The time is o'dark thirty Tokyo standard time. It is that magical transitional time from the glowing, raving nightlife to the quiet(er), mundane morning shopping period of old ladies, busy moms, and early risers. Midori was one of the latter.

Dressed sharply for work in black pants and a white shirt with ruffled capped sleeves, her green apron slung in the crook of her arm, Midori walked as briskly as she could, her arms occupied with two brown paper grocery bags that contained all her day's ingredients: cinnamon, butter, milk, sugar...all in muscle-burning quantities. It was the fifty pound bag of self rising flour on one shoulder that was really weighing her down. She really should invest in some sort of cart or bag. Sure, she had inherited her father's tall, strong, decidedly American frame of five-nine, but even good genetics could only contribute so much to lightening her load. Three more blocks, and she'd be at the store. Midori breathed past the trembling in her triceps and walked a little faster.

Bringing handcrafted American baked goods and confectionery traditions to her mother's native country was hard work. Midori was her own employee, boss, office manager, and errand girl. She often pulled twelve hour days, more likely to tip the scales at fifteen. But baking was her passion. She ate up the pictures in magazines detailing gorgeous wedding cakes, dainty pastries, and oozy desserts. And when you truly adore something, you make sacrifices without even caring.

Her mind was flooded with the to-do list for that day, her first work day of the week: at least ten desserts for the walk-ins, two wedding cakes at five feet tall and two-hundred pounds each (seriously, did Japanese people ever do anything halfway?), and balancing the business account. Midori blew a strand of honey-colored hair out of her chocolate eyes. Another breakfast of strong black tea and stevia, the sweetener herb.

There, she'd arrived. With more than a little pride, she glanced up at the sign above the door that boldly proclaimed in both Japanese and English SWEET TOOTH with the motto "Feed the Urge" scripted below.

Okay, how would she manage to open the door and keep her armload at the same time...?

Maybe the decision wasn't hers. The flour bag was slipping precariously off one sharp shoulder and starting its descent to splat-ville...

L sat at his computer, hunched over his knees. Again.

He'd hit a wall in his deductions. Again.

And he was hungry. Again.

All-nighters did wonders for his metabolism.

Beside him, Light (aka currently 7% Kira) groaned and stretched his back with an audible crack. "Ryuzaki, I'm cooked." He flicked golden eyes to L's purple-ringed ones. "Can we go home now?" The rest of the Kira Investigation Team murmured ascent, Matsuda punctuating his implore with a yawn.

"Go home," said L in a monotone, mostly due to his sugar craving and sleep deprivation. "Get some sleep and be back at the same time tonight."

They commenced to packing up paperwork into briefcases, powering down computers, and rolling desk chairs under the tables. L heard Aizawa mutter at he exited, "What is he, a freaking vampire? I've never seen the man sleep."

"Believe me: he not only sleeps, he snores," assured Light. "I was chained to him for months, remember?"

This brought tired laughter from the team as they stepped onto the elevator down to the parking level, leaving L alone with his thoughts.

And his growling stomach.

Despite popular belief, L actually was a human, with normal biological functions and no particular aversion to sunlight, just no real need for it. However, it seemed his quest for sweets would urge him outside the realm of fluorescence and into the land of UV.

Taking the elevator his peers had recently vacated, L descended to the ground level of the building he'd had built with the Wammy fortune and dinged! to the concrete, empty parking deck. Walking with his curious gait, hunched to three-quarters his size and hands in his pockets, he wandered out of the bowels of his personal prison and onto the street. Prison though it might be, L was content with his life. He lived for the mystery, the brain-shearing challenge, the mental chess game with criminals, particularly Kira. L had never had the pleasure of such a thrilling, twisty chase. It ran along his nerves and lit the fire in his belly, that scarcely contained, roaring passion he attributed to only the hunt. It boiled under his skin, just out of sight.

Maybe the obsessiveness with which he attacked cases bordered insanity. It certainly drove him to extremes in living habits: sleeping only when he was about to tip out of his chair, consuming only that which kept his brain operating at that pace of neuron firing that could be attributed to sugar alone, bathing only occasionally, driving his team to greater and greater lengths to catch Kira...

But he got he job done. Being the eighth smartest person in the world and tied with Light as the smartest in Japan, he could afford it.

Fresh air was foreign yet welcome to his lungs. Fresh may have been the operative word, but in Japan, there was no such thing.

Being a man of no small amount of paranoia, L kept an eagle eye on the day-to-day proceedings of businesses in the immediate vicinity of the Wammy tower. As such, he knew there was a little hole in the wall bakery a half kilometer away. This was where his grumbling stomach drove him. He drew the kind of looks from the sparse pedestrians that were usually reserved for roadkill: interest then aversion. It didn't faze him in the slightest, but he wondered just what it was like to be judged by what good he did than by how he looked. He took the worst criminals known to mankind out of their lives. Didn't that mean something? Unruly black hair, raccoon eyes, baggy plain white t-shirt and jeans made him stand out in comparison to the fashionable dressed, groomed, and well-rested general public. And so they judged.

Kira judged, too, L reasoned. He judged by man's judgments, for he almost exclusively killed those imprisoned or under some sort of punishment by law. And yes, crime had fallen to almost nil. But did that make murder right? The victims of Kira's deathly touch were...what? Evil? Surely one act, the acts short of killing, did not an evil man make. Did that mean non-killers deserved to die?

