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Title: The Apartment
Author: Evandar (yamievandar / hikarievandar)
Fandom: Death Note
Rating: R
Pairing: Mentions of Mello/Near
Genre: Supernatural/Mystery
Warnings: Spoilers for the whole series, weirdness
Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note and I am making no profit from this story.
Summary: When student Yagami Light moves into a new apartment, the last thing he expects is to find it haunted.
AN: "Moj drug" is a transliteration of the Russian for "my friend".
After he had agreed to help the ghost of L move on – possibly at the cost of his own life – L almost vanished from his life. Light supposed that the ghost was thanking him for his compliance by allowing him to get some sleep and finish the university coursework that was hanging over his head. Not that, in comparison to the thought of solving the Kira case, a two thousand word essay on bipolar disorder was all that intimidating. Still, Light appreciated the reprieve.
And when L did decide to return, he certainly made his presence known.
Light had been standing in front of the sink washing his face and wearing nothing except a towel, his hair still dripping wet from the shower, when he had looked up and spotted a pair of large black-rimmed eyes staring over his shoulder at his reflection out from under a messy black fringe. Light had shrieked – his voice echoing off the tiles – and spun round to face the ghost of L. All too late he felt the icy cold radiating out from the spirit’s transparent form and shivered as that cold hit the water droplets on his bare skin.
He folded his arms over his chest in an attempt to both warm himself and hide his rapidly hardening nipples from the ghost who was looking entirely too interested in Light’s body.
“A little warning next time!” Light scolded him.
L raised one hand to nibble at his thumb and slouched further. His other hand was buried in the pocket of his jeans – what he had been wearing when he’d died, Light presumed – and Light eyed it warily. “Go through to the living room,” he said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
L nodded, turned, and walked out through the wall. Light shivered. L was definitely a creepy bastard.
He dried and dressed himself in record time and headed to the living room to find that L had closed his curtains again before settling himself on the sofa with Light’s laptop on the coffee table in front of him. He was sitting in that odd position with his knees tucked up to his chest again, and Light wondered if that was some sort of nervous habit as well. It looked incredibly uncomfortable. Even so, he didn’t say anything about it.
“So,” he said, breaking the uncomfortable silence and trying to get L to focus on something that wasn’t the little ‘v’ of bare skin where he’d left his shirt unbuttoned at the neck. “Where do we start?”
“Your father led me to believe that you had helped with police investigations before, Light-kun,” L commented.
Light nodded. “Yeah,” he admitted, “but we aren’t the police. You’re dead and I’m a university student; hardly NPA material.”
He left out the fact that, until Kira had won over the Government and the NPA, he had wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a police officer. Now that they had truly succumbed to Kira’s corruption, though, he wanted nothing to do with them. He wanted nothing to do with Kira – other than to catch him and probably kill him, with any luck – and his twisted sense of justice and morality.
“That is very true,” L admitted thoughtfully. “However the basics are still the same. We start by gathering as much information as we can.”
Light nodded. “You had to have notes on him when you were running the investigation,” he said.
“Of course,” L said. “But they were deleted when Kira killed Watari.” An expression of sadness flickered briefly over his face, and Light thought that grief made him seem so much more human. “A copy might have survived elsewhere, provided that Kira had no access to our servers and can’t trace an IP address, but accessing it could be problematic. I have been dead for two years, the passwords might have changed.”
“We’ll start there anyway,” he said. He sat down as close to L as he could bear – mindful of the temperature more than anything else – and pulled his laptop onto his knees. It was already switched on.
L leaned over his shoulder as he typed. He gave directions on how to hack into the server – Light did have some hacking experience, which seemed to amuse L for some reason, but without L he wouldn’t have had a clue what he was meant to be hacking into. The files, thankfully, still existed, and Light felt a surge of relief when he hit the download button and began to copy them onto his computer. At least he wouldn’t have to repeat the years of work that L had no doubt put into the case originally. He could just pick up where L had left off.
While the folders downloaded, Light went to the kitchen to get coffee. Sick of instant coffee failing to keep him properly awake during the worst of L’s haunting, he had forked out for a proper coffee maker. Waiting for the machine to percolate, he allowed himself a moment to think things through properly. He wasn’t usually an irrational person, and going after Kira was definitely an irrational thing for him to do. But at the same time, Kira had killed his father and he had killed L who now spent his time haunting Light’s apartment. It was personal. Kira had killed two people close to Light – although admittedly, L had only become close to Light after he had died – and that was more than enough to make Light want revenge.
Kira hadn’t just screwed up the world; he had screwed up Light’s life and, selfish though it was, that was reason enough.
