Characters: L Lawliet and Zenjirou Kasai
Location: Death City's jail
Rating: PG?
Time: Jan. 3rd, early morning
Description: Though L hasn't outed himself as L, or even as a detective, pyromania is fascinating to him. He can't resist the intrigue that comes with visiting an incarcerated fire-starter and asking just a few questions.
It wasn't difficult for L to get up early. He hadn't slept in several days, and it was simply a matter of glancing at the clock and noticing that the wee hours were upon him. After fixing another cup of coffee and an early morning ice cream cone, he was awake (if twitchy) and ready to face the day.
For once since leaving his world and the Kira case, he felt like he actually knew what he was going to do with it. There had been a fire a couple days prior, seemingly set by a psychopath who was currently incarcerated. L had some experience with firestarters; they intrigued him psychologically and he could do with a rush of nostalgia not provided by his current pair of successors-slash-housemates. Though he was glad to see them, though the familiarity was heartening, it was stressful to live up to the title they had grown up revering while he couldn't hide behind the mystery and safety his world had provided him. Here, in Death City, there was no trust fund, no Watari, and no consistent casework. The people who knew who he was, outside the small circle of "his people", would want to either kill him or exploit that fact through extortion. The people who didn't know would never hire a wiry, wide-eyed young man with wild hair and baggy clothes and inexplicable habits and mannerisms that were a far cry from professional.
He wanted something new to add to his secret casefile on Death City, the one that was 450 pages and hidden in the air vent in his apartment's bathroom in Casualty Communal. So he was going to go see the firestarter as a visitor and see if he couldn't be taken seriously by the only sort of person he actually knew how to handle. Through nature or nurture, L had never really managed to learn how to interact appropriately with normal, well-adjusted individuals. The psychos, the criminally violent and insane and the raucous cacophony of their laughter and insults... he'd grown up dealing with them. If he'd grown twisted as a result of his early, intense and prodigious work, at least he'd grown effective and efficient.
No one at the station seemed to suspect L of being there to spring the prisoner. He submitted to a brief and noninvasive search for picks and keys, and was shortly thereafter admitted. He didn't seem to belong, the same way L just generally didn't belong, regardless of where he was. He passed by the barred cells, treading softly with shuffling steps, a pale, slouched figure with strangely lightless eyes.
He stopped in front of one cell. He had been told that it was the correct one, and recalling the scarred man's appearance in the video accompanying the crime, he knew it to be. He wound the long fingers of one pale, thin hand around the bars at the edge of the cell, peering owlishly at the prisoner inside and waiting to be noticed.