DN -- Chocolate Always Loves You Back II: Trouble
Title: Chocolate Always Loves You Back
Chapter: 2. Trouble
Fandom: Death Note
Pairing: Light/L
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,138
Warnings: AU
Summary: Light Yagami is not having a good Valentine's Day. Between the new guy with the candy fetish, his partner, Matsuda, and the unsettling new case... the chocolate may be the only thing that loves him at all.
Author's Note: Oh, my God, an update in TWO SHORT WEEKS!! .../fail XD
II - TROUBLE
The blond looked interestedly at the wrapper cradled in Light’s palm, cold blue eyes lighting up.
“Where’d you get the chocolate?” he wanted to know.
“There-” the redhead supplied, motioning towards Lawliet’s desk.
“Jackpot” was the verdict, and the blond was off like a thoroughbred from the starting gate, his pair of sidekicks not far behind.
Light shot a sardonic look at Mogi, who raised broad shoulders in an eloquent shrug.
Sighing inwardly, Light followed the closest thing they had so far to a lead, pitching the stupid foil into someone’s wastebasket as he strode by.
He was a little curious as to whether the blond’s given name was “Chaos” or “Trouble.”
Chaos-Trouble was, as Light approached, quite contentedly engrossed in the arduous process of cramming Valentine’s Day chocolates into his mouth. His companions were less hastily following suit, and Light almost literally stumbled as the thought struck him-they were eating as though they hadn’t for a while.
This wasn’t what he’d signed up for when he got his badge.
All right, maybe it was, but there hadn’t been anything in the contract about snarky starving children becoming crucial to your investigation. The rule book had managed to leave that part out.
It was a grave oversight.
“Yeah,” Trouble was announcing to a receptive Lawliet through a mouthful of chocolate, “we’re here ’cause of Sander.”
The redhead murmured in agreement around a lollipop. “We kinda knew him, so…”
The white-haired boy was shifting his weight, looking like he didn’t want to be on his feet, and stacking the conversation hearts that he had lined up by color. “As much as we know anyone,” he contributed.
Lawliet was dangling a familiar piece of case file by its corner, which he’d trapped between his first two fingers. He admired it bemusedly as he monitored the systematic exhaustion of his candy supply.
“The whole situation sounds very unpleasant,” he noted.
Light was pretty sure Lawliet was the most unpleasant thing in this room.
Pointedly, he cleared his throat, and Lawliet pretended to notice him for the first time.
“Your evidence is hungry, Yagami-kun,” Lawliet remarked.
Light automatically moved to ask the obvious question, but he remembered in the nick of time that his identification was all over the page of the case report that trailed from Lawliet’s grip. The guy was observant, but he wasn’t a psychic.
Which was nice, since Light really didn’t think he could have handled that today.
Lawliet’s decision to tack on the honorific, however, was tantamount to plunging a hot needle into Light’s skin-it had been almost five years since he had moved from Tokyo to northern California, and the American immigration laws’ red tape was doing an excellent job of reinforcing his Outsider status without any help from uppity up-and-comers who didn’t like his accent.
He resolved to take the high road and turned to Mogi. “Can you get Matsuda?” he asked.
Honestly, Mogi should have punched him in the kidney and told him where to shove it-or at least refused to go until he said “please”-but the guy just offered a good-natured nod and complied.
If only everyone was so kind.
Light turned reluctantly to the trio of ravenous dynamos.
“I’m going to need to speak to all of you in the witness room,” he informed them.
Color-Coder and the Aviator blinked at him unconcernedly; Trouble ostensibly ignored him until another chocolate wrapper had bounced off of the wastebasket rim.
“What for?” he demanded. “What’re you gonna give us?”
Light Yagami was about to bargain with a homeless, chocoholic, prepubescent spitfire of questionable sanity.
This just wasn’t his day.
“A place to live,” Lawliet answered before Light had a chance to speak.
