” she says. She sounds a little prickly, which is annoying. He didn’t say anything bad. “They’re okay? They’re mostly autotune, though. And isn’t one of them kind of an asshole?”

He feels anger rise hot and bright in him.

He breathes in like he’s supposed to. Last week his manager said she couldn’t give him any more chances; if he yelled at one more person, she’d have to let him go. She sounded very sad when she said it.

There’s a line behind this girl. They’re watching him — not intently, just the way people always watch him, like he’s a screensaver or a fish tank meant to entertain them.

“Okay,” he says, very calmly. Then he puts the albums below the counter.

“Um,” she says. “Can I have those?”

“No,” he says, also very calmly. “You can buy something else, or you can leave.”

“What?” Her voice has gone high.

He points to the rest of the store. “We have lots of albums from different groups. And we have postcards and keychains and stationary. You can buy any of those.”

“What the fuck?” she says, then shakes her head. She looks a little surprised at the fact that she’s sworn, which Light thinks is the appropriate reaction. She shouldn’t be swearing at him. “What are you talking about?”

The rest of the line is watching him properly now. Someone with candy-blue hair has paused by the Kihno-format albums to watch him openly. He guesses he’s a real person now. Or else he’s a more interesting variety of fish. He has to be careful so his store will be represented well. “There are a lot of different options,” he says. “I’m sorry you won’t be able to buy these today, but I’m sure you’ll find something else you’ll like just as much.”

All of a sudden his manager sweeps in beside him.

Naomi is a tall woman, nearly as tall as him, with straight black hair and an abrupt way of moving that somehow manages to make her look both uncertain and full of purpose. He can’t figure out if she likes him or if she doesn’t. She’s nice to him, but she also keeps telling him she might fire him, so there are mixed messages.

“I’m so sorry,” Naomi says to the customer. Then, “Light, go take your fifteen.”

“It’s not time yet,” he says. “We’re in the middle of a rush.”

She shuts her eyes and breathes in deep, then looks at him again. “That’s okay,” she tells him. “We’ll manage. You look tired. Go take your break.”

He’s about to argue further but she looks so serious that he decides she’s probably right. He really is tired; he’s always tired, no matter how much he sleeps. He walks out from behind the cash and heads into the break room.

He never knows what to do on his breaks. The break room is also the storage room; it’s an unfinished basement stuffed on all sides with cardboard boxes and crates filled with the rolled-up posters one can buy for 2.99 alongside an album. Sometimes the posters get ripped and Linda cuts those up and turned them into collages which she tapes up along the concrete walls. It smells musty and the half-light emanating from the single light bulb feels somehow grimy, but it’s as pleasant as it can be.

He sits on the boxes of unopened albums, then pulls up the live Beyond did a few months ago, the one with all the aegyo. Beyond is very good at aegyo. He always looks a little embarrassed. Maybe it’s a bit silly, but it makes Light feel better.

He’s brought two oranges with him. He eats one of them, then puts the other in his pocket. Linda never remembers to bring food. Usually he brings extra and pretends he did it by accident. He picks things that could be a mistake — an extra fruit, a granola bar, a Ziplock bag of senbei which he lets her eat nearly all of.

He’d bring proper food for her if he could but he’s pretty sure that would be too much. There’s a balance to be struck. He doesn’t want his friendliness to come across as something it isn’t. He’s pretty sure they all know he’s gay, which helps, but even so.

Men frighten him in a way that is both abstract and concrete. He’s never slept with one, never tried to, but he understands what it means to be an object of their desire, a thing like them but not quite, with his yellow skin and his eyes they call dark even though they aren’t. Back in McGill they’d touched him sometimes in the queer centre, where things weren’t supposed to be that way. They’d laid their hands across his arm as if he were an exotic pet and talked to him with an unearned familiarity because he wasn’t just him; he was every gay Asian boy they’d ever known or seen on television or fantasized about and they saw in him the desires they wanted him to have, some of which were his and some of which weren’t. He is ashamed now of the things which had aligned with the boy they’d imagined him to be because it feels like a capitulation to these men who had never hurt him but whose fantasies hung around them like a miasma, some of whom were his friends, who had been kind to him, who he’d laughed with and adored. He carries that shame with him into the dark and it turns his body away from him. He can never belong fully to himself again.

And so it’s not quite the same but he doesn’t want to do that to another person. He doesn’t want to be the story of a man in someone else’s life.

When he comes back upstairs the rush is still ongoing, and the noise is like insects under his skin. He has to push his way through the crowd. They part for him, but not enough that he can’t still feel the heat of them as he passes.

Linda is behind the cash. There’s a girl in front of her unloading her albums onto the table. He puts the orange down for and smiles. She smiles back, then waves at the counter.

“Naomi wants me on cash,” she tells him. She’s using her customer service voice, probably because there’s someone right there. “She says she needs the shelves organized.”

“It’s busy.” He’s so much faster than her on the till, and anyway he doesn’t want to be thrown into the crowd without the barrier of his counter. Already his skin is prickling at the thought.

“I know,” she says. “I’ll be fine. Um. Thanks for the orange.” She puts it under the cash; they aren’t allowed to have food out on the counter, although Naomi never minds when things are quiet.

He thinks maybe he’s in trouble. Maybe he should have kept his mouth shut. But he’d been calm. He hadn’t yelled or said anything mean. He’d expressed the problem clearly and offered a solution. So probably this is just fine. That’s what his therapist would say, if Light still spoke to him.

Linda is already checking the customer out. He leaves the cash and walks to the shelves.

“Hello,” says a silvery voice. He turns.

L is standing there, staring at him.

He isn’t dressed up this time. He’s wearing a pale grey sweater and faded blue jeans which are a little too big for him and a black mask that takes up the majority of his face. There’s a tiny bit of eyeliner around his eyes, heavily smudged; it looks like he’d tried to take it off and done a very bad job of it. Without his wings it’s clear that his eyes are too big for his face and that he is staring more than smouldering.

Light had seen him in his apartment but it’s different beneath he harsh retail lights. Here his features look ungainly, like they weren’t all meant for the same person, as if someone had constructed him out of pieces that had been left lying around. He isn’t ugly but he isn’t handsome either. Instead he’s fascinating. He’s like the game on the back of a cereal box, mundane and simple but in need of solving anyway.

Light doesn’t like to look at people but thinks he could stare at L for a while anyway, trying to figure out how all the pieces go together. He doesn’t look all that much like Beyond right now.

“What are you doing here?” Light says. His voice comes out more abrupt than he’d intended. He’s forgotten to use his customer service voice.

“It’s a public store,” L tells him, blandly. He does not blink. His eyes are gigantic. “Aren’t you meant to be a lawyer?”

“I am. I’m on my break.”

L pauses. “You’re on your break from being a lawyer?”

“Yes.”

“When you’ve got your lawyer break at twelve on a Tuesday you work at a Kpop store?”

“Yes,” Light snaps. He can’t see why this is so hard to understand. And yes, sure, he isn’t a lawyer exactly, but he’d done a year of school heading in that direction and he’d done it at McGill. He’d let people say all sorts of things while he did it. That should count for something.

L blinks at him, slowly, lemur-like. Light can practically hear the Nat Geo narration. “Right,” he says. “Well. I came to get RE:4PER’s Season’s greetings.”

“We don’t have them yet,” Light informs him. “They’re on order. You should look at our Instagram. That’s where we post the new releases. I take the pictures.” He takes some of the pictures.

“Yes, but it’s incomprehensible. They’re nice pictures, though.” L pauses, then says, all in a rush, “Thank you. That was nice of you. I hadn’t — I hadn’t been feeling very well.”

Light has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. “What was nice of me.”

“The …” L waves his hand. He is staring at Light as if he expects Light to somehow read his mind. He looks so intent about the matter that Light is temporarily convinced this might actually be possible, but after a moment of mutual staring he discovers that he is no more psychic than he’d been a minute ago.

“Anyway,” Light says, trying to get things back on track. “It’s good you came. I need your phone number.”

For reasons he cannot begin to comprehend, L flushes, just slightly. It’s faint enough that it might be nothing but the lighting except that L has been looking at him with so much intensity that Light hasn’t taken his eyes off of him. "Why?" L asks.

“For the raffle. You didn’t bring the sheet when we left. I need to be able to call you if you win.”

“Ah.” L pauses. “Did anyone else enter?”

“I need to run the numbers.”

“Perhaps you could just tell me now. Given the limited number of entrants.”

“I need to run the numbers,” Light says, again.

“Right,” says L. “Do you have your phone?”

He glances over at Linda, and then at Naomi. Linda is busy wrapping something up for a girl with cotton candy hair — much slower than he would, he notes — and Naomi is talking with two girls who look about twelve years old, helping them find some album on the other side of the store. Phones aren’t allowed on the floor, but they look occupied, and anyway this is Killers business, which means it’s more important than his job.

He pulls out his phone, unlocks it, opens up the contacts app, and holds it out for L.

L plucks it out of his hand. He does this by the corner, so their fingers don’t come the slightest bit close to touching. Then, instead of typing anything in, he turns it around to look at the back.

There’s a photocard of Beyond in there. It’s from the WATCH:YOU album, in which they’re themed like evil guardian angels. It’s the boyfriend photocard. It’s close-up of Beyond’s face, but it’s clear he’s lying on his stomach, spread across a bed with deep grey sheets. He’s got his arms wrapped around a pillow, his eyes half-lidded as looks straight into the camera. His hair is silver, and there are white feathers settled around him. Light has put it in a protective sleeve so it won’t get damaged.

“Do you collect photocards?” L says.

“Kind of.” He does. He spends hours on eBay looking for listings and Reddit for trades. Once, briefly, he’d considered moving to America so he could use Mercari. It’s calming. There’s a rhythm to it that soothes him.

“You should come look at my binders.”

“I’m not coming back to your apartment until you take down your fics.”

“Well,” says L. “I’m not going to do that. But you know where it is, if you ever change your mind. I’ve got all the Lucky Draw cards from Hatch.” This was the album from the year a series of foul rumours that Beyond was dating Misa-Misa, an idol from the admittedly popular but basically garbage group Lovenote started springing up. Light wonders if he’d go to jail if he murdered L to get ahold of the cards.

He’s pretty sure the year Hatch came out was also the year L started doing translations; Light hates him, but he reads them because he’s the best at it. He never falls into the same traps other translators do. They make Beyond sound so cruel when he talks about the other members, and they make it sound like he refused to take responsibility for the DUI he got four years ago, which wasn’t really that big of a deal actually; people made a lot of it, but really he was being targeted because he was famous. He wasn’t drunk, just maybe a little tipsy, and people drive like that all the time. Light’s mind goes a little fuzzy when he tries to think about who he knows who would do that, especially at twenty-four, which was how old Beyond had been at the time, but he’s sure it’s fine because Beyond wouldn’t do something that wasn’t.

L turns the phone around. The screen has gone black. L presses the side button to wake it up, then turns it around and points it at Light’s face.

Nothing happens. L turns it back to himself, then tips his head. “You don’t have facial recognition?”

“It’s not very secure. Someone could point your phone at your face to unlock it, for example.”

“Hm.” L holds it out again. Light unlocks it with his thumb, and L takes it back, then types in his phone number. He hands it back to Light. He has entered himself in it as L 001. “There,” he says. “Now you can message me if I’m the lucky one of all the entrants.”

Light has the distinct impression he’s being made fun of, but L’s expression is perfectly placid.

“Okay,” he says. “Well. Do you need help finding something else?”

L looks around. “I was just looking, really. Popping in. I didn’t know you worked here.”

Light doubts this. Everyone on the internet seems to know where he works and they’ve all got opinions on the matter, but maybe L is stupid. “Do you want the RE:4PER albums? We got the new one in yesterday.”

“I’ve got all of them.”

“We have the first and the third, too. But we only have the Y version of the first.”

“Yes,” says L. “I’ve got those.” He perks up. “Actually, I thought I might get Jungkook’s Golden album.”

“Well, you can’t.”

“What? Why not?”

“You’re a Killer,” Light says. He can’t believe he has to explain this. “You can’t buy other people’s albums.”

“I’m not allowed to like two groups?”

“No,” Light says, firmly. “You aren’t.”

Naomi is suddenly beside him. Light hadn’t known she could move that fast. “Light,” she says. “We’ve discussed this.” The turns to L. “He’s joking. Of course. I’ll show you where it is.”

“That’s alright,” L says. “Actually. I’ll get the new RE:4PER album.”

“You just said you had it,” Light says.

“Yes, but my friends don’t. So I’ll get it for them. They live in England. Mm. Actually. I told you I pulled A, didn’t I? I might as well try again.” He drifts over to the R section; Light and Naomi trail after him. L has a funny sort of way of moving, as if he were simply ending up in places by accident. People do not move out of the way for him, and it takes an abnormally long time before they’re in front of the shelf. “Have you got any stock int he back?”

“These are the only ones we have,” Naomi says. “Sorry.” Her eyes are sliding back and forth between him and L with a curiosity Light does not understand.

“Right,” says L. There are six of the new albums on the shelf; he pulls five off and cradles them in his arms. “I don’t want to take all of them, in case someone else wants one.” He gives the leftover album a long look, as if it were shelter dog he was tragically being forced to leave behind, then shakes his head. “New fans and all that.”

“Do you, ah —” Naomi says. “Do you want me to take them to the cash for you so you can keep looking?”

“That’s alright,” L says. “This should be fine. Light was very convincing.” He smiles at her, then winks at Light.

Light stares at him. He has absolutely no idea what that could indicate. After a second he decides it means he’s actually very good at his job, no matter what his Naomi seems to think. He is guiding customers towards the things they actually want, which is a commendable quality in an employee of any industry. It’s sort of what he’d be doing as a lawyer, really. Influencing people. So it’s not as if he’s been lying.

Apparently none of this has been enough to earn him back his spot on cash, so he watches from the shelves as Linda cashes L out. The albums are $36.75 each; with tax, it costs L two hundred and eleven dollars, which he pays with a tap of his phone and an utterly unruffled expression. Linda wraps two of them up in shiny blue paper and yellow ribbons, then places the rest naked into a plastic bag.

L does not look at him as he leaves.

When he gets home, his mother is waiting for him with what she refers to as a little snack — a plate of apples and crackers laid out in a neat circle on a plate. She has this idea that being hungry makes him volatile. She does not seem entirely aware that he is twenty-seven years old and can buy food on his way back if he gets hungry. Union Station has bento shop now and everything.

He doesn’t mind, though. Not usually, anyway. Sometimes being treated like a child makes him feel as if he’s being strangled but he doesn’t feel prepared to be an adult just yet.

He eats and tells her about his day, leaving out the part where his manager told him he couldn’t work at the cash anymore and removing L from the story altogether, then goes upstairs and falls backwards onto his bed. He does not bother to turn on the lights first and so his room is soft and blurry, lit only by what falls through the cracks between his curtains.

He lies there for a moment and then he curls up, his knees to his chest, then presses the backs of his hands hard into his eyes.

His legs hurt from being on them all day and his shoulders ache from standing for so long. His mind feels as though someone had removed it with a melon scoop then plopped it back in all mushed up and full of lint. Work would be fine if the customers would stop talking to him. There are simply too many of them, and they want far too much. He’s not a person to them and so he owes them everything.

At last he pulls his phone out of his pocket and taps into Alice and Will’s Google reviews so he can report the bad things ones about himself again. It’s not fair for the customers to be saying horrible things about him. He’s a private citizen. It’s slander. He should sue them, possibly. If he’d finished law school, he’d know how to do that.

There’s a brand new review. The name simply says L. His profile picture is of his cat.

It reads:

I went to this store for the first time. It exceeded my expectations. It was well-organized, if slightly cramped, and had a robust selection of artists. I was assisted by an excellent employee — who I will not name for privacy reasons — who provided useful guidance and directed me towards the items I needed. Alice & Will is lucky to have him. I will return again.

Chapter Text

He’s sitting in the family car outside of the hospital where his therapist is. His mother is in the driver’s seat and he’s got his temple against the glass, his eyes shut.

He doesn’t want to look. He doesn’t want to see. He wants to sit here with the cold against his skin and nothing inside his head. There’s no way to empty it out, but he can almost imagine otherwise if he repeats all the titles of RE:4PER’s songs like shodai, a beautiful thing to clear the ugliness inside of him.

He thinks maybe he should learn Korean so he can repeat the lyrics, too. He’s good with languages — he never got enough practise in Montreal to be conversational, but he can get around in French if he wants, and he’s got enough Japanese that he can understand nearly everything his mother says when she ues it with him.

His mother says he doesn’t have to go in. He just has to be in the parking lot, close enough that it’s an option. He can sit in the car or he can go in. He’s not allowed to talk to her about RE:4PER while he does.

It’s the one condition his parents have imposed on him for staying at their house and he hates it because it’s a reminder that it’s really theirs and not his. Sometimes he can forget that he’s only a visitor, but this hour makes him remember.

He doesn’t feel unwelcome or unwanted. He just feels like an adult who was forced to come home to his childhood bedroom because he can’t be left on his own.

He can’t think of a single thing to say that isn’t about RE:4PER. They’ll be releasing tour dates soon; he would like to tell her that. He’s got something to look forward too and so there isn’t any need to worry.

He listens to the thrum of the car’s heater, and he feels the cold against his skin. And then, when the hour is up, he hears her breathe out, soft.

“Okay,” she says. She doesn’t sound upset, not really. Maybe a little sad, but not upset. “Is there anywhere you want to go?”

“No,” Light says. He opens his eyes and blinks at the sudden brightness. After an hour in the dark, it’s overwhelming — the sky is a sharp clean blue, and the snow in grey piles along the asphalt. Its surface has crusted into a sheild of ice which glitters with holographic light beneath the sun, looking vaguely absurd against the filth. The hospital is in front of them. There’s someone sitting on the curb smoking with an IV in their arm.

His therapist’s office is buried deep in the basement, beside a chapel with stained glass and a giant crucifix bearing Jesus with his heart ripped open. It was a little frightening. They’d put LED lights behind the stained glass so it would glow.

The last time he’d been in a therapist’s office was a little over a year ago. His therapist had been a thin, bright-eyed man in his fifiies. He’d had phreneology models on his shelf and he’d said things to Light which Light had been embarassed to repeat, and so he hasn’t. Maybe he should tell his mother but he doesn’t want to. He’d been twenty-five at the time, which was simply too old for that sort of thing to happen, and he’d waited so long for the appointment. They’d been so excited about how much better he was going to get. OHIP had cut him off when he’d refused to go in to the next two appointments, and now his parents pay two hundred dollars an hour for him to sit in the passenger seat.

“Let’s go to Second Cup,” she says. “I’ll get you something to drink.”

“Okay,” he says. His throat is dry.

She pulls out of the parking lot and he rests his forehead against the glass again, then shuts his eyes again.

He hates coming here. He can never make it through the night before without the things he does.

She means well. He knows this. He wishes it would work, too.

In Second Cup she orders a honey vanilla tea. He orders a con panna, then gets a butter tart and a croissant, nominally both for himself. She refuses to buy treats for herself but she’ll eat half of his.

His mother tries to pay but he gets his credit card in before she can. She beams at him, looking disproportionately delighted by this.

Sometimes people think he doesn’t have any empathy or interest in them at all, and that just isn’t the case. It’s that everything is going too fast and he can’t figure out what he’s supposed to do or how he’s supposed to do it. He wants to be nice to people but it always goes wrong. He’s holding onto the edge of a moving train and if he reaches out to do a single thing other than that he’ll fall right off.

He comes back to where his mother is sitting, sets their drinks down, then rips the paper bag the baked goods came in carefully in half. He sets them out like it’s a plate, then hands her a little wooden stir stick so she can break off what she wants.

He sits down across from her.

Often he thinks she’s going to say something about these hours they waste and all the money he’s burning thorugh, but she never does. Possibly she read about what to do in a book; he understands that he is being very carefully coaxed into something, like someone drawing a cat into a carrier by leaving it with treats inside.

He’s never said anything about it, either, but today it all feels like far too much.

“I’m trying,” he says.

She looks up, partway thorugh sawing the butter tart in half. Her expression is neutral; he can tell she’s putting a lot of work into making it do. “I know, honey,” she says.

“Okay,” he says. Then, before he knows he’s going to say it, “I met someone.” He catches the expression on her face. “Not like that. Just another person. We’re not friends or anything.”

She goes back to splitting up the butter tart. He’s pretty sure she’s doing that so he won’t be able to tell what she’s thinking, but it’s a wasted effort; Light can never read anyone’s expression anyway. He doesn’t really get how people are supposed to do that. The idea that you’d just look at someone and magically know what they’re thinking sounds stupid. He used to be very good at reading people but he’s never been good at knowing what they’re thinking.

He wouldn’t take a pill to stop being autistic if it were offered to him because then he wouldn’t be able to love RE:4PER the way he does, but he thinks it would be convenient if people came with subtitles. I’m disappointed in you or I’m proud of you for staying alive — it’s one or the other and the required response is the same so it doesn’t really matter, but he still wishes he knew.

“Is this the person you stayed with after your cafe thing?”

“Cupsleeve. Yeah.” He hadn’t told her much about that. He hasn’t told her much about it past the fact that it exists; he likes his parents, but he needs pieces of his life that belong only to him. “I’ve talked to him online before, though.”

This reminds him. He’d looked at the raffle sheet the night before and realized there wasn’t really any point in running it through a random number generator after all. “Hold on,” he says. “Sorry.” If he doesn’t do this right now, he’s going to forget forever.

He types L a quick message.