And, he supposed, at least he had help from the greatest detective in the world. Fair enough, L might have failed the first time, but now Kira had consigned himself to a ghost wanting to bring him down for the rest of his days. And surely Kira couldn’t kill someone who was already dead, could he?
The machine finished, and Light poured himself a large cup of coffee. On a whim he added a couple of spoonfuls of sugar – far more than he normally would have put in – and he headed back to the living room. Being around L was making him crave sweet things. Odd. When he’d first moved in, hadn’t his landlord said that the coroner had told him L had died of a diabetic coma? Possibly an inaccuracy, considering Kira’s involvement, but it was still quite…spooky.
Light shook his head clear of those thoughts and sat back down next to the dead man. A glance at his laptop told him that the files were still downloading – he silently thanked god for external hard-drives – and a glance at L told him that something was bothering the ghost. L was chewing on his thumb again and looking at the laptop as though it was about to explode, which was slightly disconcerting since he had a better idea of what was on those files than Light did.
“They’ll find you,” L said eventually. “If they’re still alive.”
“Who?” Light asked.
L didn’t reply. Light sighed and changed the subject. “So once we’ve got the files and read through them to catch up, what then? We keep gathering information?”
L nodded. “There will be two years worth of unevaluated data regarding the Kira case,” he said. “We are very behind, Light-kun.”
Light tactfully ignored the sudden familiarity. The ghost had seen him half naked before, not to mention that he’d watched him sleep. He supposed that by this point anyone would have thrown formality out of the window. Although he also suspected that anyone else would have gone to see a psychiatrist or an exorcist by this point.
“Right,” he said. “But what about this ‘they’ you mentioned. Surely, if They had access to your files as well, They would have been able to continue your work.”
It was, he thought privately, absolutely ridiculous. He could almost hear the capital letter tacked on in front of the word ‘They’ – the unknown entity that L seemed so sure would be able to find him. Then again, he also knew that L’s very existence was bordering on the ridiculous all on its own.
“Yes,” L murmured. “However, if my work was continued then it seems unlikely that they have succeeded, leading me to believe that they could be dead as well.” He waved the hand he wasn’t chewing on at his own transparent body.
Light swallowed. “More ghosts?” he asked. Then, “can ghosts track people through IP addresses and computer servers?”
“No,” L said. “My experiments have shown that my presence is limited to this apartment – the place of my death – and wherever you are, though I cannot stray from you by more than ten feet without being transported back here.”
“Transported how?” Light asked.
L gave an awkward shrugging motion that looked like he was trying to dislocate his own shoulder. “I do not know,” he said. “Until recently, I did not believe in the existence of ghosts, spectres or anything else of a supernatural nature.”
Light wondered if this had caused L to have some sort of identity crisis.
“However, shortly before my death, I realised that there was a twenty percent chance that I was wrong,” L continued. “Either that or Kira was sixty seven percent more insane than I had previously given him credit for.”
Light raised an eyebrow disbelievingly. It was a given, as far as he was concerned, that Kira was crazy. His god-complex was probably the least of his issues. Even so, Kira was definitely intelligent: he had to have been to have bested L.
“He experimented on prisoners,” L said. “In order to test how far he was able to control them prior to their deaths. In one of those experiments, he had one of them leave a message. Hidden in that message was another message, which said that ‘Gods of Death love apples’. At first, I was inclined to believe that the message was a game – a ploy to either worry me – or a sign of further psychological instability. Now, I’m not so sure.”
He looked down at his transparent body, and the pattern of the material covering the sofa’s cushions, which was visible through his bent knees. “After all,” he continued, “if I can exist, surely a Shinigami is not so far-fetched.”
There was a troubled frown on his face, and his thumb - if it had been real – was becoming in severe danger of being mauled. Light felt a surge of sympathy for L. It had probably been a right kick in the teeth to go through life so disbelieving of the supernatural, only to end up as a ghost.
His computer chose that moment to give a little beep, signalling that the file downloads had been completed. Light took a swig of his now cold coffee and pulled his laptop off the coffee table and onto his knees. He groaned at the sight of how many megabites of memory the files had taken up: he was in for a very long read.
“You’re very thorough, aren’t you,” he commented as he opened the first file.
There was no reply. Looking round at where L had been sitting, he found his place empty. Light scowled. “Dammit L, give me some warning before you do that!”
He could have sworn that he heard a faint, ghostly chuckle.