Light was getting awfully tired of staring incredulously at this guy, but it didn’t look like he’d be stopping any time soon.
“Are you-” he began. He didn’t care how wretched and malnourished these pitiable specimens of humanity were; they were not setting their filthy feet in his apartment.
“My uncle has been lonely lately,” Lawliet interrupted calmly, “now that I’ve finished school and commenced a full-time career-empty nest and so on. I imagine he would be delighted to acquire a few new troublemakers.”
“He must be quite the masochist,” Light muttered.
“Or he actually cares about other human beings,” Lawliet returned idly.
Light was not going to rise to that either.
Well, not in front of a newly-arrived Matsuda and three unnaturally-attentive children.
What was with those kids, anyway?
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Matsuda greeted the boys, holding a hand out to Trouble to shake. “I’m Touta Matsuda, and I’m hoping you can help us find out what happened to Sander.”
Warily, the blond accepted Matsuda’s hand. “I’m Mello,” he said. “And this is Matt and Near.”
Matsuda finished introductions and pushed his hands into his pockets. “Do you think you can help us?” he inquired.
The three exchanged meaningful glances.
“Only,” Mello, ever the spokesman, declared, “if we get to go home with him.” A skinny finger stabbed towards the personification of disorder on the other side of the candy bowl, a SweeTart heart raised halfway to his mouth.
For the first time, Light glanced over at Aizawa sitting at the adjoining desk. The man had one hand over his mouth, and barely-contained mirth danced like fireworks in his eyes. Never in the record of human history had anyone had to try so hard not to laugh.
Light couldn’t blame him-this was a farce.
-
It was very aggravating that the boys’ uniformly unwavering eyes made him feel like he had come before a panel of unsympathetic judges-it was kind of supposed to be the other way around.
They sat in a row across the table, Mello still popping chocolates like a drug addict (a comparison that made Light shiver despite himself-for who could say what a few years might let chocolate become?), Matt having moved on to his third lollipop, and Near with one knee drawn to his chest as he crafted strange mosaic-like designs with Mello’s discarded wrappers.
Light folded his hands on the tabletop, trying not to notice Matsuda pacing thoughtfully behind him. The pair of them were a textbook case of Good Cop/Bad Cop. Or at least Good Cop/Irritable and Impatient Cop, which generally turned out to mean Bad Cop in the long run.
He really needed to work on that.
As it was, he tried to look Mello in the eyes, which was not as easy task given that the boy was avoiding his gaze. Eye contact, like arguments, agreements, and the tango, took two participants.
“You knew Sander?” he prompted.
“That’s a leading question,” Mello decided.
“This isn’t a courtroom,” Light informed him. “You’re not even witnesses, per se, and we’re not holding you-you came here of your own volition, you may recall. We’re just trying to figure out why someone would do something like this-and who did, and how we can take them into custody and make this city that much safer for everyone.”
Matsuda clapped him on the shoulder. “This, friends,” he declaimed, “is why Mister Light Yagami has always dreamed of a career in law enforcement. He was pursuing justice before he was potty-trained. Nursery school criminals fled in terror.”
Mello snickered, Near smiled faintly, and Matt gave a nervous giggle.
There was their in.
Damn if Matsuda wasn’t good at this.
“Matt,” Light’s cheerful partner went on, “I hear you were friends with Sander, is that right?”
Matt toyed with his lollipop. “Kinda. Just… it’s mostly small groups out there, you know. It’s the three of us, and Sander hangs out with other guys, but we run into them sometimes, and we’ve worked the crowds together with them before. Sander’s-Sander was-real friendly, so-y’know.”
Near bulldozed an elaborate foil geometry with both hands, scattering the pieces, and then delicately began to rearrange them, one hand rising to twirl a finger into his pale hair.
“Sander is short for Lysander,” he volunteered. “Morris is the surname. He told me once. People tell me things.”
People probably did. Near looked fantastically harmless, so much so that it completely concealed what Light gauged as a very considerable intelligence indeed.
