Seventeen-

Seventeen-

"We might have a problem I haven't discussed with you," says Watari, over tea at the end of the day. "With one of your other successors."

"Oh? Has Mello finally killed Near?" asks L, who isn't taking him seriously. He's piling sugar cubes into a tower instead.

"It's B."

That gets his attention, exhausted as he is. He stills, and glances up, eyebrows arched. He hasn't made it a secret that he doesn't approve of what Watari and Roger have done with A and B. Especially since A killed himself, it turns out, after a series of assaults from B, and the murder of the kitten they shared; he felt that sort of proved his point.

"What about him?" Watari doesn't usually like to bring these things up after L's tennis matches, he usually gives him tea and sends him to get some sleep.

"He's escaped."

"Ah." L flicks the bottom sugar cube, and sends his tower crashing down on the coffee table. Some of the cubes crumble, and the mess goes everywhere. Watari bites back a rude comment about making needless mess. He gets the message.

L rises awkwardly to his feet, and slouches his way over to his computer, bare feet shuffling on the carpet. He has a homicidal successor to try to track down, while Watari cleans up the smaller mess.

Eighteen-

Wedy and L like fighting each other for the same exact reason.
Neither of them 'goes easy' on the other.
Wedy is blond, beautiful, blue eyed, and just lithe enough to pass for delicate. Men in gyms inevitably try a pick up line, right before her elbow connects. Frequently, right after, too. Men are stupid that way. L is important, intelligent, wiry. He can't be hurt, because then who would save the world? And Watari scares all instructors into walking on eggshells around him well before they ever meet him.
When they first meet, they look at each other, and see something mutual.
When they first fight, her knees slams up, aiming for his crotch. His elbow connects with her jaw with a sickening sound. He breaks two fingers, she cracks a tooth. He isn't very good, but he's vicious. She's excellent, but she hasn't had enough practise. They decide that she can learn on him. The decide that she can teach him.
They're more careful, after that, but things aren't really any less brutal. The doctors all wonder. Watari's hair starts going grey a little faster. L is routinely limping. Wedy's mother asks if she's in an abusive relationship.
L stops walking so much. Wedy stops visiting her mother so often; when she does, she wears foundation, and long sleeved shirts.
They meet Sundays. Then Tuesdays, too.
"I'm leaving for Spain," L tells her, finally, two years after they've started.
"Fuck you," says Wedy. He damn well owes her better than that.
She kicks, he dodges, and kicks back. He connects. She yelps, and lunges for him.
They hit the mat hard, his head connects with the floor. She loses her breath. They roll. His knee connects with her thigh, she bites down hard on his ear, he yells.
They fight. Until she is black and blue and her fingers are broken this time, and his ankle is sprained and an eye is black.
Then, they sit on the floor together and laugh, with tears threatening to creep in around the edges.

Nineteen-

In Paris, he commits his one act of teenaged rebellion. He sneaks out of the hotel room; or rather, walks out, while Watari watches him on camera, without letting him know where he's going. He only heads down to the lobby, and the hotel bar, and settles down to drink a glass of ginger ail, (he's too nervous to order anything stronger.) There's a singer, doing renditions of Edith Piaf songs, quite poorly, but he sits and listens to her for hours, anyways. After her set, she sidles over, all slink and red dresses, and sits down next to him and asks him to buy her a drink. So he does, toes curling nervously in his tennis shoes.

She's young, and can't make the rent, ever, and he's young and is starved for affection, though he doesn't know it. They feel a connection that she swears is fate and he realizes is probably nerves and hormones and circumstances, and she drinks her drink and grabs him by the collar of his white, long sleeved shirt. They kiss in the bar, until they're asked to leave, and then they kiss in the elevator. He stops to ask if he's doing it right, and she giggles at him and tugs him out on the second floor, towards her room instead of his. They get inside and she licks the skin under his ear, and makes him shiver. She has condoms, and they have sex, a little awkwardly and a little messily, with her knickers down and her slinky dress rucked up around her waist. He kisses all her lipstick off, and is silent, except for the occasional, startled gasp. Until it's over.

He kisses her goodbye, wipes the lipstick off his face and goes up to his room where he becomes L again, simple as that, the person who is not-quite-human.

Twenty-

Mello sits down with him over tea and chocolate cookies, and L tells him about his experience with B, a few months ago. It's for a case-report Mello is doing for one of Roger's classes, L isn't sure why, or if he even likes the idea of leaving a permanent record of his actions behind... but if anyone knows how to be circumspect, he supposes it's Mello. He won't use the information in a way that'd be damaging to the title he hopes to succeed to one day.

