Work Text:
Rats in cages: give them a pleasure button and they will hit it over and over again, sometimes until they die. Forgoing food, forgoing water. L’s read the clinical studies, knows that the experiment has to be set up correctly. For example, the rats can’t have something else to do, can’t have other rats to socialize with, or any toys, puzzles. They won’t become dependent if they have access to other forms of engagement, real pleasure. They have to be isolated, bored, starved of hope, absent any other significant stimulation.
Light is good looking for a rat. L is unassuming for a pleasure button. And yet:
“Ryuzaki, I was reading over that file last night. I think it’s probably still up in our bedroom.”
“I think you’re right about that, Light.”
Expressionless, careful. The clinking of the chain between them is the only sound as they walk over to the elevator. Nobody in the taskforce looks up, glances away from their computers. Maybe it’s forced nonchalance, maybe as soon as they leave the room, the team will erupt in whispers, speculation. L bets not, as long as the chief is with them. Maybe in the evening, over a drink or five, Matsuda will say something. Aizawa will scoff. Mogi will keep his eyes on the table. L assumes that they know, though Light seems convinced that they do not. Among his myriad talents, Light seems to have a very special gift for compartmentalization. Dissociation. Self-induced amnesia?
He doesn’t even make it to the bedroom. As soon as the elevator doors slide closed and a pleasant automated voice announces their trajectory, Light pushes him against one of the white-panneled walls and forces their hips together. He’s already half-hard, eyes glassy. He kisses L like he is angry with him. Thumbs digging into his collarbone hard enough to bruise, pleasure leaking hot and dizzy between them. All it takes these days is one little press. Barely any pressure.
L kisses back, but he’s not angry, not even eager. He plays at placid, composed, goading Light into deeper frustration.
“You’re unbelievable,” Light says, pulling back. Breath hot on his face, tickling his skin.
“You’re the one,” L points out, “who made the excuse to get us in here.”
“And you follow,”—Light rocks his pelvis against L’s, the material between their bodies chafing with electricity—“like a dog, every time.”
“Seeing as we’re chained together, remaining stationary would have led to some embarrassing situational comedy.” Cue laugh track. “As you know, I tend to opt for the path of least resistance.”
“I think,” Light grits, smiling unpleasantly, “that you want me to come in your mouth.”
L blinks at him, unabashed. “Interesting hypothesis.”
Light kisses him again, still smiling. Beyond justice, beyond his preaching, his performative idealism, what Light wants most—what L gives him, feeds to him like slow poison—is control.
Between kisses, Light says, “Let’s test it.”
“Let’s.”
The bodiless voice announces their floor. They spill out into the fluorescent hallway, hands to themselves. Only Watari has access to the elevator cameras. L has told Light this and Light has said he doesn’t care, that he has nothing to hide, but as soon as they’re back in sight, on the main camera feed—the feed that his father can see—he keeps his distance from L. Walks gracefully, without rushing, not letting on that his erection is straining against the zip of his slacks.
L wants to destroy him. L is going to destroy him.
No cameras in their bedroom. L had made sure of that. He hadn’t been certain that he and Light would sleep together when he’d designed the building, but he’d suspected. There had been signs—halting touches, extensive eye contact, the way that Light had said his name with such starved, fascinated contempt.
As soon as the door clicks shut behind them, Light pulls on the chain. He does like his little dog metaphor. It’s always the tightly buttoned-up overachievers who turn out to be the biggest freaks in bed. L can tell by the blurry look in his eyes and the already uneven cadence of his breath that Light is going to do something positively unseemly to him.
Hand to his crotch, rough through the material of his jeans. L is hard already, too. Light smells good, is good. Soft in the right places, toned, sweet. His hair is silky. When he comes, he sometimes whimpers. L is glad that Hell is not a real place, because if it was, he would go there. He is well on his way.
“It’s fucking inexcusable,” Light tells him, kissing his jaw, the tender place just below his ear.
“Yes?”