“Can I have more chocolate?” Mello cut in, dropping a handful of wrappers in front of Near.
Light opened his mouth to ask just how many hollow limbs the boy possessed, but Matsuda preempted him by tossing more heart-shaped chocolates onto the table.
“Don’t make yourself sick,” he cautioned. “They’re not going anywhere, so there’s no rush, okay?”
Mello chewed on his lip, sizing Matsuda up critically.
“What’s your game?” he wanted to know.
Matsuda grinned. “What,” he responded, “a guy can’t just believe in mankind?”
Mello raised an eyebrow.
Matsuda resumed a search of his pockets and turned up four more chocolates and two lollipops, which he set on the table by their predecessors. “Guy also gets a bonus if he figures it out faster,” he explained.
Matt frowned, and then he muttered, “C’mon, Mel.”
Mello bristled. “Shut up, Matt,” he shot back.
Light seized the trailing thread.
“What is it, Matt?” he pressed gently. “If it’s important, we need to know.”
Matt squirmed under Mello’s glare and said nothing.
“Mello saw Sander’s body before the police did,” Near piped up distractedly, maneuvering a scrap of gold foil into place.
“I hate you!” Mello snarled.
“Which you wouldn’t’ve stopped doing if I’d stayed quiet,” Near noted.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Matsuda interjected before Mello could construct any weapons of retaliation out of candy wrappers.
There was a pause.
“Who would’ve listened?” Matt asked into it, smiling a little.
“Mello was scouting around the restaurants and the alleys that day,” Near told them idly. “Matt and I stayed close to home with the hats.”
For once, it was hard for Light to extract the relevant case information from the biography. The image Near presented-the thought of three thin, dirty boys dividing the labor and defending their turf, begging passersby and raiding trashcans for bits and pieces to cobble together into survival… It was Near’s matter-of-factness that unsettled him most of all-this was habit for them. It was natural. It was systematic, and it was their world.
They wouldn’t have wanted his pity, but they would have used it against him in a second.
“But later you got scared,” Matsuda filled in quietly, “and today you came here.”
Mello scowled. “Wouldn’t you?” he demanded.
Matsuda smiled sadly. “If I saw a little boy lying in an alleyway, dead, bruised almost beyond recognition, and cut open from collarbone to pelvis? Yes, Mello, I would.”
Mello was a little paler now, stranded in the flat glow of the fluorescent light.
“I just didn’t want it to happen to any of us,” he muttered, “is all.”
“You made the right decision,” Light assured him. “What do you know about Sander? Did you see anything unusual around him, or anyone leaving when you found the corpse? Did he have enemies?”
“No,” Matt murmured, fidgeting. “Nobody really cares about us, you know? I mean-sometimes people get mad at us, like it’s our fault we make them feel bad for having money or food or a house or whatever, but we really don’t bother anybody.”
Light looked to Matsuda, who shrugged.
“But no one really bothers you, either, do they?” Light hazarded. “Is it possible Sander was somewhere he shouldn’t have been and saw something he wasn’t supposed to see?”
“If that was the case,” Near replied, eyes on his project, “the mutilation could have been a distraction.”
Matsuda drummed his fingers on his chin. “When do we get the autopsy, Light?”
Light glanced at his watch and noticed out of the corner of his eye that Mello’s gaze was on it.
“Should be within the hour,” he answered.
Matsuda sighed. “All right.” He set his hands on the table and addressed the boys again. “So you’re going to stay with Lawliet?”
There was a great deal of emphatic nodding.
Matsuda had another question: “Do you want to help us solve this case?”
Light stared at him.
“Matsuda,” he protested, “they’re children!”
“Children,” Matsuda replied, “who know the ups and downs of this city better than we do. We’ve got to use our resources, Light.”
The triumvirate was consulting, silently again.
That was just creepy.
Matt and Near sat back to let Mello speak for them.
“Since we’ll be at Lawliet’s anyway,” he declared, “you can come ask us about stuff.”