Congratulations! You’re the winner of the BEYOND DAY event. You have won the first place gift basket, consisting of: Acquarium of Life: Saltwater Version, a Beyond Rabbit plush, three independently-printed photocards and a stationary set. Please contact the organizer at this number to arrange pickup.

He looks back up at his mother. “Sorry,” he says, again. “He won the raffle.”

“That’s great,” she tells him. “You worked hard on that.”

“Yeah, I did.” He takes a sip of his drink. It’s warm and sweet. He hadn’t told her that no one except for L had shown up; he doesn’t know what the point of that would be, exactly, and he doesn’t want her to know. “I think people liked it. I’ll probably do it again.”

“That’s great,” she says, again.

His phone dings. He looks down. It’s a text from L. It reads, tn k.

He looks at it, confused, until another series of texts comes.

thans

sorry

thanks

will msg pcikup later

He picks up the phone and informs L that he can do so at his earliest convenience, then flips it over and looks back up at his mother. He gives her a quick smile; he can deal with all the rest later.

[a series of iPhone messages, from the perspective of the message recipient]

There is no reply.

Chapter Text

Light has all this money and he thinks he might feel better if he spent it.

It’s a strange amount. It’s not enough to rent an apartment or secure a mortgage or travel, but he can buy nearly anything he can walk into a store and see. He lives at home, so there are no consequences. He should save it but nothing would happen to him if he didn’t. Nothing would happen to him if he did, either; it simply isn’t enough to add up.

He takes the bus down to Square One Mall, then wanders around trying to decide what to spend it on. Clothes and gifts seem like the right move. He would like to make people happy and he wants to stop dressing in the things his mother buys for him. He likes what she picks, but he’s twenty-seven, and the fact of it is stifling.

Square One is a labyrinth of a mall, designed according to arcane yet fundamentally uninteresting principles. It is mostly beige, or painted colours that give the impression of being beige. Its massive glass ceilings are tinted with colours that make the sunlight feel as though it’s dribbling down from a fluorescent bulb. Sounds echo cacophonously off a truly baffling array of textures — discordant wood panelling, stone cladding, and floors tiled in patterns that have nothing to do with one another.

Sometimes he wonders if the architect of Square One was profoundly depressed. It might be a cry for help.

At noon on a Thursday, it’s mostly populated by a handful of retirees and his fellow retail workers, so he can walk undisturbed through the dull light and the miasma of music winding out of the stores and into his head. It is ferociously air conditioned but he’d worn his winter jacket in and so he’s hot enough to feel claustrophobic.

He buys his mother two candles from Bath and Body Works, gets Sayu a book with a Magritte painting on the cover about an Interpol agent in love with an assassin, then ducks into Sukoshi mart to buy himself a pack of Bonten rice candy.

As he walks towards Muji, he untwists the plastic, unpeels the rice paper wrapper, then pulls down his mask to pop it into his mouth. He used to beg his parents for these when he was a kid coming home from Japanese class. It’s soft and sweet, sugary without being saccharine. His sticker is a tanuki holding a beach ball. He’ll give it to Sayu when he gets home.

Muji is bright and massive and, like all stores in malls, looks basically terrible. They are playing soft jazz. He keeps his gaze purposeful so the staff won’t think he needs help.

He doesn’t want to try anything on but he knows his size, and so he picks out two button-ups and a pair of beige pants. Briefly, he considers purchasing something like L had worn to his cupsleeve event — he thinks he could pull it off — but it’s not him. He doesn’t want to look like Beyond. He wants to look like someone Beyond would want.

He slides off his jacket, holds up the deep green shirt then looks at himself in the mirror. He feels sort of bad but he looks excellent. His hair is too long but otherwise impeccable. His skin has never looked better. He thinks probably Beyond would like this shirt.

He turns, looping the sleeve around his own and imagining Beyond slipping a hand around his waist, Beyond showing him off to all his friends, Beyond saying I picked you out from everyone because you loved me the most. You worked the hardest. You wanted this more than anyone has ever wanted anything and because of that you deserve the world.

His phone rings. He drapes the shirts over his arm and pulls it out of his pocket.

The caller ID says L 001. He pauses, then picks it up.

“What,” he snaps.

L's voice, tinny through the phone, is soft but nasally. It sounds like he's been crying. “Could you do it again?”

RE:4PER’s newest title track is playing in the background, garbled through the poor connection.

“Do what?” Light says. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You need to explain what you’re talking about.”

“Can you come wash the dishes again?”

The lights in here are suddenly far too bright. He looks around him. It’s nearly empty but all at once it feels like everyone is too close, aisles away and yet somehow breathing right against his skin. L’s voice is a chill.

“What the fuck,” he says. An elderly man with a child in tow turns to stare at him. He scowls back. It’s a public space. Or else it’s a private space which has the public in it. He’s allowed to say what he wants. If the man didn’t want his child to hear ordinary human words he should not have brought her outside.

“I don’t know,” L says. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I called you.”

“I don’t know either,” Light says. “Goodbye.”

The train from Cooksville GO to Yorkville takes an hour. Between transfers and the brief stop he needs to make, Light gets to L’s apartment nearly five hours later.

He knocks, then waits. There’s nothing. He knocks again. After the third attempt, he gives up and dials L’s number. L does not pick up. He dials again. He can hear a phone ringing on the other side of the door. He sends L a text.

Open your fucking door.

He waits. There’s nothing. Finally he pulls up his phone, navigates to L’s AO3 account, and leaves an anonymous comment on the latest chapter of Scarlet.

OPEN YOUR DOOR.

He waits. After a minute, the door opens.

The room is dark. L looks absolutely horrible — his stance unsteady, his face pale to the point of ghoulishness, his eyes deeply shadowed. His hair hangs heavily. He’s wearing the same grey hoodie he had on the last time. The aglet has been gnawed off.

L flicks on the light and reveals himself to look even paler and worse than he had in the dimness. There’s a little eyeliner smudged under his left eye and a rash along his neck, marked with half-moons. It looks like he’s been digging his fingernails into the skin.

“Hello,” he says. His voice sounds scratchy. Light is really very sure he’s been crying.

“Hi,” says Light. “Let me inside.”

“Why do you have all those bags?”

Light kicks off his boots, then pushes past him. He’s got a bag on either arm, both from T&T — a regular fabric one and a freezer bag. The posters on the walls are staring at him.

“I went to the grocery store,” he says. He heads for L’s fridge.

It has been nearly empty last time, and so it’s not surprising that it’s empty this time, too.

Inside, all L’s got is a nearly-empty litre of coke, a paper cookie bag from Tim’s with half a cookie inside it, three packs of Sunrise tofu and a suite of extremely fancy condiments — Dijon mustard from some brand he’s never heard of, spiced peach jam, spiced ketchup, and what looks like a gift set of chutney in fun fruit flavours, still in their paper box. There is also a wilted tomato, so hopefully he won’t get scurvy. Light checks the expiry on the tofu, just in case. it’s fine. L’s got two weeks.

He moves everything inside and starts unpacking his bags.

He’d noticed last time that L’s apartment seemed to consist primarily of ingredients for making things, the udon notwithstanding, and he’s never found it remotely feasible to cook for himself when he’s feeling very badly. He’d gone by the ready-to-eat aisle and bought fried noodles, steamed pork beancurd and an assortment of dumplings — mushrooms and chestnuts and yam and pork. He hadn’t wanted to get too much in case L let it rot again.

L has drifted over, watching him. Light can feel the shadow of him.

He turns, and shows L the contents of the fabric bag. “Here,” he says. “Granola bars. Instant miso soup. Microwave rice. Curry bags. You can throw these in a pot of boiling water then put it over the rice. It takes seven minutes. These ones have corn in them.” He points to them. They’re Pokemon themed. “They’ve got holographic stickers in the box, too.”

He stands up and sets the bag down on the central table.

L looks unsteady on his feet, blinking slowly in the light. Light points towards he couch. “You can sit down,” he says. He doesn’t want L to see him washing the dishes. If there are bugs again, L shouldn’t have to know.

L stares at him. He looks like he wants to argue, but it’s clear that he simply does not have the energy. “Okay,” he says. “Yes. I’m sorry. I’m very tired.”

“Yeah,” says Light. “I know.”

He watches as L walks back to his sofa and curls up on it. The table in front of him is neat, but the cardboard box beneath it is spilling over with empty water bottles. There’s a Dell laptop open on it.

The cat, Light notes, is not here.

He heads into the kitchen.

There aren’t nearly as many dishes as there were last time, but the sink is entirely full and they’re beginning to encroach on the counter again. Light turns the water on hot and gets started.

It takes time, but not all that much. It’s sort of peaceful, really, feeling the water rush over his hands, watching as the bottom of the sink slowly becomes visible. If he lets himself he can wander away from his own body. Usually when other people are nearby he washes things with his sleeves down, but L already knows, so rolls them up to his elbows; it’s easier that way.

Jiji’s dishes are in here — two ceramic bowls and a water dish, the former still crusted with food.

Finally, with everything neatly stacked in the drying rack or the counter beside it, the inside of the sink and the counters wiped down, he pads out of the kitchen and over to L.

L is curled up, so still that he might be asleep, but as he gets close he can see that L’s eyes are open, fixed on nothing.

“Come on,” Light says. “I need you to help me put things away.”

L goes on staring. For a second Light thinks he’s not going to answer, but then he takes a shallow breath in and looks up at Light. “I’m really tired,” he says, softly.

“I know. But I need you.”

He doesn’t really. He’d leave L there, but he thinks probably it’s better if he does at least some of this. Then it will be like he cleaned everything up, too.

His parents often do this for him. It’s sort of a cheap trick, really. Light sees through it. But it makes him feel better anyway.

It’s about going through the motions, mostly, that’s what he thinks. You need to do the things that people do because there are other choices but they aren’t very good, and sometimes it jostles the machinery inside of yourself into motion and makes it start doing some of what it’s meant to do. And sometimes it doesn’t, and everything remains just as it was — a horror that feels unending, a heavy black cloud that swallows him up. Knowing helps but it doesn’t help as much as people say it does.

Still. He doesn’t want to give up. He refuses to. There’s nothing on earth that can kill him, even this, even himself. He won’t allow it.

He watches L pull himself off the sofa and out of the sheets which cling to him as he stands then slough off as he walks away. He follows Light to the kitchen, then stands there, looking blankly at the dry dishes.

“You need to put these away,” Light reminds him. L does nothing.

The entire task looks utterly beyond L, so Light hands him a mug. It has a black handle and it reads I’m library people. L takes the mug, then looks at it like it’s a piece of alien technology.

“Put that where mugs go,” Light tells him.

L heads off with the mug. When he comes back, Light hands him a stacked pile of plates.

Frankly it would be more efficient if Light were doing it himself, but this is working. It feels a little like unloading the boxes at work. They get the deliveries in and Light kneels beside them, splitting open the cardboard and handing people the various albums and trinkets and stationary. Or rather it’s the exact opposite of that because this is L putting his apartment back in order, slotting the pieces of himself into the places where they belong.

It’s all going fine until Light hands him a handful of spoons, pinched together at the handle like they’re rosebuds held at the stem. L takes them, then starts to cry.

It is at once unexpected and entirely predictable. He cries like a child — not wailing, but simply unable or disinterested in hiding it, with the startled look of someone who wants to pretend this isn’t happening and has convinced themselves that ignoring it might make it so. He sits down on the floor, legs to his chest, back against the counter, holding his packet of spoons tightly in his hand.

By now Light has a pretty decent idea of how L’s kitchen is laid out, so it’s not hard to finish on his own. He does that, then walks over and stands in front of L, who has buried his fact in his knees, the edges of the spoons resting against his cheekbone.

He’s not entirely certain what to do next.

Often he’s been angry that people can’t help him. It feels horrible to have them watch while he’s breaking down, staring at him, doing nothing or else doing all the wrong things when he needs them so badly, but now that he’s in the opposite position he finds that does not know what to do.

He tries to think what he would want from someone else but he has no answers.

He sits down beside L.

When he’s alone all he can do is to wait until the feeling passes, or else he can take other measures; he decides this is probably the case for L as well. It is unclear to him if his presence is doing anything whatsoever to make L feel better — he sort of suspects it isn’t — but he also thinks it might be best if L isn’t left alone right now.

He thinks maybe it doesn’t actually matter if he’s making L feel better. Maybe that’s not always possible. Maybe that’s not always the point.

At last L speaks, his voice wet and ragged, muffled by his knees. “Jiji’s gone.”

Light had deduced this. “Yeah.”

“But she was just a cat.”

“I guess, yeah.”

“So it doesn’t really matter. It’s fine.”

Light has never been especially good at comforting people. He doesn’t have the mind for it. He thinks L is right, but he’s also pretty sure saying that out loud wouldn’t be helpful. And anyway it isn’t as if you can’t miss things that are just. He’d cried for days when his CD player chewed up his Japanese edition RE:4PER CD and that wasn’t even alive. He still hasn’t replaced it, although the reasons for that aren’t emotional — the shipping was absurd, so he’s going to co-ordinate with Sayu to combine an order for Hideki Ryuga, one of the J-pop artists she likes. That will happen when he releases an album next month. Light likes making sure there are things in the future.

“Sure,” he says.

L pulls his legs a little closer to his chest. “There’s nothing that needs me, now,” he says.

His voice is so soft that Light can barely hear him.

He sounds sad, yes, but he also sounds scared. More scared than sad, really, if Light had to quantify the two.

A little twist of nausea runs through him; he’s pretty sure he knows what L means by that.

At least he knows how to answer this one, though.

“That’s not true,” he says.

L looks up. He’s not crying anymore, but his face is very wet. He tugs his sleeve over his fist and wipes it across his eyes; it comes away wet, too.

He stares at Light, wide-eyed. It is clear to Light that he wants the answer to the great mystery of why they need to stick around even when things are as difficult as they are, and Light knows he has it.

“Beyond needs you,” he says. “He’s nothing without his fans. He says that all the time. Look.”

He pulls out his phone and opens up YouTube.

There are plenty of videos that show what he needs to show L, but he picks one of Beyond’s lives from last year. In this one he’s sitting on the ground with his back to his bed, using it as a chair. It’s in their dormitory, which is pale beige and so familiar Light feels as though he’s been there, too. He has done so much in that room. He cried and he has laughed and he has been comforted and he has learned so much about himself and about Beyond, who matters more than anyone in this world.

Beyond is peering deep into the camera. He’s not wearing any makeup — people online are always saying they have foundation and a filter on even when it looks like they don’t, but Light knows that he’s simply this beautiful without intervention — and he looks a little softer for it, even more real than unusual. He never shows up like this on stage or in interviews and Light loves this, loves that they’re seeing a moment which is just for them. Just for Killers, just for him.

He scans to the right moment — he watches it all the time, so he doesn’t have to guess — then turns the screen towards L and presses play.

Someone has edited soft music overtop the video. It’s sad and aching and hopeful. There are subtitles hardcoded along the bottom.

“Everything we have is because of you,” Beyond says. His voice is deep and scraping; L’s shivers like wasp wings and Beyond’s thrums like a mayfly’s. He can’t understand it but he can read the words. “Your support makes all this possible. So I want you to remember you have my support, too — even if you feel scared or alone, think of me and know I want you to succeed as you have helped us succeed.” He makes a heart with his hands. He doesn’t smile.

Light shuts the video off. “See?” he says. “They need us. We have to take care of ourselves for them. Our lives don’t belong just to us.” He feels sorry for other people, who don’t have something like this to love and cling to. So many things are difficult for him but he knows there is always something to return to, someone who loves him even if he isn’t here.

He looks over and sees that L’s eyes have gone wet again. L bites his bottom lip, then nods. “No,” he says. “You’re right, of course. I just —” He takes a shivery breath in. “No, you’re right. I just have to remember.”

“Exactly,” Light says. “Even if he’s the only things we have, he’s enough. He does everything for us, so we need to be here to take care of him, too.”

L nods. He does look a little better, with this new information. Light forgets sometimes, too, so he has to watch their videos to remind himself.

There’s a musical chime from L’s computer. Light looks up, and so does L.

“God,” L says. “Sorry. That’s my leash.”

“What?”

“Outlook,” L says, sounding very grim. He wipes his eyes again, then looks at the spoons, suddenly seeming very confused. Light holds out his hands, and L places them in it, then pushes himself upwards.

“You’re working?”

“I work from home, yes. It’s for Sakura News. I go into the office on Fridays, but they don’t seem to want me there.”

“Then why do you go?”

“I don’t know. I guess it’s difficult for me to kill myself if I’m in the office. Sorry. I need to look at this.” He pads over — he is barefoot, which Light had not noticed before — then spins his laptop around.

He has the AO3 Window open on one half, and his email open on the other; the Discord app is floating over it, although L clicks out of it more quickly than Light has seen anyone move in his life, so clearly he hadn’t been giving it his utmost attention. Light wishes he had a job like that. A surge of nauseating jealousy runs through him but L looks so despairing that he tamps it down. All of L’s posters are watching him, which makes that easier.

L makes an aggrieved noise. “God. Sorry. They’ve send me another article. It’s about mutant rabies. I need to fact-check this.”

“You’re a fact-checker for Sakura News?”

“I am. Yes.”

It is unclear to Light why Sakura News would need anyone to fact-check anything — last week they’d printed an article suggesting that Ariana Grande has broken up with her former partner to pursue an illicit BDSM relationship with Taylor Swift, which he supposed L had fact-checked and found acceptable — but he does understand that people need to do jobs.

“Sakura News pays you enough to live here?” The question he wants to ask is why are you so terrible at your job, but this seems more polite.

“No. My rent is subsidized by my grandfather’s deep sense of guilt. It’s very economical. I did one little thing for him fifteen years ago and now he buys me whatever I like. Look, I’m sorry. I really do need to do this. Could you — could you please go away?” L’s eyes are still fixed on the screen. He looks utterly miserable.

Light hesitates, then stands. “Sure.” He isn’t certain he should leave, but it isn’t as if he can demand to stay in L’s apartment if L doesn’t want him to.

L nods, absently, then turns around. “Thank you,” he says. “Really.”

“It’s fine,” Light tells him. He doesn’t want to be thanked. It implies too much.

L breathes in, and then out. He brings a knuckle to his lip and presses it there, very hard, then exhales again. “Why did you do this?” he says. “You hate me.”

“Because we’re Killers.” This seems self-evident. It’s sort of a stupid question, really. “We’re supposed to take care of one another.”

To Light’s surprise, a smile spreads over L’s face. It’s that same smile he’s started to get used to, wide and bright and childlike. It’s incongruent with his red wet eyes, but it’s there and it looks real, and so Light feels better, leaving him by himself. He heads for the door.

“Yes,” L says. “That’s true, isn’t it.”

“It is.” Light pulls his coat on, then zips it to the throat. “We’re all we have. And we’re going to be fine. Goodbye, L.”

“Goodbye,” L says. He drifts over to the door and steps out after Light, then stands there in the frame. When Light turns back at the elevator he’s still there, watching, wide-eyed, as if to make sure Light makes it out okay.

Light steps into the elevator, presses the button for the ground floor, then looks back at L until the doors close and the elevator shudders and takes him down and down and down.

Chapter Text

It has been six days, and L has not been online.

There is a predictability to L’s internet presence that Light enjoys. Whenever he’s bored, he can open up Tumblr and see what L is up to. Usually it’s something stupid or evil, so Light can sit down and write his own post calmly explaining all the problems with whatever L has said, but sometimes it’s nothing — pointless digressions about his day, descriptions of everything he’s eaten. It’s as secure as a promise. L is always there, as reliable as the sun or the warmth of his bed or the sound of his mother rattling pots in the kitchen when he wakes.

But he’s missing, now.

It’s night, and Light is lying flat on his back in his bed, refreshing L’s tumblr feed in case that changes anything. The house is quiet apart from its own shifting and the occasional rush of air from the central heater, and so the tap of his fingers against his phone sounds claustrophobically loud.

Light isn’t worried, obviously. They aren’t friends — in fact, he hates L, and would prefer if he were gone forever. Everything would be better if he weren’t going around saying horrible things about Beyond.

Still. Light doesn’t like not knowing where he is.

The last post he’d made was on the morning after Light had been to his apartment. It wasn’t anything important. In fact it was sort of disgusting. It reads:

god i would give anything to be crushed between beyond’s thighs right now. squeeze my head like a fruit gusher and let me drink u up ;)

Every time Light refreshes the feed, this springs back to the top. Having been forced to read it several hundred times, he’s come to the conclusion that it does not make any sense at all. Clearly L is referring to drinking Beyond’s cum, and Light wishes he weren’t, but the semen ought to be coming out of L’s head, not Beyond’s cock, given that it’s thing being squeezed. It’s inane. It’s also disgusting.

He’d added a reply a day or so into L’s absence, politely alerting him to these issues.

EVERY FUCKING DAY you re s sexcualtzing him and HARASSIGN HIM HE’S A REAL PEROSN nd YOU NEED TO HAVE SOME FUCKIGN RES{ECT FPR HiM IMASIGINE IF SOMEONE DID THIS TO YOU you say you respect him but you OBIOSULYM don’t you shoudln’t even call yourself a fan i hate yu o i hate you

But, remembering how sad L had looked when Light came to visit, he decided he should offer him a little extra grace, deleted his reply, then wrote one that was even more diplomatic.

Delete this. It’s disrespectful. And by the way this sounds like your head is squirting cum.

L usually responds to his constructive criticism, but this had not coaxed him out of hiding. Light wonders if maybe he could have been gentler. It’s important to be direct, but maybe tactful communication might have been helpful in this scenario.

He refreshes the feed again.