“You pretended you were locking me up with you so that you could keep track of my actions, make sure that I wasn’t Kira, but,”—
“Not this again.”
—“but really, it was just because you wanted this, right? You wanted me to fuck you.”
L pulls back, meets Light’s eyes. Before he even speaks the words, he can already feel the bruise forming. Face blank but for a slight twitch at the corner of his lips, he says, “Actually, I wanted Kira to fuck me.”
Instead of punching him, Light gives him an open-handed slap, which doesn’t hurt as much but is somehow more degrading. Staggering backwards a few steps, L blinks several times, cartoon stars glittering around his head. His blood pools downward.
“Hmm,” he says. Tugs at his lower lip, pain still sparking bright in his cheek.
Light looks just as shocked as L. Then he smirks. “You liked that?”
The way his voice sounds—smug, but losing composure, overcome by his unmanageable teenage hormones—makes L’s pulse thud with pleasure. It’s hard sometimes to remember which one of them is the rat.
L makes no reply, but he’s half smiling. This is part of the process of destruction.
“You’re unbelievable,” Light repeats, thrilled by the words. “Indefensible.”
L unbuttons his jeans and shimmies out of them. “You’re unimpeachable,” he counters. “Well-adjusted, functional. Non-maniacal, I’d say.” The front seam of his boxers is already wet. He looks up at Light from under his eyelashes. In the low light, he’s sure he can pass for attractive. “Do you remember what you said to me last night, when you were very,”—here, a tight smile—”close?”
Light begins wrapping the chain around his hand, tighter, tighter, forcing L off-balance, towards him. “I bet you do. I bet you’ve been thinking about it all day.”
Light must not remember. There’s that effortless compartmentalization. The beautiful blank slate.
L lets himself be drawn towards him. Says, “You said that you wanted,”—
He sees it in Light’s face the moment that he remembers, that it comes back to him. You can repress everything, but it still lives inside of you. L knows this from experience. It is an experience that he is sharing with Light, a gift he is giving him. Slow poison.
Light’s smug expression falls. They speak at the same time:
“To kill you.”
“To kill me.”
There’s that heaviness, it always returns. They carry the balance of life and death between them. The fate of the world gets tangled in the sheets, gets asphyxiated. The game is easy until it falls like a stone between their bodies. Slick with sweat, their breath coming heavily. There is only one thing that Light seems to be more afraid of than himself, his own suppressed memories and strangled darkness, and that thing is L.
Light stops pulling on him. L comes closer of his own accord.
Quietly, trying to maintain his dignity, Light says, “It’s only a sexual fantasy.”
L nods. “Though an aberrant one.”
“It doesn’t prove anything.”
“In the international court of law? No, of course not. But it suggests that you’re not quite the saint that you have convinced yourself—not to mention, everybody else—that you are.”
Light is still, self-contained. L takes his chin in his hand, tilts his face up. Light is too young for L to do this to him. He’d been a virgin at the beginning of his confinement, been saving himself for—nothing and nobody. For somebody like L, who is nothing and nobody.
Harshly and softly, Light says, “I’ve never said I was a saint. All I’ve said is that I’m a better person than you are, but that’s a very low bar.”
“One you’re tripping over.”
He kisses Light softly, not demanding, not dominative. He knows he has to be careful, cannot hurt Light, cannot give him any canon fodder. The game is practically unplayable. L is trying to save the world, or he is trying to unsave the world.
Light threads his fingers through L’s hair, kisses him with intentional brutality. Tongue and teeth. Pristine hand to the bulge in L’s soft cotton boxers. He shifts his lips to L’s ear and says, “You’re no better than the people you put behind bars. Assaulting a suspect?”
L snorts. “Who exactly is assaulting whom?”
Light tightens his grip on L’s hair, yanks backwards so that L’s chin is forced skyward. Grip tightening on his cock. “God, you’re a mess. You’re,”—
“Let me guess, a very bad man?”