But L’s presence turned out to be completely unnecessary when it came to catching up on the work that he had done when he had been alive, which was something that Light felt more than grateful for, since L hadn’t shown his face since their conversation while the files had been downloading. Even so, Light found himself missing the ghost. Even though the ghastly cold – a side effect of L’s presence – was uncomfortable, L was a pleasant enough companion, and really, for such a popular boy, Light didn’t have all that many friends.
The realisation that the one person in the world that he could ever see himself truly becoming friends with was the ghost haunting his apartment made Light want to bang his head of something hard. Instead, he concentrated on L’s case files. It had the same headache inducing effect, after all.
He’d spent two week’s worth of his winter holiday locked in his apartment and living off coffee, tea – when he ran out of coffee – and whatever meals he could scrape together using the contents of his fridge and cupboards. By the time the second Saturday of his self-imposed imprisonment came around, he was onto his third day straight of eating cup ramen. But, he had managed to finish reading the files.
Just.
With his brain aching from the sheer amount of information he had had to absorb, and his body shot to hell by whatever E-Numbers had been in the countless amounts of cup ramen he had consumed – he didn’t think that he would ever be able to eat one for the rest of his life – he decided to go out. Grocery shopping, to be more exact, since the only things he had left were a packet of American cookies – called Oreos, or something daft like that – that had somehow managed to appear in his cupboard and a cup of ‘Oriental’ flavoured instant ramen – which he would rather die than even look at.
But after reading the files, even slipping on his shoes and jacket, and grabbing his keys and his wallet and heading down to the supermarket felt strange. It felt abnormal, somehow, as if the world had changed around him without him noticing; as if the sky had suddenly turned green and grass purple. Everything seemed to be in Technicolor, and everyone he passed seemed to stare at him suspiciously. He drifted aimlessly down the aisles when he arrived at the supermarket, and ended up staring at courgettes in complete incomprehension before a hand on his arm and the wrinkled face of an old lady peering concernedly up at him reminded him that no, courgettes did not hold the secrets to the universe.
“Are you alright, dear?” she asked.
He nodded. His tongue flicked out to wet his lips and he grimaced slightly at how odd they tasted – stale and suspiciously sweet. The result of far too much cup ramen, no doubt. “Yes,” he said. His voice was raspy, barely more than a croak, and he realised that it was the first time he’d spoken in two weeks. “I’m fine, thank you. I’m just…out of it.”
She nodded and gave his arm a sympathetic pat. “A hot meal and some sleep is what you need,” she said. “You looked like death warmed over.”
He said nothing about her over-familiarity. He just smiled, thanked her for her advice, and began to pile his basket full with fresh fruit and vegetables. He couldn’t even look in the direction of the aisle where the cup ramen and other dried foods were kept. The meat and fish counters were also raided, and he found himself looking forward to eating something that had some sort of nutritional value.
He should have been expecting it.
The door to his apartment was closed and locked, just as he’d left it, when he arrived back. But there was something off. As soon as he entered, the fine hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and for once it had absolutely nothing to do with L. His screaming instincts were proved correct when something cold, hard and metallic pressed non-too gently into the base of his skull. The door shut behind him with a click.
“Don’t move,” said a voice.
The accent was foreign, and probably European in origin, but Light couldn’t place it exactly. The voice was deep enough to be male, but young, and Light subconsciously categorised the speaker as a teenager. The metallic thing, he knew, was the barrel of a gun. He swallowed nervously. A hand, strong-fingered and clad in a leather glove, snatched Light’s door keys out of his grasp.
“Put the bags down,” the voice said. “Slowly.”
Light complied. Really, with a gun pressed against his nape, ready to blow his brains out, he wasn’t about to argue. Inwardly he cursed L for haunting him, cursed Kira for killing L in the first place, and cursed himself for getting involved with this insanity as he knew that there was no way that anything like this would have happened if he had remained out of the Kira case.
It looked like the mysterious ‘They’ had found him after all. Goody. Light had always planned on dying while assuaging his own curiosity…
“Good,” the voice said. “Now, walk forwards into your living room.”
From the corner of his eye, Light saw a pair of leather boots decorated with more straps and buckles than he had ever seen on an item of clothing ever sitting innocently in next to the umbrella stand. Next to them was a pair of white trainers far too small to be Light’s own. There were two of them. Wonderful.
But really, what sort of kidnappers/assailants conformed to the social niceties of the person they were threatening?