He doesn’t think L would have done anything terrible to himself just because Light tried to offer him advice.

He’s starting to feel a little nauseous when an email notification slides into his screen. Light sits up, blinking at the sudden rush of blood to his head, then taps it.

It’s from L’s AO3 account. He chooses not to think about the relief that runs through him.

The alert is for L’s multichapter fic, Scarlet. He taps into the email. The summary reads:

Beyond has a bad day but A notices and helps in more ways than one.

The rest of the fandom adores Scarlet. Light finds this mysterious. He isn’t much of a reader, so his points of comparison are admittedly limited, but he’s pretty sure it’s the worst thing that’s been written in the English language, and possibly in all the other ones too.

Scarlet starts off with Beyond’s release from a mental hospital, where he was being treated for a somewhat bewildering array of mental illnesses which L seems to have researched primarily by watching music videos from y2k. He is placed in an arranged marriage to A, the cruel yet nominally loving heir to an international conglomerate of an undefined product and also, inexplicably, an alpha. A proceeds to treat Beyond coldly until Beyond wins him over with his sideways smile and his giant omega dick from which spurts lovingly and exorbitantly described torrents of fluid, then heals him with his own eight inch cock.

The healing has been happening over the course of two years and one hundred and fifty thousand words. It has racked up seventy thousand hits, seven hundred comments, and just under two thousand kudos. There is a plot, occasionally — a surprisingly compelling narrative about Beyond uncovering fiscal crime in Alternate’s family empire — but primarily it seems to be driven by L writing whatever he feels like at any given moment, regardless of its relation to what came before. Light is still waiting to learn results of a forensics report that had been filed six chapters ago. He is beginning to suspect he’ll never know. Also, the sex is utterly baffling. He could probably print it out and fax it to the Ministry of Education as proof that sex ed is needed in schools.

The lack of attention to detail has clearly paid off because L has never been more than a day late on an update. Every single update is horrible but Light can, begrudgingly, respect his commitment to schedule.

He taps the link.

L’s author’s notes are always conversational. He seems to treat them like a diary. If he were so inclined, Light could probably go back through them and figure out just about anything he wants to know about L.

This one reads:

Hi everyone sorry I cut it close to the wire last week but I’m back on schedule now :) I don’t think I’m replacing Jiji anytime soon but I’m feeling a lot better. Thanks to everyone who said nice things last week I appreciate it. Anyway here’s chapter fifty-seven.

Obviously Light is not interested in this story, but out of professional interest he scans further down the page.

He’s really only skimming, but after the first few lines he freezes.

Beyond woke up feeling really bad. His head hurt and he had a black pit in his stomach. He didn’t want to get out of bed but he knew he had to because it was a big day today: his breeding ceremony. So he pushed the blankets off of himself and reluctantly stood up.

He went downstairs on the spiral staircase. Then he walked into the kitchen and he realized something. The sink was full of dishes that he was supposed to do yesterday but he forgot about. “Oh my god,” he said. A was going to be so angry. He felt like he was the worst person on earth. He was a failure. How was he supposed to produce the second heir to the Song fortune if he couldn’t even remember to take care of the house?

But then A came downstairs. He started to cry because he was a failure but A said “What’s wrong?”

“I forgot to clean the kitchen. Do you hate me?” Beyond said.

“No I don’t. It’s okay,” A replied earnestly. He walked to the sink and picked up the cloth then started cleaning. “You can go rest while I do this. You’re not a failure. You’re a good person. I love you more than anything or anyone on earth.”

Maybe, he thinks, he’s only being arrogant. People wash dishes. This isn’t necessarily about him and L. L obviously hadn’t been preparing for a breeding ceremony, and Light had not told him that he loved him. Still. The resemblance is closer than he would prefer.

He reads on, fascinated and horrified as the details begin to unfurl in a strange facsimile of his visit to L’s apartment — A washing Beyond’s dishes, A handing them to him one at a time, and then Beyond taking a handful of spoons from A and collapsing against his counter.

Beyond sat down and he was crying. He felt so bad. The black pit in his stomach was being filled but that made it feel even worse. There was something wrong with him because it made sense to cry if someone did something bad to him but not if someone did something good for him. Sometimes he liked it more when people hurt him because then he knew what to do. But he didn’t understand anything about A.

He cannot understand what could possibly have motivated this. It’s bizarre, yes, and vaguely insulting for reasons he couldn’t quite put words around, but more than that it represents the actions of a crazy person. Perhaps it is some elaborate form of mockery, or an incomprehensible power play. Also, and this truly does not matter, Beyond and A had an island counter in the last chapter, not counters pressed against the walls; he remembers because A had fucked Beyond on top of it then jizzed all over their decorative fruit.

He reads on, frozen and horrified, expecting A to leave.

Except A doesn’t leave.

In this version of the story, A crouches beside Beyond. He sweeps his hair back and kisses the side of his neck, his lips soft, his lashes still wet, then puts a hand against A’s waist to keep him there.

A pushed his lips against Beyond’s. He tasted sweet. His mouth was hot and wet and he slipped his tongue inside of Beyond’s, then pressed him back against the counter. Beyond got erect in his jeans.

God, he’s a terrible writer. Why did anyone read any of this?

“I could never hate you,” A said.

“I want you. I need you. I need to be touched by someone so I can feel real again.”

“Just someone?”

Beyond started to cry again. “I will take anyone but I want it to be you. I want you to love me so much I won’t want anyone else. I want you to be enough that I won’t accept substitutes.”

A kissed his temple. “I will do that,” he said. “Trust me. I will prove to you that I can be every single thing you need. And then when I have made you strong enough you will prove to me that you can move all on your own.”

Light stares at the page. He’d never said anything like that.

“Take off your pants. I want to put it in you. I want to feel your hot sopping hole.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Beyond took off his pants. A’s lithe hands pushed him onto the tile. His jeans rustled as he pulled his huge cock out of it. Beyond was still crying but he lifted his hips because he wanted it so bad. A’s hands were hot. He put them both on Beyond’s wrists, holding him in place, then entered him gently and rapidly. Beyond started to moan hysterically.

Light can’t help it. The rest was close enough to what had passed between him and L that he imagines both of them here, too — L pressed against the kitchen tiles, his black hair spreading across the cold floor, his hands beneath Light. He would be moaning in a normal way. Maybe with a bit of that whine his voice always carries, silver and sharp.

It doesn’t help that L really does look an awful lot like Beyond. Light wishes he’d dye his hair.

Light scrolls faster, reasoning that if he looks at it really quickly it doesn’t entirely count.

He’s having some trouble envisioning what’s happening here hands-wise, actually. He’s never slept with a man, or with anyone else, but he’s pretty sure there has to be some manual guidance. Surely you can’t simply flop it around and expect it to find its way like a homing pigeon. Also, there should possibly be some lubricant? Although he supposes that could be an artistic choice.

In the pornography Light watches, people are always sticking things in one another without any regard for the limitations of a human anus. He’s seen some videos where they’re more careful, sensual even, touching one another before they get anywhere near their genitalia — their fingers drifting over each other’s ribs, their lips agains the trembling skin of a stomach, which is usually hairless (he prefers when it is not.) He doesn’t like that, though. He’s sure he’d feel different if it ever happened to him, but when he watches porn he likes things quick and to the point, not rough but hard and fast. He likes it when people take it well. When they’re good boys. When they groan and writhe and cry out, overcome without needing to be guided into it.

Actually, he’s not sure how they film that. Maybe they apply lubricant beforehand. He should look that up later.

To his horror he is becoming, as L had alarmingly described it, erect inside his pyjama pants.

This is possibly the worst thing that has ever happened to him. He falls backwards against his sheets, puts a palm against the fabric of his pyjamas, and feels himself get harder.

On the screen, Beyond is thrashing around as A thrusts inside him. His cock is throbbing and fountaining pre-cum, whatever that means.

Light aches. He feels something electric and insistent running through him, something almost panicked. He rolls his hips to press himself against his palm, once, twice, then yanks his hand away.

In his mind’s eye he can see L spread out for him, his legs parting. He’s pretty sure L hasn’t got a cock — he’d mentioned that in one of his myriad posts — so he’d be wet instead.

Light actually isn’t entirely sure what a vagina looks like. He’s aware of the general architecture and he’s seen plenty of drawings online and back in his university’s queer centre, but he’s not sure he’s ever seen a real one. Possibly someone had showed him a photo back in high school, huddled in a circle with a bunch of other boys giggling over illicit images, but he really hadn’t been thinking about vaginas whenever the subject of sex came up — he’d been thinking of Yamamoto, with his face all flushed. It hadn’t been until later on that he realized men and vaginas could have much to do with one another.

He switches into a private tab, googles vagina photograph, and is greeted with a page of blurred pink Safe Search squares. He taps into a few of them.

They’re interesting, actually. They look artistic, these fleshy things that fold like fabric — they remind him of chiffon. A lot of these are anatomical diagrams with arrows pointing to one place or another, too medical to be remotely arousing, but he sort of likes the more explicitly artful ones, the ones with hints of thighs visible with them, or dark curls of hair. He hadn’t realized that public hair gathered like that. He’d imagined it covered the everything in its entirety, even though in retrospect that doesn’t really make sense.

He squints, looking for the clitoris. People always make jokes about men not being able to find it, and he doesn’t want to fuck that up if the matter ever becomes relevant to him. He can see it in some of the photographs but not in others.

He is struck, suddenly, by the image of L splayed open for him; of his hands reaching down to find L’s clitoris, to trace his body, perhaps guiding his cock into him or sliding his tongue across it. L, groaning, slipping his fingers into Light’s hair.

He throws his phone down beside him, face down.

He is infuriatingly hard, now. The ache in him is unbearable. He stares up at the stucco on the ceiling, then gives up.

He is not one of the men in L’s fics who apparently like their penises dry as bone. He sits up, pulls open the drawer of his bedside table and fumbles around for hand cream. It is fig-scented. He spreads it across his palm. Then he picks up his phone again.

Light can be quiet if he wants to be, so there isn’t strictly a need for music to camouflage any noise he might make, but he doesn’t particularly like even the possibility that his family might hear him. He also prefers not to dirty RE:4PER with impure actions, so he puts in Camille Saint-Saën’s Violin Sonata in D Minor, then taps back into L’s fic. He pulls his cock out and wraps a hand around it.

The relief is immediate, if accompanied by a sudden urge of intense, aching need. He is leaking an extremely normal, non-fountaining quantity of precum. He bites the inside of his cheek then starts to stroke himself, fist around himself, thumb extended along the length of his cock. It is on the smaller side, as these things go, but that's fine -- it's not as if he'll need to impress L with it. He follows the rhythm of the violins.

Beyond thrashed and jerked his hips into the air, screaming with pleasure and pain. A shoved him into the tile and thrust into him quickly, moaning. “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD,” A screamed. “I LOVE YOU SO MUCH. I’M CUMMING. FUCK OH MY GOD IT FEELS SO GOOD!!!”

Light stops. He stares at the screen.

No. It’s fine. He can work with this. He takes a breath, then keeps going.

The heat is curling in his pelvis; his thighs are hot.

The idea of imagining Beyond is horrific — Beyond doesn’t deserve to be wrapped up in his perversions — so he imagines L instead, rolling his hips against Light and saying regular things, like God, please and That feels good, Light, keep going. His face would be hot and flushed, his eyelids fluttering, looking a little stupid with it, maybe, the pleasure of it stealing away the self-conscious parts of him, making him helpless and safe within it. Light would make him feel so good, so warm, so loved. He’d stroke his hair and kiss him and press their bodies close.

His stomach trembles. He lets out a low, involuntary whine and quickens his strokes. They’re growing ragged, now; he’s losing his rhythm.

A came into Beyond, his cum flowing out of him like a river. He pulled his cock out and kept cumming. It sprayed all over Beyond’s stomach and neck and got on his face. Beyond licked the cum off of his lips. It was sweet like syrup. It was like an aphrodisiac to him.

Then he started to scream and cum too. His vision went white and he screamed “A!! A!!”

When he came back to reality he saw cum had gushed all over him and A. A was wiping the cum off of Beyond with a towel he got while Beyond was cumming. He hadn’t even wiped it off of himself yet so he was still covered in it. Beyond was crying but he felt good now. A kissed Beyond and said, “See, I love you so much. Nothing you do could ever make me not love you. I will always —”

Light groans, and then he’s coming; it rushes through him, hot and liquid, and he strokes himself through the waves of it, his knees parting without his volition. He lifts his free hand to his face and presses the back of his palm to his mouth, half to quiet himself and half to give himself the sensation of something, anything, other than himself.

At last the brunt of it runs through him. He exhales, shaky, his body spent, hollowed out but not unpleasantly so, and then the cold knife of reality strikes him.

He is still holding his phone. He has just jacked off to the literal worst pornography ever written by a human being, and he’d done it by imagining the worst person on Earth. He hadn’t even used a private tab.

He stares at the stucco, feeling himself on the verge of a panic attack. Why had he thought it would be a better to imagine L? He could have picked literally anyone else or, better yet, not done it at all. As soon as he stops feeling so fucking good he’s going to stand up and castrate himself.

He decides the best and also possibly only course of action is to pretend that this did not happen. He reaches for the box of tissues on his bedside table, cleans himself off, then tosses that into his trash can. Then he puts himself back into his pyjamas, rolls over, and pulls the blankets over his shoulders.

It’s fine. This is fine. It was supremely normal. He feels extremely calm, actually, his whole body still soft with the orgasm. He shuts his eyes and allows Adagio to lull him into sleep.

Chapter Text

He gets L’s text at a quarter to midnight.

He hasn’t been sleeping well. He’s buried in his blankets, tangled and overheated; he should get up and turn the radiator down but if he moves his brain will kick into motion and guarantee he’ll be awake all night. He needs to be up at five so he can commute downtown to make it to Alice & Will at nine. Already he’s exhausted, thinking about it. The light falling through his blinds feels inconsolably heavy.

He isn’t thinking about McGill. He refuses to think about McGill. All those nights awake, his laptop sitting closed on the foot of his bed, swollen with assignments that need to be finished. It hadn’t been fair; he’d worked so hard in the years before and they still wanted more. They shouldn’t have blamed him for what he did. They should have made allowances.

When his phone buzzes, he shoves it under his pillow, desperate for rest. It buzzes again. He’s about to turn it off or possibly whip it out his window when it occurs to him that everyone who normally contacts him is asleep in this house, and so he pulls it out and flips it over.

For a moment he can’t see anything but chemical light and the blurry impression of letters. He rubs his eyes, then squints until L’s name comes into focus.

Vision still blurred, Light taps out a polite reply.

Then he sits up and check’s RE:4PER’s Twitter account.

His heart stutters.

RE:4PER 2024 WORLD TOUR: [AQUARIUM OF LIFE: DREAM TOGETHER]
SOON WE WILL MEET AGAIN

It would be really silly to have a panic attack right now, when everything is clearly going well, and so he resolves not to have one. His breath is getting kind of weird because he wants it to.

RE:4PER has done world tours before, but he’s never been to one. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that he could go during the first few years, and then everything had gotten complicated; he’d been convinced they wouldn’t leave Asia before they started going on military service.

His fingers are shaking. He doesn’t know why. He rubs at his eyes again. He isn’t scared.

The concert will be local, probably. Toronto is the most obvious choice, but he’ll travel out to Niagra if he absolutely has to. He could rent a hotel. He’s got family in Vancouver, even, on the off chance they decide to go there. He could —

He scrolls down.

There are no Canadian dates.

He stares at the screen.

There are plenty in America. There’s one in New York, barely across the border. There are stops in England and France and Ireland. There’s even one in Poland. But nothing in Canada.

He throws his phone onto the bed, puts his hands over his mouth, and screams into them. The universe is cruel and unfair and he doesn’t want to be in it anymore. He screams again. Then he takes a breath, pushes himself upwards, and picks up his phone again.

This is fine, actually. He should have expected this. He decides he had expected it. He’s very calm and poised and he wouldn’t get thrown off by a little thing like this.

L has texted him three more times.

He throws his phone down.

Everything is okay. He’s twenty-seven. He pays taxes. He’s a positive role model in his online community. An hour is nothing. It’s actually better than if it had been in Vancouver, objectively. He’s pretty sure his passport is expired, but that’s easily fixable.

His stomach twists at the thought of travelling all on his own. He pulls his knees to his chest and drops his head into them.

He hadn’t lived alone until McGill, and he hasn’t lived alone since. That night at L’s was the first time since childhood that he’d slept outside of the house. The idea of flying out of the country is utterly absurd.

Maybe he can convince Sayu to go with him. Except she’s busy with university, and he’s not sure he could handle it if she turned him down. He doesn’t want to be awful in front of her. She deserves a better elder brother, someone calm and stable, someone who says nice things to her and helps her with schoolwork like he’d done as a child, not this person he’s become, prickly and absent; he can see the way she’s careful with him, always patient, as if he were a child instead of the person who’s meant to take care of her.

His mother might come with him instead. He wouldn’t mind staying in a different country if she were there.

He shuts his eyes. He can barely sleep in his own bedroom. He needs to lie on his parent’s floor like a child. He’s pathetic, twenty-seven years old and wanting his mother to hold his hand. Suddenly the blankets around him feel like they’re strangling him; he tries to kick them off but they get tangled around his legs. His skin feels like static.

His phone buzzes again. He picks it up.

He writes back.

The dimness of the light is claustrophobic, the shadows it creates pressing in on him like something physical. If he breathes too deep it’ll seep inside his lungs and drown him. He throws his phone down, then grabs his Bonten box off the sidetable, opens it, and pulls out the razor he keeps inside.

The space between thinking about it and using it is flat. There’s no division between the thought and the action. They are one continuous thing which he can’t stop any more than he can stop the process of the thought itself.

It doesn’t hurt. It had hurt years ago, when he’d started, but it doesn’t anymore. It feels wet and cold.

When he’s done, he puts it back then grabs a handful of tissues from his dresser, folds them into a thick square, and presses them to the mess.

He feels hollowed out. He’s not sure if he feels better. It would be a lot simpler if he felt worse, but he doesn’t think he does. He doesn’t understand why he’d just done that.

His phone buzzes again. He picks it up.

The stickiness in his head recedes. It doesn’t disappear, but he can think through it, now. He taps into RE:4PER’s Weverse account.

He is greeted by a still image of RE:4PER piled around the camera like they’re taking a group photo. They’re wearing casual clothes — variations on jeans and baggy T-shirts, Quarter’s with a huge strip of painter’s tape across her chest to hide whatever brand logo she’s got on it. Beyond is in blue jeans and a black T-shirt that hangs off him and makes his arms look stick-thin. The title is in Korean, and he can’t read it at all. He taps into the video and they start moving.

Instantly, relief washes over him. He knows these voices; he knows these expressions. He doesn’t need to know what they’re saying to know what they mean.

What they’re telling him is, Light, you’re okay. Light, you’re enough. Light, you haven’t done anything wrong and everything is going to be fine forever. You’ll need to be brave again in a little while but not while we’re here talking to you. We have you, now.

Beyond is in the bottom right corner, slumped against A’s legs. He’s not talking; he’s just staring into the camera like he wants to hurt it. He doesn’t usually talk much during group lives, which is one of the reasons Light prefers when he’s alone, but that’s okay. He’ll take Beyond in any capacity. He can see through Beyond’s reluctance and tell how much Beyond loves him.

He picks up his phone and, without looking away from it, gets up and walks to his desk, where he keeps his laptop. His laptop is safe, now; there’s no work on it anymore. It only exists to entertain him. He keeps the tissues pressed against his arm with the back of the wrist that’s holding his phone.

He sits down, opens the laptop, then clicks into Weverse and opens up the live. Then there are two of RE:4PER, one talking on his computer and the other talking on this one, their voices slightly offset. There’s this horrible distance that stretches not just across space but also across time.

His head fills with static.

All of a sudden they’re just people, people who don’t know him, people who live very far away from him and who are doing a job for which they get paid. Nothing he’s whispered to them in the dark of the night has been delivered. He thinks of the box on his bedside table; he could go back. He could open it again.

Then he takes a deep breath and turns off the RE:4PER in his phone and it’s okay. They’re real again.

He opens up Twitter and searches for L’s account. Light hates him, sure, but he has the best translations out of anyone. People complain that he interprets Beyond too generously but this is the one thing they have wrong about L — everyone looks for the worst in Beyond but L knows he’d never say the horrible things people accuse him of having said. When Light thinks about this one thing he can almost forgive L. He can look straight into Beyond’s soul and see that it is kind and loving and beautiful and pure.

Light can see that he’s missed a bit because L’s account is already filled with translations. He leans his phone against his laptop, carefully positioning git so Beyond is uncovered. He has to sacrifice Quarter and Backyard to do this, but that’s okay. A is sitting right beside Beyond, leaning away, as if someone had forced him to be there; he’s always so ungrateful.

He refreshes the feed and reads the new words.

A: we’re happy to announce that our world tour dates were released! we’re happy to meet you soon!
Q: it’s been a long time since we met, hasn’t it?
Back: everyone, let us know, what songs do you want to hear us preform?

As quickly as he can, Light types: Rainfall. He thinks his life would be saved forever if he heard it live. It would be as if they’d reached right into his heart and unknotted everything that’s wrong. He has to write it with one hand, to keep everything in place. Then he types out a quick macro to add one of the Korean phrases he’d copied from the internet months ago.

This one reads: Beyond, thank you for everything you have done for me. I love you.