Ryuzaki loved this argument: he could go round and round in his head with it, like a dog chasing its tail. He was so engrossed in the internal monologue that he very nearly bumped a woman standing in the middle of the sidewalk.

It took him a split second to realize the heavy paper sack of flour on her shoulder was slipping. She was rotating with its momentum, but it was going to fall. L reached out and plucked the wayward bag out of its descent, taking the fifty pounds easily with his deceptive strength.

The woman said, "Oh, thank you! I didn't see you there."

"I just walked up," replied L in his monotone. He eyed the sign above their head. "Are you Sweet Tooth?"

The woman giggled. Actually giggled. "I'm not, but I do own the store. Will you carry that in for me? I owe you a cookie."

Ryuzaki kept his comical perk-up contained at the offer of a sweet. She dug for her keys and unlocked the front door, the bell chiming. He shifted the bag to his shoulder, straightening up an extra foot in the process, and followed her into the store. With a relived "Phew!" she slid the brown paper grocery bags in her arms onto the counter, flexing and rubbing her bicep. "I'll take it from here." The flour changed hands and she started flipping light switches as she walked gracefully around the counter and into a back room. "Choose a cookie, there's a ton of them," she called over her shoulder. The lights she flipped illuminated a small store, with a counter and register against the wall farthest from the door, cold cases (mostly empty) framing the walk-in area, and three sets of two chairs and a table.

L walked to the nearest cold case and peered in. After inspecting the lonely cakes, he found the cookies on top of the display, cellophane-wrapped and arranged in baskets. There were at least eight different types. His mouth watered. Chocolate chip? An old standby, true, but this called for some degree of adventure. Macadamia? That was somewhat exotic, make a note. What was that one, the light-with-brown-dusting?

"It's called snickerdoodle," said the woman, appearing behind the counter. He hadn't heard her approach. "They're hard to find in Japan."

L nodded and plucked the crinkly cookie from its basket, arranged himself in the nearest chair with his knees under his chin, and began to open the wrapper. She smiled and went about her setup routine, seemingly content to let him not talk and put his feet on her furniture. Now L got his first good look at her. She was American with her blond hair captive in a hair net and her height, but Japanese with her accent and was dressed more like a head waitress than a baker, but her apron bore a few faint food coloring stains that belied her work ethic.

The silence was not awkward, but it looked like he should be the one to get things started. "I'm Ryuzaki," said L around a mouthful of cookie. Correction, delicious cookie. Soft and crumbly and good.

"Hi, Ryuzaki. I'm Midori." She flashed him another beaming smile, turning a key in the register. L could hear a large industrial mixer going in the kitchen, and the hum of a preheating oven. He could smell lemons strongly, and under it, sugar and butter. He took another deep breath.

Midori appeared in front of him again (she seemed a closet teleporter: her steps were silent as a whisper) and settled into the seat opposite him, two steaming mugs in her hands. One was black tea, the other green. L finished his cookie and set about to preparing his tea with half the container of sugar. The corner of her mouth twitched in a repressed smile. "Are you a sweets fiend, too?"

L looked up from methodically stirring the beverage. "Yes. Are you?"

She nodded, motioning around. "It's part of the job description."

"Sugar?" asked L.

"No thanks. I switched to stevia."

"What is that?"

"An herb that has no calories and it 300 times sweeter than sugar. I'm a borderline diabetic, so I have to be careful." She giggled. L kind of liked the sound. "But I have to watch how I travel with stevia: it's a white, powdery substance. Cops tend to jump to conclusions about that sort of thing."

L nodded, smiling faintly.

"Aha! Got one," she said, pointing at him. "Be waiting for you to smile the whole time. My work is done."

L couldn't help it. His smile grew. So she liked his smile the way he liked her laugh?

In the kitchen, the mixer cut off and the oven beeped. "Just a second," Midori said, getting up and taking her mug with her. She started spooning copious amounts of the mixer's contents into pans of various sizes and shapes.

"That smells good," said L, moving to lean over the counter so she could hear him.

"I have a wedding cake to do today. It's huge." Midori sounded equal parts excited and dreadful. He finished his tea, watching her flit past the sliver of kitchen he could see if he craned his neck. She slid the pans into the oven and came back, wiping her hands. "I wrote the recipe, and it's one of my best sellers."

"I liked the cookie," said L. "May I take the rest to-go?"

Her eyes widened, but she seemed pleasantly surprised. "Sure! It'll take me a second to bag them up."

"I have time."

Midori wheedled a promise out of him that Ryuzaki would return the next morning to try the chocolate vegan cupcakes. He was happy to oblige. Ten minutes later, L exited Sweet Tooth laden with four bags of cookies, totaling 144 of the sweets. When the Kira Investigation Team got back that night, half of the cookies were gone and L's computer chair was adrift in a sea of wrappers. He seemed...different, somehow. But they blamed the massive ingestion of sugar.

Author's Note

Hi, guys and gals! I have been chewing on this story for a while, just waiting to finish my Sherlock Holmes story first. I wanted to put L in the social situations he never seems to get into in the TV series and see how he reacts. In case you haven't noticed, I use L and Ryuzaki interchangeably. If I messed anything up, or if you liked this story, please review! Reviews are cookies for a starving author!