The teenaged kind, apparently, as when Light entered his sitting room, he was greeted by the sight of a small adolescent boy sitting on one of his chairs, twisting his fingers in his startlingly white hair. His skin was pale enough almost to blend into the white pyjamas he was wearing – the part of Light’s brain that hadn’t caught up with the fact that he was being held at gunpoint wondered what the hell the boy was doing wearing something like that in the middle of the day – and his eyes were an unnatural shade of green only seen on cats and coloured contact lenses. He was an albino, Light realised, Caucasian – fitting with his partner’s European origins – and he was studying Light with the same sort of intensity that Light had seen on L.
He was, all things considered, possibly the most intimidating teenager Light had ever laid eyes on.
“Yagami Light,” he said.
Not European, Light decided. There was a definite American twang to his Japanese, though it bordered closer to the kind of drawl usually found in the Southern States.
“I’m afraid you hold me at a disadvantage,” Light said, “as I have no idea who you are.”
The person behind him snorted. “Really? You managed to hack into our servers easily enough.”
For a second, the intense, creepy stare of those unnaturally green eyes flickered to a place just over Light’s right shoulder. Then it returned to Light, slamming into him with the force of the bullet train.
“You may call me N,” the boy said after a moment.
Cute, Light thought. He almost said it out loud. L. N. The only one missing was M, and Light was willing to bet on that being the guy with the gun. Instead he took a deep breath.
“You’re here about the Kira files,” he said.
N continued to stare at him for a moment, before he nodded slightly. “Only one person had access to that server with those passwords” – shit, why hadn’t L warned him that the passwords were personal? – “and he is dead.”
“Right,” Light said. “About that…”
“You are not Kira,” N said. “You don’t fit the profile, and as psychotic as Kira is, I do not believe that he would have been capable of killing his own father.”
Light wondered briefly how much of the case files N had actually read himself. It had come as something of a shock to Light to discover that, in the early stages of the case, he had been a suspect and had been placed under surveillance. Obviously L hadn’t found anything too incriminating as he hadn’t been dragged in for questioning, but the knowledge that there had been a five percent change that he was Kira had stunned him.
It was a good thing that L had been making himself scarce, as Light was fairly sure that he would have tried to hit him at that point.
But, apparently, either N hadn’t read that part or he was ignoring it for now. That was good. Light was under no illusions about how quickly he’d be dead if he said the wrong thing.
“So how did you, a student whose connection to L was tenuous at best, gain access to his passwords?”
And there was the fifty billion Yen question.
“I moved into his old apartment,” Light said.
Apparently N hadn’t been expecting that. He blinked, and his gaze flickered once more to the person standing behind Light. In response, the barrel of the gun pressed harder against the base of Light’s skull. He winced.
“This isn’t the time for jokes, moj drug,” the one with the gun said. Light had no idea what that last part had meant, or even what language it had been in – definitely not French or German – but it sounded intimidating. That, he supposed, had been the idea.
“This is going to sound crazy,” he said, “and it’s a long story. Can I at least sit down?” It felt ridiculous to ask that; he was in his own living room, with his own sofa and chairs, after all. “And can you tell this guy to stop stabbing me with a gun please? You already know that I’m not Kira.”
N hesitated, then nodded. The pressure on the back of Light’s neck lessened, and then vanished completely, and he felt himself relax. He took a shakey breath, then determinedly crossed the room to the sofa and sat down. Sitting didn’t stop his legs from shaking, nor did it lessen his desire to run screaming, but it felt…better to be sitting in the same spot that he’d spent the past two weeks. His laptop still lay on the coffee table directly in front of him, next to his tea cup.
He looked up at N again, and saw that the guy with the gun had joined him. They were as different as night and day. The one with the gun – and he was still holding it, tapping the barrel gently against his thigh – sat on the arm of the chair N was sitting in. He was dressed entirely in black leather, with a Catholic rosary – silver with beads made from some kind of red wood – hanging around his neck. There was a second rosary, one in the form of a silver bracelet fastened around his right wrist, the tiny crucifix standing out against the black leather of his glove. He had shoulder length, golden blond hair and the strangest colour eyes Light had ever seen. They were amber, but unlike N’s eyes, they appeared to be natural.
“Speak,” he commanded, and Light glared at him.
“Right,” he said. “L. Well, like I said…”
And so, he began to tell them how he had met L, and of how L had helped him hack into their server to access the case files, all the while painfully aware of the growing looks of incredulity on their faces.
At least if I die, he thought, I won’t be alone in here. The thought gave him a sudden and macabre urge to laugh. He resisted; he really didn’t think that it would be appreciated.
“You think this is funny?” the blond asked. He looked – and sounded – pissed off, and the look N was giving him wasn’t exactly inspiring the warm and fuzzies either.
“Not really,” Light said.
The electricity chose that exact moment to cut out.