He can’t read it, but he’d seen the hangul often enough that he could probably recognize the shape of the letters even if he saw them out of this context. It’s a mantra to him — I love you, I love you, I love you. It’s so simple to do this. He could do so many things before and now he can do this but he can do it so well. He can do it better than anyone. It keeps him worthy. It keeps him good.

He’ll have to go. He has to see them. He will. He can. He’s sure.

Chapter Text

It doesn’t count as a relapse if he never stopped. It doesn’t count at all if he hadn’t been tormented, despising himself like those kids in PSAs. (And they’re always children - at twenty-seven, it’s embarrassing. When people find out, he feels like he’s been caught sucking his thumb in public.) It had passed as casually as it always does, less of an action than an inevitability.

He can’t blame himself for things he hadn’t meant to do and anyway it’s his own body, that’s what people always say, and he’s allowed to do with it what he wants.

Such a small thing doesn’t matter. A bit of sharpness against the skin, the taste of metal on his tongue; it’s hidden beneath the sleeves of the ochre sweater which he bought for himself at Muji and which makes him look tidy and clean and forgettable.

It’s a quiet day at Alice & Will, and so he’s sitting at the counter, cutting wrapping paper into shape. It’s three degrees out but it feels colder. He’d arrived half an hour ago but the damp still clings to him, wet against his skin. Inside him there is this feeling like a shiver, a serpentine creature moving inside his veins. It is leaving grease just below his skin.

He doesn’t feel okay.

Naomi is in the back taking inventory. If he wanted to do, he could slip into the bathroom and slip the razor from his wallet and nick-nick-nick all the way up until he felt alright again. It’s been weeks since he had to do this at work, but he opened the door last night and the feeling won’t go away.

The wrapping paper glitters silver below his fingers. Some bright song is playing through the speakers. He likes it, actually, but at the moment it’s so cheerful that it feels mocking.

The door chimes. He looks up.

There are two women, a little older than their usual customers. They look maybe fifty years old. They are white, and well dressed for the cold in nearly identical quilted jackets. One is maroon, and the other is navy.

You can never be entirely sure who does or doesn’t like Kpop. He doesn’t judge; he’s also older than what people think of as the usual demographic. Most of the people who run local events are, too.

Still. They ring alarm bells. Their expressions are performatively curious, as if they want everyone to know they find everything in the store very strange and amusing. They walk through the aisles with exaggerated gingerness, like the stationary and the CDs might jump out and dirty them.

He’s supposed to greet people when they walk through the door. Usually he does — he’s a good worker, unlike everyone else — but today he stays quiet. His instincts are good. Sometimes they’re overactive, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

One of the women looks at him, her eyes wide, like he’s not a person so much as one of the displays. He looks back at her.

He has this feeling like she’s reached out to hold him. She’s picking him up. She’s turning him over to see the price. Then she turns away and he’s freed. He goes back to cutting up the paper.

Normally he can brush this sort of thing off but today his arms hurt and his head feels like someone had poured curdled milk inside and he can feel the impression of her gaze on his skin, crawling under his clothes.

He can’t help thinking of McGill, of the way other men — men who were his friends, who treated him well — had laid their hands on him, nothing untoward, nothing like that; they just wanted to let him know how soft his skin was, how pretty and golden it looked. He hadn’t had to ask to know they were imagining him on his knees, or at least imagining that this was what he wanted, and they hadn’t always been wrong but that wasn’t the point, he wasn’t sure what the point was but it hadn’t been that. They’d stopped once he started to unravel — not when he’d begun to dissolve into tears in the middle of planning sessions for the queer centre, inconsolate and without warning, but when he’d stopped being able to wash his pretty golden skin, when he started to smell like days in bed beneath the covers, when he became disgusting and sexless, his arms peeling with scabs, and most of them had stuck around because they cared about him for reasons other than their desire to fuck him and in a way he liked what he had become in their eyes. It had been a relief to become so broken that they were forced to look at him.

And that’s not what these women want but he doesn’t think it’s all that far off and he imagines, briefly, shrugging off his ochre sweater and showing them what he is, that he doesn’t belong, that they wouldn’t want to take him home and put him on a shelf to show him off like a souvenir.

He doesn’t do this. He listens to them instead, even through the music that is too loud and too bright and he feels the scissors move through the wrapping paper smooth as a hand through water. He is doing a good job. He is putting things in order. If they buy something he’ll wrap it up for them and they’ll write a good review on Yelp. They seem like the sort of women who’d leave reviews on Yelp.

They’re talking about buying a CD for one of their granddaughters. She apparently likes those boys. They say this with a titter in their voice that Light does not like.

He’s nearly done working through his paper when they walk up to the cash.

He looks up.

They’re both staring at him, these gawking smiles on their faces, like this is all just so funny and he’s part of it too, one of the attractions.

“He-lloo,” says the woman in the maroon coat, very loudly, sort of singsong, and he thinks, well, okay, this is what we’re doing today. The confirmation is nice, in a way.

“Hello,” he says, in his bright clean customer service voice. People complain about needing to speak this way but Light doesn’t mind. He likes customer service Light. Customer service Light is kind and calm and competent and peaceful. The therapist he’d had before the last one, the one who had hadn’t told him all those things he doesn’t like to repeat, she’d said it was good for him to have a job; she said there was important for him to leave his head. “Do you need help with something?”

“My granddaughter likes these boys,” the woman says, a bit of snide laughter in her voice. “I need to find their albums and she doesn’t want anything else. They’re — I can’t remember the name?”

He waits for more information. After a second it is clear that no more is forthcoming. “Oh,” he says. “Well. Do you know … anything?”

“They dance,” she says, very loudly, as if she were speaking to an animal or a small child. People often speak very loudly to him.

“Right,” says Light. He considers stapling himself in the throat to get out of this interaction. Instead he smiles. Balance of probabilities, it’s probably That Group. “Were they on TV?”

“They’re dancers,” says the woman.

“Yeah,” says Light. “Yes. I understood that. Have you seen them on television?”

“Dancers,” the woman repeats.

“Oh, I know,” says the woman in navy. She pulls out her phone and types something into it, then turns it around and points it towards Light. It’s open to Google Translate. One half says dancers in English, and the other presumably says the same thing in Korean.

Stapling her in the throat would probably end the interaction as well.

“Okay,” says Light. “Great.” He pulls out his own phone, then Googles a picture of BTS and turns it around. He isn’t supposed to have his phone on the floor, but this seems like an emergency, as sorting this out as quickly as possible will prevent a murder. “Was it them?”

The woman in navy giggles. “I can’t tell them apart.” Her friend smacks her arm, and she laughs again. “Not like that. It’s all the makeup.”

Light breathes in, then out. “I can’t help you find their albums if you don’t know what they’re called.” The pitch at which his voice comes out — high and chirrupy, almost parodic — is embarrassing, but they don’t seem to notice.

“They dance,” says the woman in maroon, very slowly.

“Yes,” says Light. “I know they dance. They all dance. Every group dances. That’s part of the thing. I understand what you’re saying, but you need to give me more information.”

The woman in maroon shoves her phone in her face; he has always appreciated that Naomi lets them sit at the register, but it does mean that he can’t take a step back, and so he is forced to stare into its brightness.

“You need tell me more,” Light says. He thinks he is actually doing an incredible job of staying calm. He thinks possibly this is proof that he doesn’t have any mental illnesses anymore. This is not the worst interaction he’s ever had with a white person, but it’s very high on the list, and he’s having it while there’s thick dark oil swirling below his skin. “You need to tell me who the group is. I speak English. I was born in Mississauga. I don’t speak Korean. You’re not telling me anything useful. Every single group dances.”

The woman takes jabs her phone and it reads out loud what he assumes is they dance, in Korean.

There is a loud bang.

“WE ARE HAVING A CONVERSATION IN ENGLISH,” Light says.

The women both take a step back.

The bang, he realizes, had been the heels of his hands slamming into the counter. He’d stood up, apparently — he can’t remember doing that.

He is dimly aware that he’s shouting. His throat hurts.

“We are talking in English. You are saying things to me in English and I’m saying things to you in English. Are you fucking — how do you not know this? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

They’re several paces back from him, now. They look frightened.

“Light,” he hears, from around the corner. He looks Naomi is now in the doorway, pale faced and wild-eyed. “Go — go take your break. Use the break room. Don’t leave the building.”

She rushes over to the two women, stammering apologies.

His face feels very hot.

He looks at them, and then he walks out from behind the cash.

There’s something cold in the put of his stomach; he thinks maybe he’s fucked up.

Chapter Text

His manager is having some sort of discussion with the two women. He doesn’t know what it is. She’s relegated him to the break room, which doubles as their storage room. He guesses this is more promising than if she’d simply thrown him out.

He sits on top of one of the boxes of albums, feeling frozen. The room is cramped, full of unopened cardboard boxes and rolled posters and metal racks filled with items for discount and exacto knives and glittery wrapping paper. There is a tiny, rickety table where the managers are meant to rest the store laptop to do paperwork, although it’s so unstable he’s never seen them do that anywhere other than the counter out front; a back folding chair in front of it is piled high with binders. The light is fluorescent and somehow fails to illuminate the corners, despite how painfully bright it is. It is a stagnant light. It does not go anywhere.

It smells like cardboard and packing tape and the black dust from the warehouses these boxes had been shipped through; until he’d started working here, he hadn’t realized the concert of these things had such a distinct scent, something musty and chemical. At night, he dreams of this smell.

He’s fucked up. He knows this. He shouldn’t have yelled.

Then he thinks, no, he hasn’t. They deserved it. He was right to do that, because people always talk to him that way and it isn’t fair.

There are never consequences for people like that. He should be the consequence. He should be allowed to yell at them. He should be able to hurt them, even — to shove their faces into the ground and break them for making them feel this way and they’re lucky he didn’t.

The sudden violence of the image shivers through him, accompanied by a hot rush of some quivering emotion; he can’t tell if it’s guilt or rage or something different altogether. He swallows against it. That’s not who he is.

He’s a good person. He does what is right. Everyone says so. Or else they say we know you didn’t mean to or help me understand, their voices soft, eyes darting across him as if he were a stranger, some intruder in their home who had stolen the body of the son that they love and made him do terrible things. His arms hurt where he had cut them. He had done that to himself, to their son, to their brother; he has made his sister cry at night.

He shuts his eyes, then curls over himself.

He is going to lose his job.

To calm himself, he fiddles with the crown of his watch.

He informs himself that he’s not going to lose his job. He’s catastrophizing. The drop-in therapist he saw while he was at McGill, before he made his one big mistake — his miscalculation, it wasn’t a mistake, it was just a choice that hadn’t worked out — had told him that he had a tendency to catastrophize. He always thought the worst possible thing was going to happen to him. He always assumed people were harbouring some secret evil. Most things work out, she’d told him. People you don’t know can’t hate you.

She was white. He thinks this is relevant, probably.

Outside the door, he can hear them all talking and the moment is going on and on and it won’t end and he’s going to be fine and he’s not going to lose his job and he won’t have to go home and tell his mother that he doesn’t have a job anymore and it won’t go back to the way it was before, when he was alone on his bed with nothing to do except think and think and think, too tired to shape the directions in his thoughts, too tired to cry, just enough life in him to write essays that barely made any sense until even that fizzled out and there wasn’t anything all all except the black pit of his mind which was not an absence but a space filled with horrible things that pricked at him and crawled along his skin and which would never, ever leave him alone.

Anyone could walk in. The door is unlocked. But he can’t stand it. He uses his thumb to push the case off his phone and slips the razor out of it. He has these hidden everywhere, just in case, wrapped up in the waxy plastic they came in; he is aware of the infection risk, but it simply does not seem relevant, not in the face of everything up.

He pushes his sleeve up. Just a little and it will be fine. He only needs a bit.

He hears the door click; he drops his sleeve back down and there’s not enough time to get the razor back in its case where it belongs so he drops it into the pocket of his khakis instead,

Naomi is standing there, looking at him. She looks, inexplicably, very sad.

He wonders if she’d seen. He doesn’t think so. He thinks she’d sad about something else.

“I’ll get back on cash,” he says.

“That’s okay,” she tells him. “You don’t need to do that.”

“Someone else could come in. There needs to be someone on the floor.”

“I locked the door. It’s okay. It’s a slow day.” She grabs the binders off the folding chair and dumps them onto the table, then pulls the chair over and sits in front of him.

He has this sudden image of Naomi standing up and striding across the room and wrapping her hands tight around his throat, shaking him, strangling him, his throat collapsing inwards. No one has ever done this to him, but it feels suddenly very possible. It would be simpler. He imagines doing it to her, too, then wishes he hadn’t; it’s vivid and it won’t go away and anyway he likes Naomi.

His face is very wet. He doesn’t know how that had happened. He wipes at it with the back of his sleeve.

She takes a deep breath in. “Look,” she says. “You’re a hard worker. More so than anyone else, honestly. And I know you like working here.”

“I do,” he says. His voice comes out garbled and whiny, for some reason. He wipes at his face again. He gathers he’s crying, but he doesn’t know why he’s doing that. He doesn’t want to. It wasn’t his intent. “I do work hard.”

“And I don’t want to — I really wanted this to work out. I did. I know there’s … something happening in your life right now.”

“What’s happening in my life?”

She looks startled. He means it, though — he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. He wants to know. If she knows, he wants her to tell him. “I just know you’ve been having some difficulties,” she says. “That’s all.”

Her eyes flick to his wrists and he pulls them back then wraps his arms around himself, folding his wrists into them so no one can see. She looks away, quickly. He tells himself it’s not as if she could know. Or else she does know, in the abstract, because he doesn’t always care, because he’s shown up with them exposed, forgetting that’s something you can’t take back, but there’s no way she could know about last night or about what he’d nearly done just now.

Maybe he’d only imagined it, the looking.

“Oh,” says Light.

She nods, slowly. “But I can’t … I can’t have you talking to the customers like this, Light. You can’t refuse to sell them our products. You can’t yell at then. It’s just … I can’t have that. I’ve stood up for you as much as I could, but I need this job, too. I have rent. I have to let you go, Light.”

He doesn’t want her to say it. If she doesn’t say it everything will be okay. “Please don’t,” he says. His voice comes out mangled. The world is so blurry but he can’t lift his arms to wipe the water away because he has to keep them here, pinned and hidden, where no one can see. “I don’t have anything else.”

She looks stricken and scared.

“Please,” he says. “I understand. I won’t anymore. You can’t -- you can’t do this to me. I work hard. I do. I’m doing a good job. You said so last week. I know more about the albums than anyone else in this store. You said I was good.” This last point comes out in a panicked whine, and he does pull his arm out after all to press the back of his hand to his mouth, to stop the sound. He doesn’t want to sound like this. He’s better than this. He’s not doing any of this. He wouldn’t.

“We’ve talked about this,” she says. “I’ve given you so many chances.”

There’s a hitch in her voice, too, and that’s what stops him.

He looks at her. His vision is blurry but he can see her.

She’s — what. A little older than him, but not by much. In her thirties, for sure. She’s nice to them, usually. Kind of insecure. She looks so tidy and put together but she wants reassurance from everyone, all of the time. She’d offered to drive him to the subway, once, when it was thirty below and pelting snow and he’d agreed without realizing she meant on the back of her motorbike and it had been one of the scariest moments of his entire life so he guesses they’re kind of linked in that way, because they’d stared down death together, even if she seemed calm about it. She has some tiny apartment with two roommates all the way out in Scarborough because she’d dumped her fiancé a few weeks before their wedding, but she still carries a photo of him around in her wallet; he’d seen it once, when she’d pulled the wallet out to lend him coins for the TTC, that one time he forgot his Presto card.

She’s not a bad person.

He presses his sleeves to his eyes to dry them, which doesn’t work because he’s still crying, but it’s what a person is supposed to do when they’re readying themselves to do the right thing, and then he nods.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Yes. I understand.”

“I’ll give you a good reference,” she says. “I know you’re a good worker. I know you’re trying really hard.”

He nods. He stands up, then walks to the wall and picks up his bag.

He should say something to her to let her know he’s not mad, that he’s accepting all of this with dignity.

Except he is mad. He’s furious. He hates her and he wants to hurt her and kill her but he knows it’s not her fault and maybe it’s not his fault, even, that he’s angry, that he’s crying, that he’s like this, that this horrible and unnameable thing is happening to him, that something in his mind is wired all wrong. But if he opens his mouth he’s going to start shouting and he doesn’t know what he’ll say and he doesn’t want to do that to her, not really.

So he leaves. He puts his bag over his shoulder and, feeling very distant, very absent from his body, he takes himself away.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

I tell you with dry lips
Stay
Where that cloud passed by
Stay, stay, stay, stay

His mother is waiting for him when he gets home, just like she always is.

She smiles as he walks into the kitchen. She says something. He’s not sure what it is. Probably it’s something nice. She’s always nice to him — she never blames him for anything.

She’s going to be disappointed when he tells her he’s been fired. She’ll pretend otherwise; she’ll act like this is just fine and he isn’t a fuckup who can’t get better even though he’s working so fucking hard. He wishes she’d yell at him for once. He wishes she’d tell him he’s a piece of garbage who can’t do the things everyone else on the planet can.

But she won’t. She’ll keep hoping and hoping. It isn’t fair that she loves him when he can’t measure up.

He walks past her and storms up the stairs. She’s calling his name but he doesn’t stop. If he does he’ll tell her horrible things which he won’t be able to take back no matter how hard he tries. Not that he would try. He never does. He just does what he does and lets the sharp edges of his words lie around for anyone to step on.

He slams his door shut behind him then throws himself into his bed and screams into his hands. The bed is neatly made from this morning. He curls up on it, then tugs at his hair. He’s getting the dirt from his outside clothes all over his sheets.

There’s a knock at his door and then his mother’s voice. She’s saying, “Light, honey, are you okay?”

He screams at her. He says something reasonable, he’s sure. Actually he’s not screaming, not really. Actually he’d just said it nicely. Politely. Because that’s the sort of person he is. He doesn’t scream at his mother. He’s twenty-seven and he doesn’t act like a child throwing a tantrum.

She knocks again and he tells her whatever he’d said again, sweet and polite, just like he’s meant to. His throat hurts. He hears the door rattling but he’d had the presence of mind to lock it.

I hate you, someone is saying. Leave me alone, I hate you, don’t fucking come in, I hate you I hate you I hate you.

The rattling at the door stops. He curls up tighter then reaches into his pocket for his phone.

His fingers hit the razor and for a second there’s a hot white pain which he doesn’t want and he screams again and pulls it out and flings it across the room; it hits the wall with a tinny thunk. Such a little thing, utterly weightless.

It’s got him right below the nail; he puts it in his mouth because it hurts then realizes he’s sucking his thumb and takes it out and screams again.

He pulls his phone out. He’s getting blood everywhere, on his pants, on his screen; it’s making it hard to type. He opens up his Tumblr app and explains the situation very calmly then goes to Google and writes a review for his store that’s very calm, too. Then he curls up again, his fingers in his hair, tugging and tugging.

His phone rings. He presses the side button to hang it up, not bothering to look — there’s no one on Earth he wants to talk to right now — then opens it to Weverse and taps into one of the videos but it buffers and won’t load so he throws it at the wall and bites the back of his wrists then pushes his bloodless palm against the front of his pants and tries that for a while because he thinks it might make him feel better but it doesn’t work, it doesn’t feel good, he feels sick and bad and now he feels disgusting, too, oversexed and gross and dirty, so he stops. He wants everyone to die and he wants to be okay and sane and not like this anymore. He thinks he is crying, maybe. He is finding it hard to tell.

From outside, he can hear the sound of wheels on gravel, then the door downstairs opening. There’s a brief silence before heavy footsteps coming pounding up the stairs.

There’s a knock at his door.

“Light?” his farther is saying. “Can you open the door for me?”

He’s not supposed to be here. He’s supposed to be at work. Light can’t think why he’d be here instead of where he’s supposed to be.

He says this. He asks why. His throat hurts so much and he’s pretty sure he’s not screaming because that isn’t something he would do. He wouldn’t.

It’s a little hard to hear what they’re saying but his parents are talking; his father’s voice is low and his mother’s is taught, not quite panicked. They never panic. They’re always so steady. Maybe they should panic. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t feel very well.

His father’s voice is saying take off the hinges.

And then his mother’s voice is saying he’ll never trust us again.

He wants them to take the door off. He wants someone to save him.

His face feels hot and wet. He is very, very calm and everything is just fine and he’s just fine. He feels too bad to hurt himself even though that would probably make him feel better; he thinks he should get up and do it because it would be self-care and then he screams into his hands again because it’s too far away and he just can’t stand it and then there’s another knock at the door and he screams at them to go away.

But the voice which responds does not belong to his parents.

He stops.

It’s quiet and silvery. It winds its way under his door and wraps itself around him.

It is familiar but entirely out of context, so much so that he manages to take in a breath and push himself up. His chest feels tight.

He gets off the bed and walks across the room. The world is swimming. He unlocks the door and throws it open.

L is standing there, wide-eyed. He is wearing a black hoodie and soft blue jeans, and his face is incredibly pale. There’s a white paper wristband peeking out from below his sleeve, as if he’d just gotten back from a club.

He takes a step back when he sees Light, then swallows and steps forwards again.

Light’s parents are behind L. His father’s face is twisted up with worry, flushed red the way it gets when he’s scared. His mother is crying and Light doesn’t know why. It’s not like anything happened to her. it happened to him. Just to him.

Light grabs L’s wrist and drags him in — L lets out a soft puff of air — then slams the door behind both of them and locks it and falls back against it. He slides to the ground.