Light laughs despite himself, although the joke is at his expense. Movements slow, weighted heavily with want, he plays with L’s cock until it’s straining, until he’s sticky in-between his thighs, legs going shaky, hips canting forward.
L says, voice coming out in a low hiss, “It’s sure taking you a long time to find that file.”
Light shakes his head softly, wearing a glazed expression of pleasure. “They won’t notice. And if they suspect at all,” he murmurs in L’s ear, “which they won’t, it will only be because they don’t trust you. What could you possibly be doing to me upstairs for all that time? What kind of threats have you made to keep me from reporting you? If they talk about anything, it’s how to help me. How to get you locked up, like we both know you should be.”
L groans. Light’s fetishes are not just filthy, they are psychosexually compromising. He looks at his face, and then at the chain that keeps them bound together, half of it wound loosely around the palm of Light’s hand.
“Light,” he says, raising his wrist and rattling the cuff. “I already am locked up.”
Something pours through Light. L can see it in his eyes, feel it in the soft trembling of his whole body. This is the pleasure button, the flood of dopamine that ruins him over and over again. L will hold it down until it breaks him. Until one of them is dead. Until they are both—
“L,”—
“Ryuzaki.”
“L. Take those off.” He nods at L’s boxers, doesn’t dare touch him.
L strips, though his shirt stays on. Downside of the chain, which otherwise has so many upsides. His limbs shake as he moves, his mind is cloudy, his senses clogged with the scent of Light, the way he always smells when he’s aroused: musk and soft terror. His hands are not gentle when he pushes L to his knees. L opens his mouth without having to be told.
In these moments, Light is his god—or close enough. He is just what L had wanted him to be. Something beyond the scope of logic or law, someone unforgivable, who has eclipsed the concept of forgiveness. An avenging angel. Thrusting his—ha—angelic cock down L’s mortal throat, pulling his hair, biting back every noise, every plea for mercy. In this moment, L would grant it to him without a second thought.
There is no use denying it, at this point: he is, indeed, a very bad man.
His throat spasms around Light’s cock, his pulse pounds. L can taste the blood blooming just beneath the flesh. No matter how many times he makes him come—late nights, long mornings—Light cannot seem to get enough. L knows that if Light had control over himself, his body, he would not touch him. Would not so much as look at him. He’d kill him, and kill him again. He knows that Light is angry with him because of the pleasure, because he doesn’t know what to do with it, how to contend with its heaviness, its power. He would prefer to be clean, pure, and bodiless.
Grip tightening against L’s scalp, he quickens his thrusts, hitting the back of L’s throat, gagging him. L splutters, tries to pull back, but Light holds him there, fucks his face until his eyes water. L has to dig his fingernails into Light’s thigh to get him to pull out.
Light gasps, takes a step backwards, his cock jutting slick and hard in front of him. He looks afraid. This is part of the unfolding, which is one aspect of destruction.
They stare into each other’s faces and breathe heavily, L on his knees, Light unsteady on his feet. L wonders what Light sees when he looks down at him, who he thinks L truly is, behind the mask. He doesn’t apologize for being too rough, but L can see his shame very clearly in his, for once, unmanaged expression.
Slyly, jabbing the wound just because he has access to it, he says, “What could I possibly be doing to you upstairs for all this time?”
Light gives the chain a hard yank so that L falls forward on his hands and knees. L makes a sardonic expression at the floor. His throat is slightly sore.
Light is, at base, a sadist, which is not sexually perplexing but, as it pertains to his identity as Kira, presents questions without easy answers. Does Kira kill because he gets pleasure from killing, or because he truly wants to change the world? Are criminals only convenient scapegoats, a way for a murderer to justify his desire to murder, or does Kira believe that he is punishing the wicked for morally just reasons? Is his undeniable physical obsession with abusing L dependent upon his view of L as a truly corrupt and irredeemable person? Or does he insist upon holding that opinion because it allows him to do whatever he wants to L while keeping his conscience clean as a whistle?