Author: Evandar (yamievandar / hikarievandar)
Fandom: Death Note
Rating: R
Pairing: Mentions of Mello/Near
Genre: Supernatural/Mystery
Warnings: Spoilers for the whole series, weirdness
Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note and I am making no profit from this story.
Summary: When student Yagami Light moves into a new apartment, the last thing he expects is to find it haunted.
AN: "Moj drug" is a transliteration of the Russian for "my friend".
After he had agreed to help the ghost of L move on – possibly at the cost of his own life – L almost vanished from his life. Light supposed that the ghost was thanking him for his compliance by allowing him to get some sleep and finish the university coursework that was hanging over his head. Not that, in comparison to the thought of solving the Kira case, a two thousand word essay on bipolar disorder was all that intimidating. Still, Light appreciated the reprieve.
And when L did decide to return, he certainly made his presence known.
Light had been standing in front of the sink washing his face and wearing nothing except a towel, his hair still dripping wet from the shower, when he had looked up and spotted a pair of large black-rimmed eyes staring over his shoulder at his reflection out from under a messy black fringe. Light had shrieked – his voice echoing off the tiles – and spun round to face the ghost of L. All too late he felt the icy cold radiating out from the spirit’s transparent form and shivered as that cold hit the water droplets on his bare skin.
He folded his arms over his chest in an attempt to both warm himself and hide his rapidly hardening nipples from the ghost who was looking entirely too interested in Light’s body.
“A little warning next time!” Light scolded him.
L raised one hand to nibble at his thumb and slouched further. His other hand was buried in the pocket of his jeans – what he had been wearing when he’d died, Light presumed – and Light eyed it warily. “Go through to the living room,” he said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
L nodded, turned, and walked out through the wall. Light shivered. L was definitely a creepy bastard.
He dried and dressed himself in record time and headed to the living room to find that L had closed his curtains again before settling himself on the sofa with Light’s laptop on the coffee table in front of him. He was sitting in that odd position with his knees tucked up to his chest again, and Light wondered if that was some sort of nervous habit as well. It looked incredibly uncomfortable. Even so, he didn’t say anything about it.
“So,” he said, breaking the uncomfortable silence and trying to get L to focus on something that wasn’t the little ‘v’ of bare skin where he’d left his shirt unbuttoned at the neck. “Where do we start?”
“Your father led me to believe that you had helped with police investigations before, Light-kun,” L commented.
Light nodded. “Yeah,” he admitted, “but we aren’t the police. You’re dead and I’m a university student; hardly NPA material.”
He left out the fact that, until Kira had won over the Government and the NPA, he had wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a police officer. Now that they had truly succumbed to Kira’s corruption, though, he wanted nothing to do with them. He wanted nothing to do with Kira – other than to catch him and probably kill him, with any luck – and his twisted sense of justice and morality.
“That is very true,” L admitted thoughtfully. “However the basics are still the same. We start by gathering as much information as we can.”
Light nodded. “You had to have notes on him when you were running the investigation,” he said.
“Of course,” L said. “But they were deleted when Kira killed Watari.” An expression of sadness flickered briefly over his face, and Light thought that grief made him seem so much more human. “A copy might have survived elsewhere, provided that Kira had no access to our servers and can’t trace an IP address, but accessing it could be problematic. I have been dead for two years, the passwords might have changed.”
“We’ll start there anyway,” he said. He sat down as close to L as he could bear – mindful of the temperature more than anything else – and pulled his laptop onto his knees. It was already switched on.
L leaned over his shoulder as he typed. He gave directions on how to hack into the server – Light did have some hacking experience, which seemed to amuse L for some reason, but without L he wouldn’t have had a clue what he was meant to be hacking into. The files, thankfully, still existed, and Light felt a surge of relief when he hit the download button and began to copy them onto his computer. At least he wouldn’t have to repeat the years of work that L had no doubt put into the case originally. He could just pick up where L had left off.
While the folders downloaded, Light went to the kitchen to get coffee. Sick of instant coffee failing to keep him properly awake during the worst of L’s haunting, he had forked out for a proper coffee maker. Waiting for the machine to percolate, he allowed himself a moment to think things through properly. He wasn’t usually an irrational person, and going after Kira was definitely an irrational thing for him to do. But at the same time, Kira had killed his father and he had killed L who now spent his time haunting Light’s apartment. It was personal. Kira had killed two people close to Light – although admittedly, L had only become close to Light after he had died – and that was more than enough to make Light want revenge.
Kira hadn’t just screwed up the world; he had screwed up Light’s life and, selfish though it was, that was reason enough.