His body is shaking. The door is sort of steadying against his spine. He puts both hands on the ground and feels the cool wood against his palms. Thinks, one thing I can feel. He can feel the wood. He can hear his parent’s voices still behind the door, murmuring things too quiet for him to hear, and the muted sounds of cars on the road outside. He can see the hems of L’s jeans, tearing, soft white threads breaking free from the denim. He can taste the metal of own blood in his mouth.

He’s very calm and he thinks probably he’s handling this quite well. It’s fantastic that L is here to see how well he’s doing.

“Please don’t touch me again,” L says.

Light looks up. The world is very blurry; he wipes at his eyes. It clears for a second, then goes blurry again.

“What are you doing here,” Light says.

His voice sounds all twisted up and hoarse. It shouldn’t sound that way. He wipes his eyes again. He has no idea how L knows where he lives.

L kneels in front of him. His eyes are very wide, and the corners of his mouth are tense with worry. He is looking at Light like he’s an injured animal. That compassion, that sadness at seeing something hurt, the determination to save a thing which can’t help itself. He is so condescending, all of the time. Light doesn’t mind. Not right now. He’s scared. He’d like to be condescended to. He wants to be pitied. If he’s pitied he’s not responsible.

The strands of silver in L’s hair are growing back in — they look nearly like fallen snow.

“It seemed like you might need a friend,” L says.

“We’re not friends,” Light tells him. “I hate you. I hate you.”

“Alright,” says L, very softly. “It seemed like you might need someone. I suppose it doesn’t have to be a friend.”

“Why,” Light says.

L pauses. And then L says, his voice very careful, “I read your Tumblr post.”

“So what.”

L fumbles around in his pocket, then pulls out his phone, taps it a few times, and turns it around. Light wipes his eyes again.

L has for some reason taken a screenshot of Light’s post. It reads:

Light stares at this. “I didn’t write that,” he says.

“You did,” L tells him, very softly. He’s still talking like Light’s an animal with its leg caught in a trap and Light imagines his fingers reaching forwards, saving him, stitching up the torn flesh. “You did write that.”

L puts his phone away. Light follows the movement.

The thing around his wrist isn’t a club bracelet, he realizes. It’s a hospital wristband. The name on it is bewildering. It has nothing to do with L.

“Are you okay?” Light says.

“What?” L looks startled. He follows Light’s gaze down to his wrist. “Oh. Yes.”

He tugs it off. His hand is all bones, and he only has to fiddle with it for a moment before it slides off.

He looks quite ill, actually. Light hadn’t noticed before. He hadn’t got any makeup on and the shadows under his eyes are so dark. Light can see the veins below his eyes, a network of pale green.

L slips the bracelet into his pocket. “But I came here for you,” he says, and Light snaps back to the present moment. It’s not about L. It’s about him. Things are happening to him. “What happened?”

“Nothing. Nothing happened.”

“Your job let you go?”

“No,” Light says. They didn’t, actually. He’s decided. He’ll go back to work tommorrow. He has a shift at nine. He’s going to go and it’ll be fine.

L looks at him for a long time. “I think they did,” he says, finally. “Perhaps it’s hard to think about. Perhaps it’s easier to pretend that it hasn’t happened.”

Light’s face is wet again. He folds over his knees.

“Did you know you’ve got blood on your face?” L says.

“My finger got hurt.”

“May I see?”

Light holds out his hand. He doesn’t lift his head. He can feel L turning his hand over. He’s very gentle. His fingers are quite soft.

“Ah,” L says. “It isn’t deep, Light, but it’s still bleeding. Have you got bandaids somewhere?”

“They’re in the bedside table.” He keeps a lot of things there. He takes good care of himself, sometimes. He’s very safe.

L lets go of his hand.

“Don’t leave.” Light is shouting again. He doesn’t mean to. He hates how he sounds, whiny and awful and childlike, as if L were about to abandon him in a grocery store.

“I’ll only be a second,” L says. “I’ll be right back.” His voice is so soft.

It really is only a moment before L is back and kneeling in front of him once more. Light looks up to watch him wipe his finger with an alcohol wipe — it’s not the correct thing to put on an open wound, but Light is so tired that he lets him anyway — then wrap a bandaid around his finger. It’s an Anpanman bandaid. He likes Anpanman.

Light folds his hand back in against his chest.

“There,” L says. “You’ll be fine. That’s all better, now. Nothing to worry about.” He smiles very gently.

“It’s not fine,” Light says. “It isn’t.”

L looks at him. “No,” he says, finally. “You’re right. It isn’t fine. I know your job was important to you. But it’s going to be okay. Do you want to know why?”

Light shakes his head. Then he thinks about it again, and nods.

“Because we’re Killers,” L says. “We need to be okay for him. We need to take care of him. That’s our responsibility.” His smile looks very sad, but Light is pretty sure it’s real.

“Okay,” he says.

“Alright,” L says, and nods as if they’ve come to some sort of arrangement. Maybe they have. Light’s not sure. It feels sort of like they’ve just made a pact. Or else like they’re both acknowledging a pact they made long ago. “Tell me what you know.”

“I —” For a second Light isn’t sure what he means. Then he breathes out. “We’ll be here for him. No matter what. We need to survive at all costs.”

“No matter what,” L says, solemn. “You told me that.”

No, Light thinks — Beyond told them both that, and Light reminded L of it. The difference seems important, somehow. But before he can say anything L is talking again, his eyes wide and earnest, the way they always are, like everything he’s saying has already been decided, as if he’s only relaying information they both already know.

L, it occurs to him, seems a little confused at the division between them; he is talking now as if they are one and the same.

“Listen, Light,” L says. “I’ve come to a decision.”

Why are you here, Light wants to ask. Not because he wants him gone but because he wants to know. Where were you, before you came here?

L presses a knuckle against his lip; it looks as if he’s waiting for Light to say something, but Light has nothing to say. Light looks at him until he goes on.

At last L nods, undeterred. “I’m going to get tickets to the shows. I decided last night.”

“All of them,” Light repeats. He waits for the jealousy to sink into him but he’s too tired and so the space where that belongs stays empty and waiting for something else. “Okay. Well. Congratulations, I guess. I’m not going to any.” Then he looks down at L’s wrist, where the hospital wristband had been. “What were you doing last night?”

“It doesn’t matter,” L says, very earnestly. “It’s not important anymore.”

It is important, Light thinks, but before he can say anything L is talking again. “But I don’t want to go alone. That’s not the way things were meant to be.”

“Okay, well, sorry.”

L tips his head. “Will you come with me, Light?”

Light stares at him. L stares back, his eyes wide and dark and searching.

“I don’t —” I don’t want to go with you, he means to say. He hates L. He’s evil and horrible to Beyond and the more Light thinks about it the more certain he is that L must have doxxed him to get his address and be here at all.

But he thinks of the bright lights and the dark concert halls and of Beyond standing on the stage. He thinks of how it would feel to be a glowing light in that ocean; one of so many, a spark in the wave, reaching for Beyond, part of the vast crowd of people who would do anything for him and who could survive anything at all. And he thinks also of his own room, and his own little bed, and how small he feels here, weak and alone.

He can still feel L’s fingers on his wrist, bandaging him up, making him okay again.

L’s eyes are fixed right on him, wide and searching, and all of a sudden what Light wants more than anything is to take him away from wherever he had been the night before.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, okay. Sure. Fine. Whatever.”

L smiles at him. “We’re going to be okay,” he says. “I promise, Light. I do.”

Chapter Text

L is pushing him through security. L is saying, Light, it’s fine, it’s okay. Light doesn’t know why he’s saying this because of course he’s alright. He’s fine. He’s always fine.

L is standing with him in the disabled stall while he sits on the dirty ground and cries and L is saying, hey, look at me, you’re going to be fine, it won’t be so bad once you get on.

Light isn’t scared. He’s very brave, all the time. Everyone says so. They’ve been saying that since he was a child.

L is saying, Light, look, I think you’re having a panic attack. He’s putting a cold can of Nestea against Light’s neck and Light is swatting him away. And then he’s letting him do it because it feels kind of better, actually. It kind of helps. L kind of helps.

Toronto Pearson is massive and sterile, the walls all white, like an overgrown Apple store. He’d been here only once before, when he was a child; he had flown all the way out to Regina for his grandmother’s funeral, the first and last time he’d been on a plane. It smells kind of like cleaning fluid. The floor is covered with slush and grit people have tracked in.

The announcements sound garbled over the intercom. He gets two chances to hear them — once in English and once in French. He tells to L this while L passes him half a sandwich in the waiting area. His chest feels hollowed out. L has laid a few environmentally friendly brown paper napkins over the table as a plate for their sandwich. He doesn’t understand why they can’t have their own sandwiches. This one is tuna.

He has an Americano, too, in a paper Tims cup. Light thinks it’s insane to drink caffeine before getting on a plane.

“I don’t speak much French at all,” L tells him. He’s watching Light like he might start crying, which he obviously won’t. Maybe he did a little of that before but he’s done now. “Only the basics. Puis-je aller la toilette, you know. J’aime la chat noir. Un cafe au lait, s’il-vous-plaît. And so on.” His accent sounds like he last studied French a decade ago in high school, which is presumably what happened.

“Le chat,” Light says.

“Hm?”

“Le chat. It’s Le chat. Chat is masculine.”

“Alright. J’aime le chat noir. I am sensing that you speak French.”

“I went to McGill,” Light informs him. “I lived in Montreal.”

“Is that so?”

“I did poli-sci.”

“That’s very nice, Light.”

When their boarding announcement comes on in English and French, L stands up with his coffee.

“You can’t bring that on a flight,” Light tells him.

“You can,” L says. “I bought it after security, so it’s alright.”

“You can’t have unsealed liquids,” Light says.

“Well, no, not if you buy them before security, but I bought it after.” He points to the Tim Hortons stand. “See?”

“No one else has any,” Light tells him.

“That’s alright. It’s still allowed. Perhaps they don’t know.”

“It isn’t.” He can feel his voice rising. A family with two children turns to look at him, the mother’s eyes narrowing. He scowls back at them. He hadn’t been that loud.

And anyway this is important. L doesn’t know anything. Light read all the rules and it isn’t permitted. They’re going to catch L and throw them both off the plane. Or else he’s going to get on with his hot coffee and the plane is going to do a big jolt and it’ll spill on someone — Light, maybe, or L himself — and they’ll get burned and the plane will have to land and they won’t get to go to any of the concerts and then their burn will get infected and they will die. And it’ll be Light’s fault because he let L do it.

This is his chance, right now, to change the future.

L looks at him for a very long time. “Alright, Light,” he says, then drains his coffee and throws it in the trash.

“You should have recycled that.”

“Thank you, Light. I’ll keep that in mind for next time.”

To get to the airplane from the airport they have to go through a strange little hallway which the airport workers rolled across the tarmac to connect the two. He was aware of this — he’s seen television — but he hadn’t known how loud it would be in the tunnel. It is unclear to him what exactly is making that noise.

“It’s okay,” L says, very softly, and places a hand on the back of Light’s arm. The ground gives a little beneath his feet but that’s okay. It’s fine. It doesn’t scare him at all. It is simply not the sort of thing which would frighten a brave person such as himself.

“You’re doing really well,” L tells him, as he buckles himself into his seat. L has given him the window seat; he stares out the plastic and watches the people scuttling about on the tarmac.

L nudges his leg. For someone who doesn’t like to be touched, L certainly touches him a lot. “Tell me about your favourite variety show.”

Light thinks about this for a second. “I like the Men on a Mission episode where they had to do an obstacle course and Beyond got so mad he pretended to throw A on the ground.” They’re good actors — they’d made it look real, and when the camera cut back Beyond was gone because he’d had to leave for a different appearance, so a lot of delusional fans think he’d really shoved him. He hadn’t, obviously, but there a lot of stupid people in the world who will believe anything at all.

“I liked that one, too,” L says. “Which was your favourite obstacle? I liked the one where they had to put their hands in ice water to pull out a trinket.” Beyond had been very good at that.

Light tells him, and L is watching him so intently, eyes so wide and fixed on him, nodding like he really and truly cares, that Light barely notices when they take off.

Once they’re properly in the air, L reaches into his pocket and digs out a folded up piece of paper. He unfolds it and spreads it across his legs; it’s a list of everywhere they’re going to go.

“Okay,” he says. “We should discuss what we’re going to do.”

They hadn’t talked much in the month between. L has sort of dropped off the map, and Light had been busy. His parents had demands which he had to follow; Sayu had gotten on the phone and shouted at them, which she never does until they’d made Light do three sessions with a private therapist; he’s on CAMH’s list for a DBT group, for later. The waitlist is nine months, so it won’t interfere with their trip.

And anyway it isn’t as if he’d wanted to talk to L more than absolutely necessary. He’d called, once, just to check up on him, but L hadn’t answered.

“It’s a pretty tight schedule, actually,” L says. “We’ve got all of today and tomorrow in Seattle, with the concert at eight, but then we’re off to San Francisco right away. Then we’ve got Los Angeles, and Chicago, a day in Cleveland — I don’t think there’s much to do in Cleveland, anyway — Atlanta, which should be interesting, and then two full days in New York. Then we’re off to Europe. England’s the first stop, there.” He pauses. “I thought we might stay with two of my friends, actually. Mello and Near. You know them.”

This is technically true. Near and Light had exchanged death threats, a few times. He wouldn’t consider them close.

“I have a friend in Cleveland,” Light announces. “From McGill. Kiyomi. Her name was Kiyomi. We dated for a bit.”

“Oh. You dated — do you want to see her?”

“No,” Light says.

L looks at him, tilts his head, then nods. “Well —”

“Why would you ask me that?”

“What?”

“What does it matter to you if I see her or not?”

L tilts his head a little further; his eyes have gone wide. “It doesn’t, really, if I’m being honest. I was only making conversation.”

“Then why would you ask? Jesus Christ. You’re so fucking patronizing.”

“Light, I really don’t care — oh, hello.”

A flight attendant has appeared over his shoulder, rolling a silver cart. “Would you two like to order anything?”

“Could I have a Bloody Mary, please?” L says, then glances back at Light. He seems to be deliberating something. Light can’t imagine what. “And a vodka straight up.”

“A cranberry juice,” Light tells her.

She looks at Light apologetically. “I’m afraid we’re all out.”

The panic rises faster. “What?”

“Would you like something else?”

“No, I want cranberry juice.” It’s what he had the only other time he’d flown on a plane, when he was seven, and everything had been fine. His voice, he thinks, is quite reasonable, given what’s happening; it’s rising maybe a little, but the situation is untenable. “Didn’t we just come from an airport? Is no one in this place competent, do the pilots even —”

There’s a weight on his upper arm. L has laid a hand on it, and is looking at him very intently. The flight attendant’s smile has gotten very strained, which is stupid, because he’s just providing reasonable constructive criticism.

“It’s okay,” L says. “Light. It’s fine. Why don’t we get something else, hm?” He looks up at the flight attendant and flashes her a wide smile. “I’m a little nervous about flying and he’s just trying to make sure everything is exactly as I’d expected it to be. That’s all. What else do you have? You must have tomato juice. He’ll have that. Can I tip you? Is that allowed?”

Her smile is a little less strained, but she’s still looking at him like he’s an inconvenience, which Light thinks is very rude to do to a business-class customer. She informs Light that he is not allowed to tip her, then waves a hand when he tries to hand her a twenty dollar bill anyway. She mixes together L his Bloody Mary, hands him a tiny bottle of vodka, then puts a little plastic cup of tomato juice on his tray.

L passes the tomato juice to Light.

“I don’t like her,” Light says.

“Yes, I can see that. You should drink that. Flying is very dehydrating.” He goes to pour the vodka into his drink, then pauses, and hands it to Light instead. “Here. Have this. It might calm you down.”

“It’s 9AM,” Light tells him.

“Yes. It is.” L takes a long drink from his Bloody Mary, then smiles brightly at Light. It looks a little too bright, maybe. Slightly forced. “Anyway. As I was saying. We’ve got two days in New York, so that’s quite a bit of time for tourism. Shall we use a day to find their hotel?”

He says this so casually that it takes Light a second to process.

“What?” he says. Then, “No. We should not do that. What the fuck?”

“Mm,” says L. “Then we won’t.”

“Are you asking if we should stalk RE:4PER?”

“No. Of course not. I was asking if you’d be interested in finding their hotel, and obviously you aren’t, so we don’t need to discuss the matter any further.”

“Jesus. This is exactly what’s wrong with you. You keep telling everyone it’s fine, it’s just fiction, it’s not real, but you want to fucking find where they live, and —”

“Drink your vodka,” L says. He mimes the motion. “Go on. It’s good for you.”

Light does.

Chapter Text

By the time they get back to the hotel, Light is exhausted, but L looks worse. He seems liable to unwind into individual cells.

The flight was a little under five hours, but it seems to have taken more than that from him. He’s gone very pale, and his fingers are shaking on the handle of his suitcase. He won’t let Light take it from him, though — when Light tries, he jerks away as if he’s been burned.

The name L gives at hotel reception is the same as the one that had been on his hospital band. Bella Lioni, a profoundly ordinary name. Light’s not sure if he’s supposed to know it. L had said it plainly, as if it didn’t matter, so he supposes it’s fine. He tucks it away with all the other information he has about L.

When they get to their room, L is swaying in the doorway.

It’s probably the sleekest hotel room Light has been to in his entire life. It’s massive — nearly the size of L’s apartment — and there’s a huge window that opens up onto the Seattle skyline, flooding the whole room with light. He can see the Needle rising up above its blocky buildings, the mountains far in the distance. The walls are cream, with scalloped edging, and the accents — the curtains, the throw pillows — are indigo. Somewhat inexplicably, there are several bookshelves, as if they’re about to sit around and read.

There is, however, an immediately obvious issue: there is only one bed.

It’s a nice bed. It’s huge. It’s got tiny white sheets with an indigo runner. But there’s only one of it.

Light stares at this for a moment, considering, then points towards it. “Go to sleep,” he says. “You look like shit.”

It’s probably a testament to how tired L is that he simply kicks off his shoes, leans his suitcase against the door, then walks over to the bed and lies down in his jeans and hoodie, right there on the runner.

He looks strangely vulnerable like that. Upsettingly so, really. Light has to stop himself from walking over and tucking him in. Instead he walks past and pulls the blinds shut.

L curls up into himself.

“I’m going to go look around,” Light informs him. “I’ll bring back food.”

L makes a vague noise that’s probably language, so Light heads out, working over in his mind what to do about the bed.

He takes the elevator back down to the receptionist, who looks pleasantly up at him. “Hi,” he says. “I’m — Lioni. Sorry. Our room only has a double.”

Her eyes go wide. “Oh!” she says. “Are you and he not —” She cuts herself off, abruptly.

For reasons Light could not possibly explain, the thought sends a flush up his throat. “No. We’re not.”

She looks back at her computer. “Well, it was booked as a double and the hotel is fully booked, but I can have a cot sent up.”

Light considers this for a second. “Actually. My friend is sleeping. Can I get it later?”

“Absolutely. I’ll make a note on your account.” She types something, which is presumably the note.

This is so cool. Things are happening, and he doesn’t even have to argue for them. He wonders if this is what it’s like all the time, if you’re rich. “Thanks,” he says, then tries to think of more things to ask for. “Could you tell me where I can get a coffee? And a good restaurant. To eat. We were on a plane.”

She writes down a few places for him, then sends him on his way with a packet of pamphlets and a branded memo page full of personal suggestions. Apparently there’s a bar in the hotel, but he wants to see the city — they won’t have all that much time later, with the concert.

He heads for Monorail Espresso partially because the receptionist had mentioned it was once a coffee cart, which feels very American, and partially because he likes public transportation. He’s never been on a monorail before, but he thinks he might like to.

It’s a brisk ten minutes away. His head feels fuzzy, and his thoughts are translucent — it’s only 1PM in Toronto, ten AM here, but he’s been on a terrifying plane for hours and he’d barely slept the night before. Everything has the liquid quality of a lucid dream.

All the buildings look strangely pale. Whenever he catches a peek of the Space Needle peeking up through the buildings, it looks like some eerie alien thing, as if someone had drawn the CN tower from memory and plunked it straight into the world.

He can’t tell if he feels good or bad. His body feels sort of terrible, but he thinks his mind is okay.

He thinks of RE:4PER walking through these streets. Presumably they must have. Probably they’d look up at the Needle, too. He wonders if it reminds them of the Seoul Tower, instead.

When he finally reaches the coffee shop, it turns out to be a walk-up. The receptionist had made it sound like it was dine-in and he was counting on a place to rest but there are a handful of picnic tables outside, so he figures that’s probably okay.

There’s a big sign in the window that reads Caffeine, and a progress flag in the window. The building has white brick and windows with black bars. There’s a cluster of people in line already, so he gets in behind them.

Somehow this feels vaguely illegal. It’s strange to be doing normal things in another country.

Americans, he thinks, also stand in lines. People around the world are standing in lines. Even Beyond probably stands in lines. The world is so connected. He thinks he might cry about his realization. He also thinks maybe he would like a nap.

The barista behind the counter has spiky pink hair and wide smile. Light squints at the menu behind them. “Can I have,” he says, “an espresso.”

“Is that all?” they ask, very loudly. Light squints at the many again.

“Yes,” he declares, finally.”

“Three dollars and thirty cents.”

He reaches into his pocket, pulls out his wallet, fishes around for two toonies, then realizes he’s left all his American cash at the hotel.

He freezes.

For a second he doesn’t know what to do. He stares at the barista, who looks back at him, their smile slowly becoming strained.