Compartmentalization. Dissociation. Ongoing and necessary amnesia. Light walks over to the bed and L, still on his knees, is dragged along behind him.
His cock is heavy between his thighs, and he feels weak with arousal. No matter how much crawling he does, though, he will win this game just like every other, because, unlike Light, he is not ashamed. He can face himself, from the tips of his insipid toes to his gaunt and pitiless head. Light cannot face anything. Light does not know himself, and does not want to.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, he is pushing his slacks down his legs. Faded tan, golden hairs. His skin is smooth and unblemished. The pleasure is two-fold: L is doing this, first and foremost, to destroy him; second, because he likes doing it.
“Take it off.” Light nods to the chain.
L holds his eyes, does not let him hide. Carefully, he rises to his feet and shuffles to the nightstand, where the safe sits, heavy and obtrusive. Light pointedly turns his face away as L spins the dial. When it clicks open, he removes the small silver key and undoes the cuff around his own wrist.
As he latches it to the bed frame, Light only stays still and watches him, without a word. L leaves the other cuff on Light’s wrist as he pulls his own shirt over his head and tosses it to the floor.
He says, “Do you want to undress?”
Light, already naked from the waist down, shakes his head very slightly. He’s past anger, likely approaching some state of vulnerability, if his protective posture and guarded expression are anything to judge by. Usually he takes off his shirt.
L cannot allow him any barriers. There cannot be any space between them. Awkwardly, he climbs into Light’s lap, where his cock juts, still wet with L’s spit, between their bodies. Light clenches his jaw. L will force him open, force his way inside. He kisses him on the mouth, gently, almost lovingly.
Light leans into it, kisses back, then gets defensive. He shoves L back, palm in the center of his chest, and says, “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” L murmurs against his jaw. The bare place on his wrist where the chain had been is pink, irritated.
“Don’t act like you,”—Light cannot finish the sentence, cannot say the word.
L says it for him, but he deforms it, makes it sordid where it might have been sweet: “Like I worship you?”
Light shudders beneath him. Thumb on the pleasure button. Let the poison pour.
L thinks that he is winning, until Light grabs him by the hair and, with his cuffed hand, begins to loop the chain around his neck. Then: he knows that he is winning.
His instinctual reaction is to fight back, panic, retreat, but he reigns it in. To refuse him anything is to admit defeat, give up. To protect himself is to protect Light, to let Light remain whole. In order to take him apart, he has to take himself apart; they are inextricable in that way, if not in any other.
“Light,” he breathes. His larynx is being crushed, and the word comes out deformed by pain.
“Shut-up. Quiet.”
Light can pull tight and cut off L’s airflow, or he can relax his grip and let the pressure be mild, a death threat rather than a full on murder attempt. The shared knowledge that Light wants to murder him beats between them, cloying, dizzying. L does not know a physical feeling better than this one.
Light pushes him off of his lap and toward the nightstand. Loosened slightly, the chain around his throat becomes a leash, keeping him within Light’s power even as he stutters onto his feet and digs around in the bedside drawer for the bottle of lube. The air between them is frighteningly hot.
Pleasure glows through L like a sickness. Light leads him back to the bed, pulling on the chain, and L crawls onto the mattress on his hands and knees and begins slicking himself, his hole. His movements are halting, limbs unsteady, but he knows, can feel, that this is what Light wants him to do, just how he wants him to be.
He gives Light exactly what he wants because he has become convinced that it is the only way that he will make it through this year alive: by becoming indispensable. Light does not want a partner or a rival, does not want a best friend. He sure as hell does not want a girlfriend. He wants a disciple. He wants L’s body, dead.
So, L just has to make sure that his body is much more appealing alive.
He uses his own fingers to loosen himself. Light watches him, stifling every noise of need. When he climbs on top of L, pulling the chain taut so that L has to arch his neck back just to keep breathing, his cock is incredibly wet. He thrusts shallowly at the crease of L’s ass, already biting back whimpers. He’s eighteen, a repressed, adolescent mess. L cannot hold the desperation of his desire against him, but he holds it over him. Uses it to his advantage.