And, he supposed, at least he had help from the greatest detective in the world. Fair enough, L might have failed the first time, but now Kira had consigned himself to a ghost wanting to bring him down for the rest of his days. And surely Kira couldn’t kill someone who was already dead, could he?
The machine finished, and Light poured himself a large cup of coffee. On a whim he added a couple of spoonfuls of sugar – far more than he normally would have put in – and he headed back to the living room. Being around L was making him crave sweet things. Odd. When he’d first moved in, hadn’t his landlord said that the coroner had told him L had died of a diabetic coma? Possibly an inaccuracy, considering Kira’s involvement, but it was still quite…spooky.
Light shook his head clear of those thoughts and sat back down next to the dead man. A glance at his laptop told him that the files were still downloading – he silently thanked god for external hard-drives – and a glance at L told him that something was bothering the ghost. L was chewing on his thumb again and looking at the laptop as though it was about to explode, which was slightly disconcerting since he had a better idea of what was on those files than Light did.
“They’ll find you,” L said eventually. “If they’re still alive.”
“Who?” Light asked.
L didn’t reply. Light sighed and changed the subject. “So once we’ve got the files and read through them to catch up, what then? We keep gathering information?”
L nodded. “There will be two years worth of unevaluated data regarding the Kira case,” he said. “We are very behind, Light-kun.”
Light tactfully ignored the sudden familiarity. The ghost had seen him half naked before, not to mention that he’d watched him sleep. He supposed that by this point anyone would have thrown formality out of the window. Although he also suspected that anyone else would have gone to see a psychiatrist or an exorcist by this point.
“Right,” he said. “But what about this ‘they’ you mentioned. Surely, if They had access to your files as well, They would have been able to continue your work.”
It was, he thought privately, absolutely ridiculous. He could almost hear the capital letter tacked on in front of the word ‘They’ – the unknown entity that L seemed so sure would be able to find him. Then again, he also knew that L’s very existence was bordering on the ridiculous all on its own.
“Yes,” L murmured. “However, if my work was continued then it seems unlikely that they have succeeded, leading me to believe that they could be dead as well.” He waved the hand he wasn’t chewing on at his own transparent body.
Light swallowed. “More ghosts?” he asked. Then, “can ghosts track people through IP addresses and computer servers?”
“No,” L said. “My experiments have shown that my presence is limited to this apartment – the place of my death – and wherever you are, though I cannot stray from you by more than ten feet without being transported back here.”
“Transported how?” Light asked.
L gave an awkward shrugging motion that looked like he was trying to dislocate his own shoulder. “I do not know,” he said. “Until recently, I did not believe in the existence of ghosts, spectres or anything else of a supernatural nature.”
Light wondered if this had caused L to have some sort of identity crisis.
“However, shortly before my death, I realised that there was a twenty percent chance that I was wrong,” L continued. “Either that or Kira was sixty seven percent more insane than I had previously given him credit for.”
Light raised an eyebrow disbelievingly. It was a given, as far as he was concerned, that Kira was crazy. His god-complex was probably the least of his issues. Even so, Kira was definitely intelligent: he had to have been to have bested L.
“He experimented on prisoners,” L said. “In order to test how far he was able to control them prior to their deaths. In one of those experiments, he had one of them leave a message. Hidden in that message was another message, which said that ‘Gods of Death love apples’. At first, I was inclined to believe that the message was a game – a ploy to either worry me – or a sign of further psychological instability. Now, I’m not so sure.”
He looked down at his transparent body, and the pattern of the material covering the sofa’s cushions, which was visible through his bent knees. “After all,” he continued, “if I can exist, surely a Shinigami is not so far-fetched.”
There was a troubled frown on his face, and his thumb - if it had been real – was becoming in severe danger of being mauled. Light felt a surge of sympathy for L. It had probably been a right kick in the teeth to go through life so disbelieving of the supernatural, only to end up as a ghost.
His computer chose that moment to give a little beep, signalling that the file downloads had been completed. Light took a swig of his now cold coffee and pulled his laptop off the coffee table and onto his knees. He groaned at the sight of how many megabites of memory the files had taken up: he was in for a very long read.
“You’re very thorough, aren’t you,” he commented as he opened the first file.
There was no reply. Looking round at where L had been sitting, he found his place empty. Light scowled. “Dammit L, give me some warning before you do that!”
He could have sworn that he heard a faint, ghostly chuckle.