He thinks he might cry or fall down or start shouting. He doesn’t want to do any of these things, but the idea of informing them that he hasn’t got any money at all feels unbearably humiliating and impossibly confusing. He’s not even sure what to tell them. He forgot about money? Like Disco Elysium?

Then he remembers credit cards. He pulls his out. “I would like to pay by credit,” he declares. The barista, looking relieved, waves at the machine; he adds a twenty percent tip, then taps his card. He had been informed that Americans don’t have tap, but apparently they do.

Everything is so fantastic. He stands to the side to wait for his drink, then picks it up and takes a sip.

It’s very bitter, pleasantly so; he can feel the caffeine sparkling through him, lighting his brain up. It’s his first-ever foreign coffee. He wonders if he should do something to celebrate it. He pulls his phone out to inform Tumblr, then decides he actually wants to be by himself for a while, and anyway the data charges would be atrocious.

He’d sort of been planning to sit down for a while but the tables are already full. Instead, he downs the rest of his coffee, then tosses the paper cup into the trash.

When he gets back to the hotel, he’s holding two boxes of Chinese takeout. He was delighted to find that they come in boxes just like on TV.

The room is dark; he slips inside, then shuts the door behind him. L is a dark shape under the blankets, and Light thinks he’s asleep until he sees the glow of his phone and realizes he’s probably working on that horrible fic. Someday Light is going to have to ask how he does this so quickly and why he won’t simply invest in a bluetooth keyboard.

“Hey,” says Light.

L rolls over, and puts his phone face-down. “Hello.”

“I’m going to turn on the light. It’s dark.”

“Yes, of course.”

Light flicks the switch, then stills.

He’s not certain, but it really looks like L has been crying. His eyes are red and puffy, and there’s an indefinable shivery quality to his face.

Light isn’t sure what to say. He’s never been good at reassurance, not even before McGill.

He trawls through his mind to come up with something that might be useful, then decides it’s simply not his purpose in the world and holds up the plastic bags instead. “I brought food,” he says.

“Oh,” says L.” He was definitely crying. His voice is raw. He doesn’t sit up. “I’m not hungry.”

“Did you eat while I was gone?”

“No.”

“Then you are.” He'd had a collection of pastries while he was out, and he's still starving. He walks across the room and plunks the bags onto the table. “I got lemon chicken.”

L stares at him. Light opens the plastic bags, then takes out the boxes one by one. It’s fun — they’re like little presents, just for him and L.

He’s got lemon chicken, like he said, and vegetable mix, and chop suey with loads of bean sprouts and chicken. This, he’s decided, will be both filling and nutritious.

It’s sort of nice, actually, taking care of L. Acquiring provisions. L would have been hungry but now he’ll be nourished and that’s because of him.

He lays the chopsticks out like he’s setting a table, then takes out the fortune cookie and puts them in the middle of the table.

When he looks back, L has risen. He’s supporting himself with one arm, and the blankets are still wrapped around him. His eyes are big and wide and fixes on Light.

“Come here,” Light says. “Don’t be silly.” Then, because L isn’t doing anything at all, “You can take the blankets with you.”

L starts and then, like a wind-up toy jolted into motion, he pulls the blankets around himself like a cloak and crawls off the bed. He sits down and picks up the chopsticks, then states at them like he’s not sure what they’re for.

To jog his memory, Light sits down across from him, opens his up, then snaps them apart. L does the same, then peers down at the boxes.

“These were good choices,” he says.

“Thank you,” Light tells him.

“What did you do while you were out?” He pokes at the lemon chicken with his chopsticks, then eats one out of the box, which Light thinks is a little disgusting, although it’s unclear to him what the alternative would be. At home he sometimes rips the top off the styrofoam containers and uses them as plates, but that’s clearly not an option here.

He decides that it’s a vacation and, as such, the ordinary rules of engagement do not apply. It’s like Midsummer Night’s Dream. He plucks at a piece of lemon chicken.

“I walked around. I had an espresso.”

“Oh.” L pokes at the chicken, evidently trying to pick out the perfect piece. He settles on one so tiny it looks like mostly breading. “This is sort of romantic, isn’t it?”

Light looks over, sharply.

“What?”

To his surprise, L flushes. It looks strange on him, blotchy and red, crawling up his throat.

“Well,” he goes on, his voice quite steady; if it hadn’t been for the flush, Light wouldn’t have noticed he was embarrassed at all. “Sharing food from the same dish. It’s like Sleepless in Seattle.”

“That doesn’t happen in Sleepless in Seattle.”

“Well, that dog movie, then. With the pasta.”

“The Lady and the Tramp. That takes place in New England.” He isn’t actually trying to interrogate him — it’s just very confusing, given how incorrect all of this is. He supposes this explains some things about Sakura News.

L stabs at a pepper, misses, then rearranged his chopsticks, uses them normally, and picks one up. He holds them like he learned how as an adult —excessively precise, his thumb a perfect hinge, eyes darting towards them to make sure they don’t cross. It’s odd. Light is pretty sure he’s Japanese. He’s definitely Asian, anyway.

“California is in New England, in its way,” L says.

“No, it isn’t. What?” It’s strange to hear something so inane spoken in that silvery voice.

“Well, if you — would you like to watch a live? I think that could be fun.

Light does.

Chapter Text

Light wakes to find L already in the bathroom. The door is wide open, and through it Light can see that he’s leaning on the counter, doing his makeup.

Light reasons that if he wanted to be alone he would have shut the door. He rubs the sleep out of his eyes, then drifts towards him and stands in the doorway.

He looks much better, which is a relief. Probably he was just tired, the night before. Light had been tired, too.

L glances towards him, then tips his head.

“You don’t need to lurk,” he says.

Light walks in. The bathroom is tiny — big enough for the two of them, but only barely. He sits down on the edge of the bathtub.The porcelain is cold beneath his fingers.

L is patting foundation over his skin with a little triangular sponge. The sponge is sort of dirty. He’s got an open black leather case on the sink beside him. L’s accoutrements are spilling out of it in a way that feels inexplicably obscene — brushes and shaving cream and a blue toothbrush with a name printed on it, presumably of L’s dentist, which is slightly too small for Light to read.

That green tube Light had seen in L’s bathroom months ago is sitting beside it. He hopes L will use it so Light can find out why he wants to be green.

“What do you want to do today?” Light asks.

L pauses in his patting to turn back and look at him, both eyebrows raised, as if Light has gone utterly insane.

“The concert,” L says. “I want to go to the concert.”

“Yeah,” Light says. “But the concert is at eight. What do you want to do before eight?”

L stares at him, blankly.

“We can do things before eight,” Light tells him. “We’re in Seattle. We should see Seattle. We have ten hours.”

L stares at him for a little while longer, then turns back to the mirror. He sets down the sponge and runs his fingers over his face, then picks up his eyeliner.

Light has rarely seen anyone put on makeup. Sayu wears it, but he didn’t generally hang around while she was putting it on, before she left for university. He knows his mother sometimes does, too, but he can never tell if she is or isn’t wearing it — she looks like his mother no matter what. As a child, though, he’d sometimes sit on the edge of the bathtub just like this while she put on foundation and blush that made her look nearly the same but a little brighter.

He considers asking L if he could try, but it seems somehow too intimate, and anyway he’s pretty sure you’re not supposed to share someone’s makeup. You could get pinkeye or strep or something like that. Or, worse, he could put it on and end up looking all wrong.

“We can do whatever you want,” L tells him. He sets his pinkie against his cheekbone and draws two quick, sharp lines across his eye and then suddenly, like magic, he’s got a heavy wing above it.

Light hadn’t realized how much it changes his expression, but he can see it now, with only half his face. The eye without a wing looks soft, a little tired, perhaps, strangely vulnerable; he wants to walk to that L and brush his hair back and tell him everything is going to be alright. The eye with the wing looks intense, almost angry. Untouchable. That’s the L he hates.

With another set of quick, deliberate movements, L does the other and then the transformation is complete; the gentleness is gone and this bulletproof person who looks startlingly like Beyond is back.

He has a sudden, unbidden image of stepping forwards and cupping L’s face in his, holding him soft, of L looking up at him, his lips parting.

In this image L’s face is bare. He looks delicate, not breakable but like someone with whom he needs to be careful, someone who can be touched and harmed and caressed.

It’s so vivid that it grabs him like a wind, sweeps him up in the force of it, and he has to swallow and run a hand quick across his temple to clear it.

“I want to got to Pike Place Market,” he says. “And I want to go on the monorail.”

“Okay,” L says. “We can do that, if you’d like.”

“They’re classics,” Light informs him. “It’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“Alright,” L says, sounding irritatingly as if he’s appeasing Light instead of performing the completely normal act of exploring a brand new city. “I’ve got to — there’s a thing I have to do, though. At one PM.”

“What’s that?”

L bites his lip, then starts putting his makeup away. “I’m meant to — I’ve got a therapy appointment,” he says, all in a rush.

“Oh,” says Light. “I used to do that, too.”

L looks at him through the mirror. “I don’t — I don’t think I would, if I had a choice, but my grandfather …” He waves his hand. “It’s one of his conditions.

“For what?”

“For all of this. He won’t pay if I don’t. He thinks there’s something wrong with me.”

“There is,” Light says.

This is sort of obvious. He doesn’t mean anything negative by it — there’s something wrong with him, too, and he thinks it’s important to know this. If he didn’t know, he would think this was all his fault.

L flinches, though, and he thinks maybe his words hadn’t come across right. He readies himself to correct it but before he can say anything L picks up a little tube and sprays something all over his face; it makes a sharp hissing noise. The gesture is so startling that he entirely forgets what he was going to say.

“Anyway,” L says. He zips up his makeup case and turns around, looking at Light for the first time without the abstraction of the mirror. The air smells faintly chalky. “Come on. Let’s go see people throw fish.”

They get continental breakfast in the hotel, first, which is vaguely exciting — every part of the day feels so incredibly adult. All they have to do is walk in and take whatever they want from the bar. No one even asks if they belong, because it is evident that they do.

L eats like a bird, gathering for himself a breakfast that is entirely fruit — nothing but a bowl of strawberries, blueberries and raspberries that are clearly meant as toppings for the oatmeal beside them. He pours a half-cup of cream over them, then takes a glass of orange juice and a mug of black coffee.

Light, who knows how to take advantage of free things, loads his plate up with eggs and sausages and toast and home fries and — since L has already make them look ridiculous by taking the fruit on its own — a pile of blueberries. On the way out he grabs two oranges and sticks them in his coat pocket for them to eat later.

L eyes him with something that leans inexplicably like envy.

Light had looked up directions to Pike Place Market earlier; he leads them there while L trails a little ways behind him.

L is dressed in all black — his long black coat, a silky black scarf, heavy black boots and a black mask — and Light is quite sure that people are staring at them as they pass because he looks like a fashion model or perhaps a pop star. He could easily be an idol. Light is dressed in his faux-sheepskin coat; he blends in just fine.

He wonders if L could make him look like that, if he wore makeup, too. Maybe. He knows he looks nice, nice enough that people treat him well for it, not nice enough that he intimidates them.

Men are drawn to him. They are not scared of him. They see him and think he’s something they could have.

L, with his makeup, looking frighteningly beautiful. Without it he looks ordinary. Maybe a little strange, even, the same proportions which give him that ethereal cast when he’s made up lending him a sense of the bizarre.

It is not unappealing, this strangeness of his. This thought settles slow in Light’s mind, without his permission. He doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want to think of L that way. He doesn’t want to be like the men who want him, who lay their hands across him, whose fingers wind deep into his mind.

“It’s a bit surreal, eh?” L says. Light startles and turns. L nods towards the Needle.

“Yeah.”

“Like the CN tower. Except not.”

“Yeah.”

The market is uncomfortably full. It’s full of soft things and so the noise doesn’t echo; it settles claustrophobically around him instead, a warm miasma of sound.

To his surprise, L shrinks close to him. It takes Light a second to realize he’s just trying to stop other people from bumping into him, but it has the effect of making it so L walks into him every few steps instead. Light steps away from him but L immediately lurches forwards to stay close. Irritated, Light lets him do it.

It’s easy to find the fish people — he just follows the noise of them until he sees a crowd of people who are very obviously tourists, adorned with backpacks and fanny packs and happily choosing to stand in the middle of the walkway, as if everyone else on Earth was as unhurried as them.

Light leads L to the edge of the crowd, doing his very best not to block everyone who wishes to do anything other than watch people throw fish. They are tourists, but he doesn’t think they have to act like it.

There are a couple people doing something with fish on ice, and three people slightly apart from them who are shouting and throwing a trout back and forth. The trout is in absolutely terrible shape — its belly is split open, and he can see the entrails making their way out, a shock of pink along its silver stomach. He takes a picture with his phone, then turns to L, who is watching with his brows furrowed.

“Do you like this?” L asks.

“The fish looks hurt.”

“It’s dead. It doesn’t matter.”

Light knows this. Obviously. He is aware. Still, there’s something alarming about it, about all these people standing around to watch a dead fish fall apart as it gets thrown around. He’d sort of assumed they threw fish with a purpose in mind. He informs L of this.

“Mm. They also throw them when you buy them. This is for the tourists. People don’t buy them often enough for there to always be one to throw.”

“Oh. I don’t want a fish that looks like that.”

“Well, it wouldn’t look like that because they wouldn’t throw it around like that.” Before Light can say anything, L’s voice rises. “They would only throw it one. The broken fish is for the tourists. As I said.”

“I don’t like it.”

“No. It’s a bit distressing, isn’t it?”

“We’re the tourists and I don’t want it.”

“Yes,” L says. “But the other tourists do. You aren’t the only person on the planet, Light, believe it or not. Let’s go elsewhere, shall we?”

L’s alarm goes off as they’re walking through Seattle, looking for new things to do. He pulls his phone, then makes a face.

“What?” Light asks. He can see Light’s phone, tilted just slightly towards him; he’s pretty sure it’s an accident.

The alarm has a title; it reads BetterHelp.

“Therapy,” L says. He stares at his phone, then puts it back in his pocket. “It’s not important.”

“You’re skipping therapy?” Light can't decide if this is a good idea or a bad one. On one hand, it's BetterHelp -- he'd sort of assumed that L would be able to pay for a proper therapist rather than a data scam. Light gets it, he really does; the wherewithal required to find one for himself had been entirely beyond him, and his parents had done the bulk of the work for him. Still, L has money and a grandfather who apparently cares enough to follow up on whether or not he attends.

All the same, L really does seem very unwell. Although he looks fine just now, so maybe it isn’t a big deal.

“Well, I don’t really have time right now, do I? I suppose I could do it in the middle of the street, but that seems somewhat unpleasant, doesn’t it?” Then he smiles up at Light, that bright smile, almost blinding, childish and unrestrained. “Like you said. We’re in Seattle. Let’s explore.”

Chapter Text

Light thinks he is maybe going to pass out.

He’s been to a few concerts before, but never for someone he loved. Never for someone who is so beloved. Even in the entranceway, the crowd is milling about, their excitement palpable, glancing his way with the same luminescent interest they look at everyone else, like they already know each other, like they’re family.

Which they are. Sort of. They’re all here because of RE:4PER. They’re all bound by that.

He looks behind him.

L’s eyes have gone gigantic, so wide they look massive even with his heavy wings. Something soft in Light flutters; he doesn’t know what it is.

He’s walking far too close to Light — it must be the crowd again, just like the market — and then, as Light is about to turn away again, he grabs the edge of Light’s sleeve.

Light freezes.

L looks sort of shivery. Maybe this means it’s Light’s job to take care of him. He’s not sure. He’s never been in this position before, unless one counts Sayu.

Back in McGill he was always the most vulnerable of his friends, the one who had to be watched out for; he’d never been much of a crier before university but suddenly there he was in class with saltwater in his eyes and everyone saying Light, what’s wrong, what happened, and he could never answer because nothing had happened and nothng was wrong except for him. Something had gotten knocked loose and even in the years that followed he couldn’t put it back together; he’d lost the knack and now everyone takes care of him.

And L is an adult and so he isn’t responsible. Still. He doesn’t shake him off. He lets him hold his sleeve as he shows their tickets to the usher and leads them into the vast dark of the concert hall and to the floor — a thrilling place to be, somewhere hed always assumed belonged to other people — but and then suddenly they’re standing together, here at a RE:4PER concert, and Beyond is going to be in front of him, realer than ever.

The concert hall is massive and dark. Even with all heat of all the people around them, it’s freezing cold; it smells like concrete and mingled perfume.

L pulls out his lightstick, so Light does the same. They’re shaped like sickles, with a black plastic handle and a blade of clear pastic with a second clear tube inside filled with red and purple glitter. L’s has a sticker along one side of the handle which says BEYOND in big silver letters, and then something in Korean on the other side. Light thinks maybe it says I love you; he’s seen the letters often enough that he has a vague sense of thier shape.

Light can see them only dimly. The crowd is murmmering to one another, the noise rising headily above them.

And then suddenly the room fills with red light.

He startles, and nearly drops his lightstick — without any input on his part, it’s turned on and is glowing a bloody red.

“It’s bluetooth,” L says. “The stage managers control them so the ocean will work properly.”

“I know that,” Light says. He had. He’d just forgotten because it felt like magic.

He looks up and around him. The concert hall is studded with lights, glowing bright in the dark; people call it an ocean and that really is what it looks like, a wash of colour and light glimmering across waves as they move gently, the people carrying them swathed in dark, almost invisible, as if they are themselves the lights, which in a way they are. Light doesn’t exist in here. No one does. It’s only RE:4PER and them, a vast collection of people whose only purpose is to love them and be loved in return.

And then suddenly the lights on the stage flash and a cheer rises up from the crowd, a cheer so deep and loving tht it thrums inside his chest and he hears the noise coming from himself, too; he breathes in and L grabs his arm, a movement that feels somehow involuntarily, and usually he doesn’t like to be touched but right now he doesn’t mind and then, for the first time in months — years, maybe — his mind goes quiet.

He can’t think. He doesn’t want to think. His whole world is nothing but the lights and the sound and Beyond with the stage lights on him, shining in the dark.

Walking out of the concert, he doesn't have a clue what to do with himself. He feels changed, profoundly so, but he couldn't say for certain what the change is -- the colours of the world seem more muted, the sounds softened, and not unpleasantly so. Usually they're too bright. Usually they hurt.

He heads for the cot the second they get to the room and falls onto it. L hovers by the door. Light can't see him, but he can hear as he stays there for a moment then pads over to the bed, as quiet as always, eternally so careful not to make any noise at all.

He's less unbearable to be around than other people are.

For a long moment there's silence, and then he hears the sound of L's body hitting the covers.

Light lies there in the quiet, trying to commit all of it to memory. He can photograph all of it inside of his head. He wants it in his bone, in his blood.

"That was nice, wasn't it?"

L shuts his eyes a little tighter. He doesn't actually want to talk to L right now; he needs to commit all of this to himself. It feels like waking from a dream, fragile and liable to float away.

There's silence, so he thinks he's going to get exactly this, but L speaks again.

"I thought he was even better live than in the videos. I knew he would be, but it's different to see it, isn't it?"

Light stays very still, hoping he'll stop. He does not.

"I wonder if they'll do all the same songs again next time. I want to see Winter Rain again. I liked the staging."

"L," Light snaps. L falls quiet. "They'll do the same songs. You know that."

There's a long silence. "Right," L says, at last. "But I thought it might be nice to discuss it anyway."

"It wouldn't be," Light says. "We both saw the same show. We were there together."

"Ah," says L. Then, quieter, "The plane is at seven tomorrow. I think I'll set an alarm."

"Yeah," says Light. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Light.”

Light turns over. He feels sort of bad, for some reason. Guilty. He’s not sure why. He sort of wants to turn around again and talk to L a little more after all. But he’s already made up his mind so he stays where he is and shuts his eyes in the dark and allows the memory of the lights to lull him away into sleep.

Chapter Text

San Francisco is beautiful, full of colourful buildings and impossibly tall hills. It helps that the day is clear and bright, the sky a pale blue with only the slightest breath of clouds. The air smells mostly of petrol, but Light doesn’t mind.

They take a bus down to their hotel which, inexplicably, contains only a double bed. This time, L doesn’t complain when Light informs him they should head out into the city before the concert.

There people absolutely everywhere, and L sticks aggravatingly close to him as they walk.

“We haven’t got much time,” L says, without looking up from his phone. It’s a little unclear to Light how he’s managing to walk without thwacking into Light, especially since he’s so insistent on staying right at his elbow. “The concert is at eight, so if there’s anything you want to do —”

“I want to go to the Castro,” Light says. “And Japantown.”

L flicks his eyes upwards. “We can probably do one,” he says, then taps away at his phone. “Japantown’s closer.”

It’s eight AM; Light’s pretty sure they could manage both. Still, he acquiesces. “Let’s go to Japantown,” he says.

Light is starving by the time they get to Japantown. He’s pretty sure he’s going to blow up if he’s forced to do even one extra thing before they eat, so he makes a beeline for the first restaurant he sees.

The area is beautiful, full of buildings with wood siding and wagata-kawara roofs; it’s nothing at all like J-Town out in Markham, which he loves very dearly but which is tiny and resembles a strip mall more than anything else. It looks like a place tourists might go which, he supposes, they are proving accurate.

“Oh,” says L, curiously. “Are you hungry?” He says this as if it were an exciting foreign concept and this were the first time he’s hearing about it.

“Yeah,” Light says. He heads into the restaurant, and nods as they’re loudly Irasshaimase’d. “They were supposed to serve food on the plane.” He’d found the flight much less horrifying this time than the first go around, but the service was underwhelming.

“They weren’t,” L tells him. “It was only an hour flight.”