Being twenty and thinking in terms of 'when I die' is both alarming, and incredibly necessary, which is again, alarming in and of itself.

"And then B lit himself on fire?" asks Mello, irritation mixed with awe; it's an epic story, but an alarming one, involving the gruesome murders of two adults and a child.

"He did," agrees L, "in an intention to create the perfect crime, that I'd be unable to solve. Fortunately Agent Misora managed to put him out in time, and apprehended him. We have him in custody now, sedated, mostly, while the burns heal. I'll interrogate him once he's lucid and let you know the results."

"Why do you want to interrogate him?" asks Mello, uncertainly.

"Well, I don't believe he killed just the three people, do you?"

Twenty one-

"Watari," says L, suddenly, dropping his chocolate chip cookie. "You're not going to... retire, soon, are you?"

"What?" replies Watari. "No, of course not. We can't risk the security breach. What brought that on, L?"

"I don't want you to get hurt."

"What?"
"Well, aside from planning to put me down if I stepped out of line, you were a parental figure through my childhood." Watari shouldn't be surprised that L knew about that, but of course he did. He of all people would be able to assess the risk he posed to the world as a loose canon.

"So I'm family?"

"Homicidal impulses aside."

"Of course. Will you be sleeping tonight, L?" Since he occasionally doesn't, it's prudent to ask. Especially given the routine he subsequently enters into.

"No thank you. I'll have hot chocolate and coffee and jel-"

"-jelly beans, and marshmallows with but not in the hot chocolate and lychee icecream after the coffee."

"Precisely. I should be lost without my Boswell."

"Don't quote books I gave you to read at me, young man, I know them better than you do."

Twenty two-

Matt is losing interest in the program, and L isn't sure, from reading the files, how to motivate him again. Or if he should even bother. Mello and Near are promising candidates, they'd make good successors, either one of them (especially both of them) and Matt isn't driven enough to be able to work at the speed, and complete the amount of cases L traditionally has per year. The transition would be best if it were seamless, and therefore, he marks the status down as 'discarded' with casual disregard, and goes back to reading Mello and Near's latest case reports.

After a moment's thought, he goes back to the other window and makes a note to Roger to keep Matt enrolled in his program of study (though he hardly attends classes any longer,) since his calmness seems to be Mello's ballast.

Hopefully Matt's brand of calm will be exchanged for Near's in the future, and M and N can depend on each other, but as far as L knows at the moment he has years left to sort that out, so for now he focuses on continuing to teach them what they need to know, rather than what they have to be in order to be L.

Twenty three-

Watari gets him a book about obedience studies, and L temporarily becomes so depressed with the state of the human race that he considers resigning from his position as the world's three greatest detective. If an even sixty six percent of people are willing to electrocute each other to death on the say so of a scientist, their only concern being whether or not they were responsible for what occurred, then maybe he doesn't want any part in saving them.

"Don't be dramatic," says Watari, setting a milkshake down in front of him. "Eat your strawberries."

"Et tu, Watari," mutters L, following his mentor's instructions and stopping in surprise as he's pulled into a brief, faintly awkward hug. Watari has mid-life crisises and gets affectionate at the oddest moments and about the strangest things.

He decides that he isn't going to give up humanity for lost, because thirty four percent is at least something to hold on to, and because if he walked away from this now then he'd be the person who disavowed responsibility for his actions, and he isn't the sort to electrocute the man in the other room.

Twenty four-

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

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

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

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

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

L smiles instead of spits at him.

Twenty five-

Heart attacks hurt more than he thought they would. Logically, he understood that there would be a massive amount of pain, but he didn't really comprehend, he supposes. Which is odd for him, given that his understanding of any situation is usually complete and instantaneous.

Light catches him before he can hit the ground, and he wants to scream in agony but can't seem to do anything except sag. Light is smirking at him, in a way that finally, finally bumps his certainty up to one hundred percent, and he shushes the parts of himself that are yelling that it's too late, because Near and Mello are still out there, and they are going to succeed him and they are going to solve this mystery. The circumstances surrounding his death, what with Misa's imminent capture, will leave nothing to doubt. Provided they find way to know what happened; no doubt Aizawa, or perhaps Ide, will come forwards, so long as they do then they will not be able to help but understand, and they will be able to trap Light. L will defeat Kira, no matter which incarnation of the position it is.

You think you have won, L thinks, trying to stare at Light, but his eyelids are so, so heavy. But justice...

And then he doesn't think anything, any more.