But L’s presence turned out to be completely unnecessary when it came to catching up on the work that he had done when he had been alive, which was something that Light felt more than grateful for, since L hadn’t shown his face since their conversation while the files had been downloading. Even so, Light found himself missing the ghost. Even though the ghastly cold – a side effect of L’s presence – was uncomfortable, L was a pleasant enough companion, and really, for such a popular boy, Light didn’t have all that many friends.
The realisation that the one person in the world that he could ever see himself truly becoming friends with was the ghost haunting his apartment made Light want to bang his head of something hard. Instead, he concentrated on L’s case files. It had the same headache inducing effect, after all.
He’d spent two week’s worth of his winter holiday locked in his apartment and living off coffee, tea – when he ran out of coffee – and whatever meals he could scrape together using the contents of his fridge and cupboards. By the time the second Saturday of his self-imposed imprisonment came around, he was onto his third day straight of eating cup ramen. But, he had managed to finish reading the files.
Just.
With his brain aching from the sheer amount of information he had had to absorb, and his body shot to hell by whatever E-Numbers had been in the countless amounts of cup ramen he had consumed – he didn’t think that he would ever be able to eat one for the rest of his life – he decided to go out. Grocery shopping, to be more exact, since the only things he had left were a packet of American cookies – called Oreos, or something daft like that – that had somehow managed to appear in his cupboard and a cup of ‘Oriental’ flavoured instant ramen – which he would rather die than even look at.
But after reading the files, even slipping on his shoes and jacket, and grabbing his keys and his wallet and heading down to the supermarket felt strange. It felt abnormal, somehow, as if the world had changed around him without him noticing; as if the sky had suddenly turned green and grass purple. Everything seemed to be in Technicolor, and everyone he passed seemed to stare at him suspiciously. He drifted aimlessly down the aisles when he arrived at the supermarket, and ended up staring at courgettes in complete incomprehension before a hand on his arm and the wrinkled face of an old lady peering concernedly up at him reminded him that no, courgettes did not hold the secrets to the universe.
“Are you alright, dear?” she asked.
He nodded. His tongue flicked out to wet his lips and he grimaced slightly at how odd they tasted – stale and suspiciously sweet. The result of far too much cup ramen, no doubt. “Yes,” he said. His voice was raspy, barely more than a croak, and he realised that it was the first time he’d spoken in two weeks. “I’m fine, thank you. I’m just…out of it.”
She nodded and gave his arm a sympathetic pat. “A hot meal and some sleep is what you need,” she said. “You looked like death warmed over.”
He said nothing about her over-familiarity. He just smiled, thanked her for her advice, and began to pile his basket full with fresh fruit and vegetables. He couldn’t even look in the direction of the aisle where the cup ramen and other dried foods were kept. The meat and fish counters were also raided, and he found himself looking forward to eating something that had some sort of nutritional value.
He should have been expecting it.
The door to his apartment was closed and locked, just as he’d left it, when he arrived back. But there was something off. As soon as he entered, the fine hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and for once it had absolutely nothing to do with L. His screaming instincts were proved correct when something cold, hard and metallic pressed non-too gently into the base of his skull. The door shut behind him with a click.
“Don’t move,” said a voice.
The accent was foreign, and probably European in origin, but Light couldn’t place it exactly. The voice was deep enough to be male, but young, and Light subconsciously categorised the speaker as a teenager. The metallic thing, he knew, was the barrel of a gun. He swallowed nervously. A hand, strong-fingered and clad in a leather glove, snatched Light’s door keys out of his grasp.
“Put the bags down,” the voice said. “Slowly.”
Light complied. Really, with a gun pressed against his nape, ready to blow his brains out, he wasn’t about to argue. Inwardly he cursed L for haunting him, cursed Kira for killing L in the first place, and cursed himself for getting involved with this insanity as he knew that there was no way that anything like this would have happened if he had remained out of the Kira case.
It looked like the mysterious ‘They’ had found him after all. Goody. Light had always planned on dying while assuaging his own curiosity…
“Good,” the voice said. “Now, walk forwards into your living room.”
From the corner of his eye, Light saw a pair of leather boots decorated with more straps and buckles than he had ever seen on an item of clothing ever sitting innocently in next to the umbrella stand. Next to them was a pair of white trainers far too small to be Light’s own. There were two of them. Wonderful.
But really, what sort of kidnappers/assailants conformed to the social niceties of the person they were threatening?