“Yeah, but planes come with pretzels — yeah, two.” He holds up his thumb and forefinger as the waiter heads towards them with a menu, then lets himself be led towards a table in the back. The restaurant is little and dark, full enough he supposes they were lucky to walk in without a reservation; there’s a dragon mural painted along one wall and a massive fan golden fan along the other. This does not bode well for the quality of the food, but Light actually doesn’t care so long as it’s halfway edible.

He orders the tempera bento meal. L stares at the menu for a very long time, then orders a green tea ice cream and a genmaicha.

“You should eat something real,” Light informs him, as the waiter is leaving.

L stares at him, wide-eyed.

“Is ice cream not real?”

“It’s ice cream,” Light says.

“Well. Yes. I’d hoped that would be the case, since it’s what I ordered.”

“It’s a dessert. It’s not real food.”

“It is real food. It’s ice cream. When it comes, you’ll see that it’s existent, and this will be very exciting for both of us.” Then, as Light opens his mouth again, his voice rises, loud enough that the couple beside them turns to look. “Well,” he says. Let’s agree to disagree. And anyway the waiter is gone, so it’s too late.”

Light is correct, but he supposes that’s a satisfactory solution. He shrugs.

It’s sort of awkward, really. It occurs to Light that this is the first time they’ve been alone without something to look at, other than the plane, which doesn’t count because Light had been, admittedly, a little upset. After a long moment of silence, he pulls out his phone and scrolls through Tumblr. There isn’t much happening on the dash. He reblogs three gifsets of RE:4PER before the waiter arrives with their food and he’s obliged to put his phone away, so as not to be rude.

“So,” he says, then casts around for a subject of conversation. He lands on Japan, on account of the decor. “You’re Japanese, right?”

“Mm,” says L. “Half.” He skims his spoon across the top of the ice cream, taking off the thinnest possible skin, then licks it off. Light can see the little ridge of skin along the bottom of his tongue. It’s a disturbingly erotic movement, and he looks away as L goes on. “Half … other things. European, mostly. Italian. Hence the name. British. Russian. Mm. Is Italy part of Europe?”

Light turns back to him. He’s skimming off more of his ice cream. Light can’t figure out if he’s joking or not. He doesn’t seem to be.

“Yes,” Light says, at last. “Italy is in Europe.”

“Well, entirely European, than. Oh, maybe French? I don’t know. The European is all on my father’s side and he wasn’t much of a factor.”

“I speak French,” Light informs him. “I went to school in Montreal. France is also in Europe, by the way.”

“Ah. Yes. McGill, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s very impressive. McGill is quite a good school.”

Light can’t tell if he’s being made fun of or not. He eats a shrimp tempera, then decides he doesn’t actually care. L is always so polite when he’s being rude, which makes it worse. The tempera is aggressively mediocre.

“Are you Yonsei?” he asks.

“What?”

“Fourth gen. Are you fourth gen?”

L pauses. “How did you know that?” There’s the slightest trace of alarm in his voice.

“Because all Yonsei are half. Like, statistically. I’m not, obviously. But we even out. And I don’t really count because my mom’s from Japan so only my dad’s side was interned.”

“Ah,” says L. “Do you always talk about such cheerful things?”

“It’s historical. San Francisco’s was Manzanar.”

“San Francisco’s what?”

“Their internment camp. Mine were in Kaslo.” He pauses. “You should know these things,” he says. “It’s your history. You should know it.” He feels this very strongly: someone has to keep the rot of the world in their minds. It can’t be forgotten.

“Thank you, Light,” L says. There’s something a little sharp in his tone. “I appreciate your concern. How’s your tempera?”

He says tempera like a white person. Tem-per-ah. All the syllables stretched out and heavy, with a puff of air on the ‘p’ and a heavily rolled ‘r’, like he knows that’s what he’s supposed to do. He opens his mouth to point this out, then realizes L looks like he’s on the verge of walking out. Instead, he picks up one of his shrimp tempera and holds it out to L.

L stares at him, as if he’s never seen shrimp before. “What?”

“Here. Have one. You haven’t eaten all day and you need to do that.”

L gestures to his ice cream. Light ignores this. They are agreeing to disagree. He disagrees.

“Have some shrimp,” he says.

L breathes out, heavy, then picks up his own chopsticks and plucks it off.

Instead of eating it like a normal person, he raises it above his head and lowers it into his mouth. The motion exposes the entire length of his throat; his Adam’s apple bobs.

The direction Light’s mind wanders off in is absolutely not his fault. It’s definitely L’s. He swallows, eats a yam, then says the first thing which pops into his mind and which wouldn’t sound like a pornhub comment.

“You know, you aren’t supposed to do that.”

L swallows. He does not appear to have chewed the majority of the shrimp, and Light tries extremely hard not to make any assessments about his gag reflex. “What?”

“Chopsticks to chopsticks. Because it’s how you hold bones.”

L stares at him. “I’m sorry?”

“After someone dies.”

L is still staring at him, looking utterly bewildered, so Light goes on. “After cremation. It’s how you pass the bones.”

L is silent for a second, and then he shakes his head, as if waking himself from a reverie. “Have you ever considered taking a communications course.”

“I took one,” Light says. “After I got diagnosed with autism. They had pamphlets. And a workbook.”

“You — what?”

Light isn’t entirely sure why he’d said this. Still. He’s pretty sure it’s something they have in common, and he’s expecting L to say as such, but instead he only blinks twice, owlishly, then says, “Oh.” Then he goes on, quite naturally, so naturally in fact that Light is certain he’s putting it on — L’s normal manner of speaking isn’t natural — “Could you please expand on that, Light? I don’t know what passing the bones is about.”

Light hesitates.

It occurs to him that L maybe doesn’t know that L is, himself, autistic.

It isn’t something he’s ashamed of but it’s something he prefers not to disclose. He wouldn’t have said it if he’d known L were unaware. It changes the way people look at him. Suddenly he’s no longer unknowable and brilliant, too smart to worry about social conventions — he’s confused, and unsure of what’s happening, and in need of assistance. Or else he’s making excuses for himself, being mean on purpose and hiding behind a diagnosis. They are impatient with him from the jump; they have compassion fatigue from accommodations they haven’t yet made. Even his own parents, who he knows love him very deeply, who don’t think of him as less, still changed once there was a name associated with the way he is. He can’t put a finger on how, but he knows they have.

And he doesn’t particularly like that L is being so nice, so understanding, that he’s helping Light to do this conversation properly, but he doesn’t want to ruin their lunch and he doesn’t know how to change tracks, and so he goes on.

“When someone dies in Japan you remove the bones from the ash and put right side up in the urn so they won’t be upside-down in the afterlife. It’s called kotsuage.” Then, more sharply than he’d intended, “You should know these things. You should know your own culture.”

“Well,” says L, “We haven’t all been blessed with parents who make that sort of thing appealing, have we. You should know that, too.” His tone is definitely biting, now, and Light thinks they’re gearing up for an argument, which would be sort of a relief — simpler, anyway, than whatever he’s feeling right now — but instead L takes a long breath and then exhales. Then he scoops up a spoonful of ice cream and holds it out to Light. “Here. Have some of this.”

It’s definitely an apology. “I don’t want that,” Light tells him. “Your mouth’s been all over it.”

L shrugs. “Suit yourself.” He eats it, instead.

Light pushes his bento towards the centre of the table. “You have some. There’s too much for me.” That isn’t true — he’s absolutely starving — but he suspects it will make L more likely to take some of it and apparently he’s right because L hesitates, then plucks up another shrimp. He must be hungry; Light has been with him all day, so it isn’t as if he could have been sneaking off and having things on his own.

It pleases him, the fact that L is eating. He’s evil, obviously, but Light still wants him to be well.

Chapter Text

Once the meal is done, L declares that he’s tired and needs to go back to the hotel. He does look entirely exhausted — he seems to get tired more quickly than pretty much anyone Light has met in his life. Perhaps he has some sort of condition. It seems rude to ask.

He heads out, and Light heads for the Castro. It reminds him of Toronto’s Church Street, sort of — it’s got rainbow crosswalks and everything. He can tell that men are looking at him, the same way they do back home, the way he’s never quite figured out how to handle; he likes it, sort of, but he doesn’t know how to pick up the threads they’re spinning.

He pays ten dollars to visit the GLBT Historical Society museum, then glances at his watch and realizes L was right about their limited time after all. He walks briskly out the door and heads for the bus.

His body feels staticky; he’d like to stay longer. He’s sure he’s letting something or someone down by failing to do so. This is his history, too. But he has to be ready for RE:4PER. He breathes in and out, like he learned in the DBT course his parents made him take. He’s not sure if it helps. The bus takes forever to arrive and, with a real deadline to meet, the novelty of taking transit in a brand-new city isn’t much fun.

When he gets back to the hotel, L is sitting on the edge of the bed, typing into his phone.

“Why don’t you get a laptop?” Light asks as the door falls shut behind him. L shrugs.

“I have one at home. I don’t write on it. It’s extraneous. I can type quickly enough on this.”

“But wouldn’t it be more comfortable.”

“Well,” says L, “I wouldn’t know. Because I don’t write on it.”

He looks up, and Light freezes.

L had done his makeup the night before, too, but he must have been rushed, or disinterested, or something of the like, because this is nothing like how it had been. It’s nothing like the cafe event, either.

It’s hard to say what exactly has changed. His eyeliner is sharper, maybe. He’s done something with eyeshadow that makes his eyes look darker and more endless than they already do. Somehow his features look more organized — without makeup, his face looks like everything has been strewn about at random.

Light doesn’t dislike that, actually. He thinks it’s sort of nice. He’s not ugly, exactly, but he’s disarmingly irregular. He's got a face like a model, which is to say somewhat odd until it's decorated.

But now he looks disorienting. Otherworldly. He looks like Light shouldn’t be allowed in the same room as him. Permission should be required. There should be a glass wall or the screen or the computer or at least a handler between them.

He looks like Beyond.

Light swallows.

His eyes trail downwards. L is wearing an alarmingly tight black turtleneck and a pair of baggy black pants.

He’s got a nice body, really. Light hadn’t noticed before. It’s a tiny bit weird, all bones that stick out in funny sorts of ways. His breasts have somehow disappeared. He must have a tighter binder for when he wants to do that. Light had sort of liked the way he’d been before, the swell of softness and shape, which looked like pectoral muscles in his street clothes and more clearly like breasts when he wore them unbound in the hoodie he slept in; they build him out, leant an air of masculinity to his body, which looks otherwise breakable, delicate as a moth fluttering around a flame that’s liable to burn it. But he likes him this way, too. It gives him the same feeling as looking over the edge of a cliff to a valley far below.

He’s got his piercings back in, too, a silver halo around his ear. There’s a tiny red bead dangling from his left ear. It glitters in the soft hotel light.

He must see Light staring because he hunches over, as if somehow trying to hide himself. All of a sudden he looks just like himself again.

“Do I look stupid?” L asks.

“No,” Light tells him, truthfully.

L looks at him, skeptically.

“You don’t,” Light says, again. “You look fine.”

“But maybe it’s a bit much.” He touches his earring. There’s a thumbhole in the sleeve of his turtleneck which keeps it pulled over his palm; it makes him look somehow edgy and hesitant at the same time. “Should I take this out?”

Light is going to have to kill someone if L takes it out. “No,” he says. “It’s fine. It looks fine.”

L fidgets with it. He stares at Light as he does so. Staring, Light is starting to realize, is more or less L’s thing. Light hates eye contact; he watches the glittering red bead instead. L’s fingernails are painted black. They look stark against it.

Finally L drops his hand. “Anyway,” he says, at last, and Light snaps his gaze upwards. “Are you going to get ready or are you just going to go like that?” His voice is back to the way it usually is — bouncy, melodic, a touch of irony twined through it even when he’s hardly saying anything at all.

Light looks down at himself. He thinks he looks fine. He’s wearing khakis and a black sweater under his sheepskin coat. It’s the way he always dresses. “There’s nothing wrong with what I’m wearing.”

“I didn’t say there was,” L says. “People just like to get dressed up before concerts. That’s all.”

“Well, I don’t like to.”

“And that’s perfectly acceptable. I encourage you to follow your heart, wherever it may lead you.”

Now he feels self-conscious. “I need to brush my teeth.”

“Okay,” says L. “That’s fine, too. Whether you brush your teeth or do not brush your teeth, I encourage your choices. Because it is all so very fine.”

Light is pretty sure he’s being made fun of. He kicks off his boots and heads into the washroom.

Chapter Text

It happens during the concert’s final speech.

Later there will be videos of the event shot from all around the venue. They’ll be all over TikTok and Tumblr. Still frames will be splashed on the front page of Koreeabo and AllKpop, as if it were news, when really it’s barely anything. People are making a big deal out of it because they’re pathetic and because they have nothing better to do with their lives and because they want Beyond to fail. He’s so perfect, and so important, and they can’t stand to see someone like him shine, can’t stand to see someone like Light happy.

Most of the videos are from the back of the concert hall and show only grainy bodies moving, but there are ones from closer, too, which become the authority in the matter. The pathetic people who want to bring Beyond down stitch the videos together as if this were a crime scene reconstruction.

But Light sees it up close.

L had gotten them seats right by the stage, so he can look and he can know.

It’s nothing.

What happens is this:

Quarter Queen is talking, tearfully, about how much it means to see the venue filled when years ago they were sitting in their dorm room, eating ramen they could barely afford, afraid they’d never sell a single seat. The translator’s voice echoes around the concert hall, calm and featureless. The people who can speak Korean cheer when Quarter speaks, and a larger cheer rises whenever the translator does, which gives everything an eerie effect, the world on a delay.

It’s cold, but Light doesn’t mind. The lightsticks in the dark look like stars. His own glows bright.

Alter reaches over to Beyond. Light’s not sure why. It looks like maybe he’s trying to catch his attention. His fingers brush across Beyond’s arm, and Beyond half-turns.

What it looks like at first, before Light thinks about it and realizes this could not possibly be what he’s actually seen, is that Beyond hits him heavy, a backhand across the chest.

Alter stumbles back. There’s a heavy, staticky puff of air through the mouthpiece. He clutches a hand to his sternum, where Beyond’s knuckles had been.

A’s expression twists into a snarl. His lips curl upwards, furious and somehow resigned at his own fury. He spits out a word which no one translates — Light has no idea what it was — and then, abruptly, the mic cuts out.

There is an awful half smile on Beyond’s face. He looks pleased with himself. He says something which Light can only barely hear and can't understand at all, and the rest of RE:4PER spins towards him, their faces suddenly flat, except for A, who goes blotchy.

No one is cheering anymore. Instead, the concert hall fills with the strange and foreign sound of thousands of people whispering. This happens in stages; none of this has been caught by the big screens, which are all still focused on Quarter, and so not everyone has seen.

Quarter’s eyes have gone slightly glazed. She raises the microphone, but there’s no sound.

Alter is spitting out a string of words. They’re close enough that Light can hear them. He doesn’t have the slightest idea what A is saying, but he sounds furious.

For the first time Light wishes they were further. Less real. He wants them to be people in his computer screen again.

Backyard grabs Alter’s shoulder. He says something in a soothing tone.

And Beyond is laughing, inexplicably, as if this were all very funny, as if everyone were doing these things just to amuse him, his voice high and sharp and vile.

Backyard barks something out and jabs his finger towards the crowd. Alter, at last, falls silent, looking for the first time aware of where he is.

It’s so cold in here. Even with all the bodies, it’s freezing.

Quarter taps her mic. There’s a startling click as it turns back on, and then suddenly her voice is filling up the concert hall again.

“It’s okay,” she says, in English. She’s laughing, sort of, as if it were a joke, and Light suddenly realizes that it must be, even though her voice is strange and strained. Beyond wouldn’t really do that. He wouldn’t.

Then she says something else in Korean and Light waits for the soothing, emotionless voice of the translator to kick in.

“You’re scaring everyone,” she says. “They’ll think you’re really mad.”

He can feel the crowd breathing out, too.

It’s fine. It’s all okay. Alter smiles. And Beyond of course had been smiling this whole time, so everything is fine and nothing has been ruined and the world is still safe and okay and comprehensible, because Beyond is in it, and Beyond is perfect, or at least close to, and Beyond had said that they’re going to survive.

He looks away, towards L.

L is staring at the stage, his expression flat. Light thinks he should say something but he’s not sure what and after a moment Blues-harp has taken the mic and begun to speak and so it’s out of his hands. RE:4PER will fix this for him. They always have.

On the walk home, in the cold dark, he asks L, “What did he say?”

“About what?” L says.

Light turns to look at him. He’s staring straight ahead, his expression still, and so Light is very sure he knows what he’d meant.

“After A touched him.” He doesn’t know how to phrase what to happen. He would prefer not to weigh in. He doesn’t want to think about it.

“I don’t know,” L says. “I didn’t catch it.”

He’s lying. Light isn’t sure how he knows this but, he’s certain.

He should press him, he thinks, because he knows that everything is fine — because everything has to be fine — and he would like confirmation, would like L to say this just so he can be even more sure than before, but after a moment’s consideration he decides he doesn’t want to.

“Okay,” he says, and L hums in agreement, the sound soft and melodic in the dark.

Chapter Text

RE:4PER is the most important group in the world, obviously, but they often go under-appreciated, and so Light hadn’t been expecting what happened at the concert to be news. But he wakes up to a phone full of Google alerts and a flurry of messages in his Tumblr inbox asking him to weigh in.

Still on the cot, half asleep and tangled in the blankets, he answers a few of them with his measured takes on the situation, then pulls up the news reports.

Serious journalists simply do not cover Kpop news unless it’s got something to do with That Band. But the usual suspects have picked up on it — Koreeabo and All-Kpop and Soompi all have articles up. He feels a little sick as he clicks into one of the Soompi ones.

He sits up fast.

There’s a pixellated screenshot and a video linked on the page of last night’s concert. It’s close to the stage, and it’s dark and blurry and hard to see, but he thinks that’s the back of his and L’s head.

He stares at it.

He could be mistaken — they’re from the back, and it’s dark, and the camera quality is terrible. But he can see the amber of his own hair, and the black turtleneck he’d been wearing last night. L’s carefully messy black hair and his black sweater is perhaps slightly less distinctive at a Kpop concert, but it certainly looks like him, although he’s standing much straighter than he usually does.

He squints, momentarily distracted. L must have been standing taller than usual to see above the people ahead of them. He hunches so much that Light had always thought of him as shorter than himself, but they’re actually about the same height.

Light shakes his head. That’s not the point. He clicks into the video.

The room is suddenly full with the noise of the concert, and for a second it steals him away — RE:4PER is safe, RE:4PER is always there for him, and Beyond would never do anything wrong. but then A reaches out to touch him and —

L’s shifts. Probably he’s trying to look. His head, suddenly, block the two of them and the moment of impact goes unrecorded.

A stumbles backwards, that snarl on his face, nearly impossible to see in the dark, but Light remembers it, can overly his memory onto what he’s looking at on the screen. Feeling suddenly nauseous, he shuts off his phone and the noise disappears.

He looks up. L is on his own bed, staring at him.

His eyeliner is smeared all around his eyes, and his hair is a mess — the gel he’d put in it last night makes it stick up at bizarre angles. It’s disarming.

“Are you watching it?” he says. His voice is hoarse.

“No,” says Light, then realizes L doesn’t mean right exactly now. “I was. Did you?”

“Not yet.”

“I think —” Light shuts his eyes for a moment, then opens it again. “We’re in some of the videos.”

L’s eyes go even wider than usual.

Light waits for him to say something. He has come to notice that L is a chronic silence filler — the softness of his voice and the shrinking way he holds himself, as if he were trying to take up as little room as possible, give the impression of someone uniquely quiet, but really he never seems to leave a space open.

Maybe he’d shocked into silence, though, or else it’s just too early for him to be coherent, because he only sits there, blankets still piled on top of his legs. Finally Light decides it’s his turn to take up the mantle.

“Whatever,” he says. It comes out harsher than he’d intended, and he watches L still at the words, as if Light is liable to do something to him. He doesn’t like that look, but it’s too late. “It’s stupid, anyway. We’re going to miss the plane.”

Bt the time the airplane lands, someone has, somehow, figured out that it was him.

It’s just a single message in his inbox. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It says, was that you?

They are still on the plane, just finished moving; his data has just returned. Suddenly the mass of people around him feels claustrophobic. The air is stale. L’s elbow is brushing against his, which he hadn’t minded during the flight, but now he has to fight the urge to slap it away.

it isn’t rude or angry and somehow this makes it worse — the idea of someone knowing where he is and not knowing enough to realize or care that this is frightening. At least if they’d been angry it would have shown they had a bit of sense.

He deletes the ask. There isn’t anything else to be done.

He considers telling L. He’s right there; it’s relevant to him. He’s on the screen, too. In the video it was clear that they were together. He looks over.

They had only asked about him, and it was only one person. L’s identity is more secure than his own. No one knows what he looks like. There’s no reason they would.

He decides that it’s fine. He puts his phone away and shuts his eyes.

The hotel has only one bed.

“What,” says Light, bewildered, “the fuck is happening.”

He hadn’t really meant for it to sound angry, but clearly it does, because L flinches and then looks over at him. It’s really very startling how skittish L has turned out to be, now that they’re together all the time.

“I booked it correctly,” L says, defensively. He leans his suitcase against the wall. “I specifically said I wanted two. I spoke to someone on the phone and everything”

Light wonders if it has something to do with them being gay. Maybe the receptionists are looking at them and drawing conclusions.