Light pushes inside him all at once, and L swallows back a bark of pain. Pleasure rises, destroys. Who is the rat? Who is the cage? L clenches his jaw, refuses to lose himself in the feeling.
Light simply doesn’t have that kind of self-control. He fucks L quickly and sloppily, groans, “Take it, you take it. You’ll take anything I give you, right?”
“I,”—L tries to reply, but Light yanks on the chain and cuts him off, doesn’t want to hear it.
“You’d let me kill you,” Light practically moans into his ear, fucking him with labored, aggressive thrusts. “You’d let him kill you. You’d let—you’d like him to.”
L groans, strangled, in agreement. His vision oozes black, then spectral white.
“If I was Kira,” Light breathes, slamming into him, “I’d stop—I’d stop your heart right now, right before you,”—
His grip loosens. He’s already coming unspooled, overexcited. Stimulating himself with his necro-fetishistic fantasies. Reaching into the dark depths of his psyche and coming up with filthy hands.
Light lets go of the chain. His breathing is very loud. L gains enough physical leverage to be able to turn back and look at Light just as he begins to come, his thrusts losing cadence, his eyes widening in helpless bliss.
“You’d fuck me dead,” L says. His voice is only shaking slightly.
Light closes his eyes, spasms, gripping L’s shoulders, pulse pounding as he spills, hot and uncontrolled, deep within him. L rides out the feeling. His neck hurts, his dick is still aching. He does not really want Light to kill him, but he cannot help but enjoy the fact that Light wants to. That Kira, dormant somewhere inside of him, wants to so badly that it leaks out.
Light tucks his forehead against L’s back as his heartbeat hammers and he takes deep, labored breaths. His body is slack on top of L’s. His skin is very hot, even through his shirt.
L feels him tense after a minute or two passes, as his faculties return and his shame settles in. L’s neglected erection, pressed beneath their collective weight, is wilting. Light finally pulls out of him, slowly, wordlessly, unwrapping the chain from around his neck with soft inattention. He does not look at L’s face. His stare is vacant, pointed into the middle distance.
The room is quiet once their breathing settles down. Cold once their sweat cools.
Light rolls over, still chained to the bed frame like some kind of kept boy, and begins to shake. His button-down sticks, dewy, to his skin, showing the line of his spine through the thin material. This is the overdose. The rat, dying of hunger.
L is so close to winning. Even though Light cannot seem to remember his past, though he has nothing left to confess, L will pull whatever is left out of him. Open it to the daylight. Bury himself in it.
L reaches for him, touches his bare lower back. Light freezes, then, slowly, as L comes closer, lets his body relax into the touch. L wraps his arms around him, kisses the back of his neck. Even his sweat smells clean, like seawater.
Light does not cry, but he continues to shiver, like a body in shock. He says, “I didn’t—I didn’t,”—
“It’s okay,” L tells him.
He can feel Light’s head shaking, resisting comfort. L suspects that he will not get to come this evening, which is physically frustrating, but ultimately for the best. The next time this happens—which won’t take long, if the past several weeks suggest any sort of pattern—Light will remember, and he’ll like it. He’ll say, “You like when I use you, don’t you? When I don’t give you anything?” and L will rock his hips into his and nod, and it will not be a lie.
None of this is a lie, which is why it is going to work.
Light is leaning backwards into his touch now, letting L soothe him. He says, “I didn’t mean—I’m not,”—
He cannot finish the sentence, cannot say the name, or face the self that he does not recognize.
That’s what L is for, to face it for him. He says, soothingly, with a tenderness that is not at all false, although it is—has to be—a trap, “You are, Light. But it’s okay. It’s okay that you are.”
Light finally looks at him, and the fear in his eyes is tinged with something else. Something deep down, unburying itself. Like a man in a dream whose eyes dart around beneath his closed eyelids.
Like Kira, smiling in his sleep.