The teenaged kind, apparently, as when Light entered his sitting room, he was greeted by the sight of a small adolescent boy sitting on one of his chairs, twisting his fingers in his startlingly white hair. His skin was pale enough almost to blend into the white pyjamas he was wearing – the part of Light’s brain that hadn’t caught up with the fact that he was being held at gunpoint wondered what the hell the boy was doing wearing something like that in the middle of the day – and his eyes were an unnatural shade of green only seen on cats and coloured contact lenses. He was an albino, Light realised, Caucasian – fitting with his partner’s European origins – and he was studying Light with the same sort of intensity that Light had seen on L.
He was, all things considered, possibly the most intimidating teenager Light had ever laid eyes on.
“Yagami Light,” he said.
Not European, Light decided. There was a definite American twang to his Japanese, though it bordered closer to the kind of drawl usually found in the Southern States.
“I’m afraid you hold me at a disadvantage,” Light said, “as I have no idea who you are.”
The person behind him snorted. “Really? You managed to hack into our servers easily enough.”
For a second, the intense, creepy stare of those unnaturally green eyes flickered to a place just over Light’s right shoulder. Then it returned to Light, slamming into him with the force of the bullet train.
“You may call me N,” the boy said after a moment.
Cute, Light thought. He almost said it out loud. L. N. The only one missing was M, and Light was willing to bet on that being the guy with the gun. Instead he took a deep breath.
“You’re here about the Kira files,” he said.
N continued to stare at him for a moment, before he nodded slightly. “Only one person had access to that server with those passwords” – shit, why hadn’t L warned him that the passwords were personal? – “and he is dead.”
“Right,” Light said. “About that…”
“You are not Kira,” N said. “You don’t fit the profile, and as psychotic as Kira is, I do not believe that he would have been capable of killing his own father.”
Light wondered briefly how much of the case files N had actually read himself. It had come as something of a shock to Light to discover that, in the early stages of the case, he had been a suspect and had been placed under surveillance. Obviously L hadn’t found anything too incriminating as he hadn’t been dragged in for questioning, but the knowledge that there had been a five percent change that he was Kira had stunned him.
It was a good thing that L had been making himself scarce, as Light was fairly sure that he would have tried to hit him at that point.
But, apparently, either N hadn’t read that part or he was ignoring it for now. That was good. Light was under no illusions about how quickly he’d be dead if he said the wrong thing.
“So how did you, a student whose connection to L was tenuous at best, gain access to his passwords?”
And there was the fifty billion Yen question.
“I moved into his old apartment,” Light said.
Apparently N hadn’t been expecting that. He blinked, and his gaze flickered once more to the person standing behind Light. In response, the barrel of the gun pressed harder against the base of Light’s skull. He winced.
“This isn’t the time for jokes, moj drug,” the one with the gun said. Light had no idea what that last part had meant, or even what language it had been in – definitely not French or German – but it sounded intimidating. That, he supposed, had been the idea.
“This is going to sound crazy,” he said, “and it’s a long story. Can I at least sit down?” It felt ridiculous to ask that; he was in his own living room, with his own sofa and chairs, after all. “And can you tell this guy to stop stabbing me with a gun please? You already know that I’m not Kira.”
N hesitated, then nodded. The pressure on the back of Light’s neck lessened, and then vanished completely, and he felt himself relax. He took a shakey breath, then determinedly crossed the room to the sofa and sat down. Sitting didn’t stop his legs from shaking, nor did it lessen his desire to run screaming, but it felt…better to be sitting in the same spot that he’d spent the past two weeks. His laptop still lay on the coffee table directly in front of him, next to his tea cup.
He looked up at N again, and saw that the guy with the gun had joined him. They were as different as night and day. The one with the gun – and he was still holding it, tapping the barrel gently against his thigh – sat on the arm of the chair N was sitting in. He was dressed entirely in black leather, with a Catholic rosary – silver with beads made from some kind of red wood – hanging around his neck. There was a second rosary, one in the form of a silver bracelet fastened around his right wrist, the tiny crucifix standing out against the black leather of his glove. He had shoulder length, golden blond hair and the strangest colour eyes Light had ever seen. They were amber, but unlike N’s eyes, they appeared to be natural.
“Speak,” he commanded, and Light glared at him.
“Right,” he said. “L. Well, like I said…”
And so, he began to tell them how he had met L, and of how L had helped him hack into their server to access the case files, all the while painfully aware of the growing looks of incredulity on their faces.
At least if I die, he thought, I won’t be alone in here. The thought gave him a sudden and macabre urge to laugh. He resisted; he really didn’t think that it would be appreciated.
“You think this is funny?” the blond asked. He looked – and sounded – pissed off, and the look N was giving him wasn’t exactly inspiring the warm and fuzzies either.
“Not really,” Light said.
The electricity chose that exact moment to cut out.