It occurs to him, he doesn’t actually know if L is gay. He’d assumed he was because he sort of just seems that way, and because of all his distressingly horny fanfiction, but neither of those things necessarily mean anything. Plenty of straight people seem gay, and people can write stories about anything. Wanting to fuck a celebrity doesn’t count. Lesbians are obsessed with Jungkook, for example.

“Are you gay?” he asks. L startles.

“Sorry?” he says. His eyes have gone very wide. Then he swallows; his tongue darts out to wet his lips. There’s something vaguely and bewilderingly anticipatory in his expression. “Why?”

“Because of the beds.”

L’s eyes have gone sort of dark. They’re fixed right on Light. It’s a bit disconcerting. Light can’t remember anyone having looked at him quite that intently before. He decides to go on.

“The bookings,” Light says. “Maybe they’re giving us single rooms because they think we’re gay.”

L’s face goes bright red. He looks away. “Ah,” he says. His voice sound strangely choked. “Well. That’s certainly a theory. But I booked them before they saw either of us, so that probably isn’t it.”

This is mortifying. That hadn’t occurred to Light, somehow. “Fine,” he says. “It was only an idea. You don’t need to be so fucking dismissive. And mean.”

“What?” says L.

Light leaves his suitcase by wall. He stalks off towards the bathroom and locks himself inside.

When Light emerges from the bathroom, his face washed, his heart back under control, L is sitting on the bed typing into his phone. He looks up as Light walks out, and sets down his phone.

“Are you feeling better?”

“I was feeling fine,” Light says. “There wasn’t anything wrong. You were being an asshole.”

“Mm,” says L. “Well. I apologize. It certainly wasn’t my intent.” He pauses, then goes on. “Anyway, we’ve got quite a bit of time before the concert. Do you want to go to Coney Island?”

Light stares at him. They’ve got time, but certainly not that much time. "What?"

L shrugs. "It could be fun. I like ferris wheels."

"I mean. I guess. Later. But what do you want to do now?”

L looks very much like he's gearing up for something. "I would like to go to Coney Island," he says, all in a rush. It looks like it had cost him something. Maybe it had. L never seems to have any opinions on what happens to him. “We won’t have time to do it tomorrow. We’ll have to get on a plane. I’ve always wanted to go to Coney Island.”

"Right, but -- wait, do you think Coney Island is in Los Angeles?"

"It is," L tells him, very confidently and very incorrectly. "I saw it on the tourist list."

"L, Coney Island is in New Jersey." He's pretty sure it is. It's not in Manhattan, anyway. And it's definitely not in California, which is what matters at the present moment. "How do you not know that?"

L stares at him. "It was on the list," he says. He sounds so confident that Light wonders if he's been wrong after all.

He pulls out his phone and googles amusement parks, Los Angeles.

"L," he says. "Are you talking about the Santa Monica Pier?"

"Coney Island is on the Santa Monica Pier."

"No, it's not. It's on the -- a different pier. There are lots of piers. Granville Island has a pier and it isn't Coney Island."

"Granville Island hasn't got a ferris wheel," L says, which is true but irrelevant.

"I don't think you understand how geography works," Light tells him. He does feel better now, actually. Now he’s not stupid. They’ve both made a mistake. Well. His wasn’t really a mistake — it was just an idea — but L’s was definitely a mistake. They’re back on even ground. Better than even ground, really.

He puts his phone back in his pocket. "Let's go to the Santa Monica pier."

Light's new mission in life is to make sure L does not starve to death. He is becoming increasingly convinced that, left to his own devices, this is what would happen. As far as he can see, L doesn't have any particular issue eating the food that has been placed in front of him, but he seems genuinely unaware that this is something which needs to be preformed on a regular basis.

The Santa Monica Pier feels a bit like a Lana Del Rey song on account of being both American and near water. Everyone has pleasant accents and they talk quite loudly. He buys two corn dogs and hands one to L, who looks startled, as if he'd assumed Light were planning to eat them both on his own and leave L with nothing.

"I think you're meant to ask before buying people food," L says."

He's probably right. Light shrugs. “If you don't want it, I'll have both."

"No, it's alright. It's what you're meant to do at amusement parks, isn't it? Eat corn dogs and fuck?"

"Excuse me?"

He turns back, and sees that L has gone pink around the ears, which is, in his opinion, the only correct response to having chosen to say such a thing, out loud, in public, and at ten AM.

"That's what they do in the movies," L says.

"What movies? That isn't a thing."

"You haven't seen that?"

"Name one movie where that happens.”

"I -- Zombieland."

"What?" Light can't remember if they fuck in Zombieland or even if there's an actual amusement park, but it's such an incredibly stupid answer that this seems beside the point. "What are you talking about?"

L is busily putting a remarkable quantity of mustard on his corn dog. "It's a shame they don't have sauerkraut, eh? That's an American thing."

"It isn't," Light says. “You made that up. And how would you eat sauerkraut off a corn dog, anyway. You're not going to be able to eat that, even. Why are you putting on so much mustard."

"This is delicious, Light, thank you." He hasn't eaten any of it yet. "Shall we play some carnival games?"

L is sort of remarkably terrible at carnival games. Light watches him as he whacks zero moles and somehow manages to fuck up a ball toss so badly that the ball bounces right off the counter and he has to go running after it. He keeps going with dogged determination, utterly undeterred by the fact that he appears to lack even the slightest whisper of talent.

It's fascinating, really. It's sort of inspiring. Light wishes he could carry on so persistently at things he is evidently incompetent at. He considers saying as such, then realizes this might not go over terribly well.

It is a brisk ten degrees out, warm for the sort of Januarys he's used to but sea-cold, the air getting right under his sleeves and down his throat. It's not the sort of weather which lends itself to amusement parks and so it’s mostly empty, but the cold carries its own kind of hedonism, a sense of something that isn't meant to be. He imagines that he can taste the ocean salt on his lips -- he licks them and finds he can't, but the impression of it still lingers, the thought of it in his mind nearly as good as real.

L is leaning over the counter of an air gun game, elbow on the counter as he aims incompetently at a row of bowling pins. He is all limbs and his dark hair is falling in curls over his shoulder. His expression, which Light can see only from an angle, is serious, determined, as if there were any consequences whatsoever to what he's doing, as if all things mattered in some way. It is certain that he's going to fail but he isn't going to do so lightly.

He isn't sure why but the thought of what L had said floats into his head. Amusement parks are for corn dogs and fucking. Idiotic and crude and not even correct.

Suddenly, unbidden, he is stuck with the image of L pressed up against the wall of some winter-abandoned building, his shoulders against chipping paint on sea-softened wood, his shoes digging into the half-dead grass, leaving tracks on the grass, Light's teeth against the long expanse of his throat, marking his pale skin red.

It crashes in to him hard as a wave and he tastes the salt on his tongue again, salt that now tastes more like iron, feels his pulse kick up so hard that it beats inside his throat. To his utter horror he can feel his blood rushing downwards and he thinks, frantically, of profoundly unerotic things -- math tests and bad dreams and the forgetting of vital events -- until he is sure he isn't going to utterly humiliate himself.

What, he thinks, with something near panic, the fuck was that.

There is a pop as L misses the targets with his gun; Light flinches, then steps forwards.

"Here," he says, and holds out his hand. L stares at it for a moment, then hands it over.

Light fires three sharp shots. He knocks two of the pins down, then hands the man behind the counter five dollars for another round. "The trick," he says, "is that you have to aim for the little prizes. They rig the big ones so you can't get them."

The man gives him his pick of cheap, colourful bears.

"Pick one," Light says, and L stares at him, something almost wary in his expression, as if Light were handing him the keys to an expensive car that he might someday come to collect for. "I don't want it," Light tells him. "And you clearly did."

L gets a green one with a clover on its belly and carries it in his arm for the rest of the fair, as careful as if it were a real living thing which might come to harm. He gets a cotton candy on the way out and eats it lasciviously and Light tries very hard not to think about what had happened.

Chapter Text

There is a palpable tension at the next concert. Everyone seems ready for something to happen — as if Beyond were likely to do it again, or A were about to come out and tell them that it was all just a big joke which they shouldn’t worry about. Not that Light is worried, of course. He trusts Beyond.

Still. He finds that he’s waiting, too.

But the lights come on and RE:4PER steps out and suddenly all of it seems so inconsequential and far away, like something from a different and lesser world. Reaper had always been the thing he reaches for when he wants to escape what’s unbearable and things are not different just because it’s them he’s worried about.

And there they are on the stage. They’re laughing. They’re talking to one another. Their smiles are bright and so he knows that everything is fine.

He wakes to find a Twitter message from A on his Google alerts.

He is still lying in bed, buried beneath the covers, eyes foggy with sleep. He rubs at his face then blinks twice to clear his vision.

It’s all in Korean so he can’t read it, but there are plenty of translations of the threads.

L’s is not up yet because L is in the washroom, straightening his hair. Light can see the corner of his shoulder through the door. He picks one of his lesser favourite translators and reads.

i hate coming on stage laughing and smiling every single night like everything is fine and it’s not. there are people who you think are nice are monsters. someday the people who deserve to pay will pay. when i choose not to wake up anymore you will know whose fault it is. until then understand there are things i can’t say even though i want to.

He goes cold. He sits up.

“L?” Light says.

“Hm?”

“Did you see this?” He holds up his phone, even though L’s back is turned.

L sets down his straighter. He steps out through the washroom door and turns to look at Light.

His eyes are very round and very bright. His hair, half-done, looks like an absolute mess — a real mess, not the controlled on-purpose disaster he usually makes. One half is straight and the other is still curly.

His eyes look sort of wet, actually.

He is suddenly very sure that L knows perfectly well what he means. He shoves the blankets off himself, then picks up his phone and walks over. He holds it out for L.

“Oh,” says L. “Yes. I did see that.”

“Can you translate it.”

“It says he’s a crazy, bitter fuck who’s jealous of Beyond’s success,” L says, quite calmly. “You should pack your bags if you don’t want to miss our flight.”

Light is exhausted. He can’t believe how tired he is, really. He hadn’t known he was capable of it.

On the plane he takes the seat closest to the window and shuts his eyes.

L is on the phone beside him, tapping away. It’s probably that stupid story of his. They hadn’t paid for WiFi, so he can’t be online.

In a way Light is jealous of that. His own mind often feels empty, his world a sort of void that he overlays the internet onto. Often it feels as if he doesn’t really exist at all. He’s just a series of thoughts that he can post online.

The soft pattering of L’s fingertips on the glass screen of his phone feels calming, almost meditative, like rain on a window. He allows it to lull him into sleep.

L, he has learned, likes to stand right by the luggage carousel when they land, as if someone might steal their things if he doesn’t watch. Although Light thinks it’s maybe the movement he likes. There’s something about the way his eyes track the carriage.

He feels sort of warm, when he thinks about this. It is not an unpleasant feeling. It’s sort of fluttery. He doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t want to know what it is, not really — it’s his feeling, and it’s precious, something he can keep close and treasure. It can be secret even from himself, if he wants it to be, which right now he does. He doesn’t want to ruin it.

He picks up his phone to check what’s going on with people on the internet. He flicks through his Tumblr, then freezes.

There is a post on his dash with a hundred notes already, even though he knows the person who posted it could not have done so more than thirty minutes ago because he is standing right there, watching things go around and around on the carousel.

It reads:

If you have any doubts as to whether or not A’s words are worth considering …

Then there is a list, a very long one, of everything that makes him impossible to trust.

What seems to make him untrustworthy, as far as Light can see, is that he is crazy.

He scrolls through the post. He isn’t counting, but there must be at least thirty quotes in here, all with attribution to various sources they had come from: radio shows, television appearances, internet boards. None of them have source links, which makes sense, because the author was in the air at the time of writing.

He Googles one, just to check. It’s exactly right, word for word.

All these things must have been sitting around in L’s head, waiting for a moment like this.

A has mental health issues. He has spoken about it publicly. There are even songs about it, although it’s unclear if they’re about A in particular. Light likes to imagine that they’re about Beyond, that he and Beyond are crazy in the same way, but they aren’t written by anyone in the group, so it’s difficult to say.

L has gathered lines upon lines of these quotes. A saying, sometimes I don’t trust myself. A saying, I get angry, sometimes. I worry people are out to get me. Some of them don’t have anything to do with his trustworthiness, not even obliquely. One says he struggles with depression, sometimes. Another — and Light’s stomach sinks at this — says that he’d self-harmed years ago, as a child.

Light does remember that last one, actually. It had gone on to say that he was proud of himself for stopping, and that other people could too. They didn’t need to be defined by that, he’d said. He’d said that everyone was going to be okay.

It had made Light angry. He wasn’t going to be okay. Beyond never said anything like that. He only said that things weren’t alright, but that they had to go on anyway.

L has not included the part, the part about stopping. This makes Light feel something. He doesn’t know what. He wonders if L thinks A would be trustworthy if he stopped. Light has not stopped.

Suddenly there’s a silver voice by his side. “Hello.”

He startles. He had not seen L come up beside him.

L is smiling. His eyes are big and wide and guileless.

What do you think of me, Light wants to ask.

A panic surges through him. He had not felt this scared in a while. L had made him feel safe, he realizes, which was stupid of him. He’d forgotten that L was the enemy. He’d forgotten that everyone has the potential to be as such. There is no safe haven in the universe; there is only himself, and his razors if he wants them, his little escape hatch, the thing that sets him apart and the thing which can save him.

They don’t make him untrustworthy. They make him special. They make it so he relies on no one else, nothing else.

“Are you alright?” L asks. He looks very sincere, worried even, albeit in some indistinct and unbothered way Light might otherwise have liked. He wants — needs, really — someone who can care about him without being hurt by him and he had thought that was L.

But right now his heart is in his throat and he knows that L might at any point turn into something monstrous, sharp-toothed and vile.

“Yeah,” he says, and his voice feels like it’s coming from somewhere faraway.

L gives him another curious look. “Well,” he says, brightly. “Let’s get going, then, shall we?”

Chapter Text

He tells L that he wants to stay back at the hotel. L had done that the first few times, so he thinks that’s probably okay.

“I’ll stay, too,” L says. He leans his suitcase against the wall then digs his phone out of his pocket and flops back on the bed. Light is still standing by the door; he hasn’t even taken off his coat. He feels sort of sluggish and stupid and incapable of proper motion.

“No,” Light tells him. “You should go. Enjoy Chicago.” He wants to be left alone.

“I’m fine,” L says. “I have things to write anyway.” As if to demonstrate, he starts tapping away at his phone.

“Then I’ll go,” Light says.

L sits up. “I’ll come, too.”

This is rapidly becoming farcical. “Fine,” Light snaps. “Let’s go see —” He can’t think of anything to see in Chicago. “Let’s go see Cloud Gate.”

L springs up from the bed. “Wonderful,” he says. “I love clouds.”

—

On paper, the weather is pleasant enough, but somehow it feels bitterly cold anyway — the fuzziness in his head makes it difficult to tolerate anything whatsoever. He doesn’t want to be out here with L. He wants to be curled up in the bed watching videos of Beyond, or possibly drowning himself in the Chicago River.

He is tired of being the person who makes everyone’s lives worse. He is tired of being someone who can’t be trusted because he’s so damaged.

No, he thinks, as he leads L through Millennium Park towards Cloud Gate, the crowds of tourists growing thicker as they walk. Its not him, actually. It’s everyone else. They are simple and stupid creatures who don’t understand a thing about him. Everyone he knows is a liar and a fraud. His friends tolerate him but he knows they talk about him behind his back; they pity him, even though he’s the one deigning to grave them with his presence.

Even his parents say they love him but really they want him dead so they can be free of the scourge of him.

And fuck them. He doesn’t need them. He should call them right now and tell them he’s never coming back.

His mind goes a little staticky when he tries to think about where he’d be without them, with nothing set up and no job to return to, but whatever. He’ll figure it our. He is brave and he is strong and he does not need anyone but himself.

“Oh,” L says, as they get close. “You’re taking me to the Bean.”

“It’s not called the Bean,” Light tells him, irritably. “It’s called Cloud Gate.”

The park is full of tourists who are all talking too loud and taking photographs of each other looking gauche in front of this artwork that none of them know the name of.

Up close, Cloud Gate swoops around them. L sweeps through the crowd, straight towards its centre, and then suddenly Light is encased in silver on every side. Chicago is peeking through the edges of it. The world is quiet in here, muted somehow.

It would be nice if it weren’t for the tourists who are saying stupid things and making stupid faces in the mirrored surface, playing with the warping of their bodies. The sound has gone tinny, though, and their voices feel very far away.

L pulls out his phone to snap a photo, then steps too close to Light. “Here,” he says, and his voice sounds faraway too. “Let’s get one of us.”

Light turns to look at him. His voice is very soft and his eyes are very wide. Light wants to be furious with him. He can’t quite manage.

“Okay,” Light says. “Fine.”

L leans towards him and snaps a selfie. L is not smiling. Light is; it’s an instinct of his. He looks perfectly placid. He feels miserable.

“So,” L says. “Why is it called Cloud Gate?”

“It’s — come on.”

He walks to the outside of the structure and suddenly the noise and the light comes rushing back. He resits the urge to put his hands over his head, to hit himself even, the way he used to when he was a child; he’s always hurt himself, has never stopped, has only graduated to brand-new methods. L follows after, his phone clutched in his hand.

Light points to the upper half of the sculpture. The tourist’s reflections are scattered along the bottom, but at the top there is a reflection of the clouds above, which are shaped by the sculpture and which look somehow endless, both real and painted on; the city skyline had been turned into a thin line which looks suddenly frail and breakable, as if they could puncture it and walk straight into the sky.

He watches L’s gaze track all over the sculpture. Then he looks upwards, so Light does too.

It’s a beautiful day, bright and blue.

“Very nice, Light,” he says, approvingly, as if Light had made it himself.

Despite himself, Light feels a surge of pride.

It does not make the fear go away. It does not prevent him from wondering when he’ll do something which will make L want to write something like that about him, too. Maybe there’s a list of things about him just sitting in L’s mind and waiting around for when they’ll be useful.

He feels like the brittle sky, that beautiful breakable line.

He knows how to fix this. He tucks into the washroom of a little coffee shop and pries off his phone care. He takes out the razor, wrapped in its waxy packaging. The metal makes a tinny ping.

He does it quick and then he walks out, feeling calm, all his nerves exposed, fragile but quiet for the moment.

“Are you alright?” L asks. There must be something in his expression.

L’s eyes are strangely bright, his body shivering with excitement. For a moment Light is offended. Then he realizes L has no idea what he was doing in there.

“Yeah,” he says. He’s pretty sure this is true.

“Did you see?”

“No. What am I supposed to see?”

“I always check my phone when I pee,” L informs him.

There are some anatomical considerations here, but Light elects not top bring them up.

L turns his phone around to face him.

It’s a post from the RE:4PER Twitter account. It’s from A — that’s signed at the bottom, with the English character — but beyond that Light has absolutely no idea what it’s said, because it’s written in Korean.

“L,” he says, feeling somewhat impatient. “I can’t read this. You know that.”

“Oh,” says L. He does not seem like he is doing anything in particular with this information.

“So you’ll have to read it to me,” Light prompts.

“Right.” He turns the phone back to himself and reads it out loud.

“I want to apologize to everyone for my words last night,” he says. “They were not written in a sincere mind. I took some medication and, with the start of the show, it made my thoughts confused. Everyone, please understand the incident was only a joke between friends. Please forgive me for causing so much worry. I am embarrassed by my words now, so as a favour of me please do not share them. I hope to meet you all at the concert tonight. Saranghae.”

He says the last part in Korean, presumably under the impression that Light will understand, which in fact he does. It means I love you — he’s heard it often enough.

L puts the phone back into his pocket. “See?” he says. “Just like I said. It all got cleared up.”

Light feels something. He’s not sure what it is. Nothing about the message had felt right at all. But he wants very badly for it to be true, and L looks so confident that it was fine, so he decides it’s nothing but his own paranoia.

He feels a little delicate right now, his nerves all on edge. He always is, after. He can’t be trusted. Just like A, he can’t.

But he can trust Beyond. He can only trust Beyond.

He does. Always, he does.

L looks down at his phone again. “We should go to the the Planetarium.”

Light checks his watch. He doesn’t really want to go anywhere else; he wants to get under the blankets and sleep, but frankly it doesn’t matter. “We don’t have time,” he says. “We need to go to the concert. We can’t do every single thing.

L deflates, like a child, but Light concludes that this doesn’t actually matter. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s go.”

It is a good show. It is always a good show. He can forget so easily.

Walking home in the dark, he points up at the sky. L startles, then turns to him. Light isn’t really sure why. He guesses they don’t usually talk all that much on the way back to their hotels, so maybe it’s a surprise.

“Look,” he says. L looks upwards. “It’s better than a planetarium because it’s real.”

The Chicago lights are bright enough that he can’t see much, but brightest stars are there. He doesn’t know their name, apart from the North Star. He thinks maybe he should know. All these distant galaxies.

“That’s very nice, Light,” L says.

His voice is very soft, suddenly. There’s something in it that Light can’t identify. A want of some variety, a desire for something Light can’t guess at. The stars, maybe.

He can understand this. The sky is so vast, nearly endless, and it is so far — he is not a person prone to romanticization but he is so familiar with the desire to escape, to become a part of something which is not him.

L makes a strange, jerking movement towards him. Startled, Light jerks away.

L pulls back abruptly, then turns his face away and stares determinedly ahead. It’s very hard to tell in the half-light but Light thinks he is maybe blushing.

He has no idea what that was about.

It had almost seemed like L was about to kiss him, but he knows this cannot be true.