Light fought the urge to roll his eyes.
“Or,” Mello suggested, “he could bring us here with him every day.”
Light raked his hands through his hair, trying not to give up on humanity entirely.
There was no winning with these people.
[Chapter I] [Chapter III]
Chapter: 2. Trouble
Fandom: Death Note
Pairing: Light/L
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,138
Warnings: AU
Summary: Light Yagami is not having a good Valentine's Day. Between the new guy with the candy fetish, his partner, Matsuda, and the unsettling new case... the chocolate may be the only thing that loves him at all.
Author's Note: Oh, my God, an update in TWO SHORT WEEKS!! .../fail XD
II - TROUBLE
The blond looked interestedly at the wrapper cradled in Light’s palm, cold blue eyes lighting up.
“Where’d you get the chocolate?” he wanted to know.
“There-” the redhead supplied, motioning towards Lawliet’s desk.
“Jackpot” was the verdict, and the blond was off like a thoroughbred from the starting gate, his pair of sidekicks not far behind.
Light shot a sardonic look at Mogi, who raised broad shoulders in an eloquent shrug.
Sighing inwardly, Light followed the closest thing they had so far to a lead, pitching the stupid foil into someone’s wastebasket as he strode by.
He was a little curious as to whether the blond’s given name was “Chaos” or “Trouble.”
Chaos-Trouble was, as Light approached, quite contentedly engrossed in the arduous process of cramming Valentine’s Day chocolates into his mouth. His companions were less hastily following suit, and Light almost literally stumbled as the thought struck him-they were eating as though they hadn’t for a while.
This wasn’t what he’d signed up for when he got his badge.
All right, maybe it was, but there hadn’t been anything in the contract about snarky starving children becoming crucial to your investigation. The rule book had managed to leave that part out.
It was a grave oversight.
“Yeah,” Trouble was announcing to a receptive Lawliet through a mouthful of chocolate, “we’re here ’cause of Sander.”
The redhead murmured in agreement around a lollipop. “We kinda knew him, so…”
The white-haired boy was shifting his weight, looking like he didn’t want to be on his feet, and stacking the conversation hearts that he had lined up by color. “As much as we know anyone,” he contributed.
Lawliet was dangling a familiar piece of case file by its corner, which he’d trapped between his first two fingers. He admired it bemusedly as he monitored the systematic exhaustion of his candy supply.
“The whole situation sounds very unpleasant,” he noted.
Light was pretty sure Lawliet was the most unpleasant thing in this room.
Pointedly, he cleared his throat, and Lawliet pretended to notice him for the first time.
“Your evidence is hungry, Yagami-kun,” Lawliet remarked.
Light automatically moved to ask the obvious question, but he remembered in the nick of time that his identification was all over the page of the case report that trailed from Lawliet’s grip. The guy was observant, but he wasn’t a psychic.
Which was nice, since Light really didn’t think he could have handled that today.
Lawliet’s decision to tack on the honorific, however, was tantamount to plunging a hot needle into Light’s skin-it had been almost five years since he had moved from Tokyo to northern California, and the American immigration laws’ red tape was doing an excellent job of reinforcing his Outsider status without any help from uppity up-and-comers who didn’t like his accent.
He resolved to take the high road and turned to Mogi. “Can you get Matsuda?” he asked.
Honestly, Mogi should have punched him in the kidney and told him where to shove it-or at least refused to go until he said “please”-but the guy just offered a good-natured nod and complied.
If only everyone was so kind.
Light turned reluctantly to the trio of ravenous dynamos.
“I’m going to need to speak to all of you in the witness room,” he informed them.
Color-Coder and the Aviator blinked at him unconcernedly; Trouble ostensibly ignored him until another chocolate wrapper had bounced off of the wastebasket rim.
“What for?” he demanded. “What’re you gonna give us?”
Light Yagami was about to bargain with a homeless, chocoholic, prepubescent spitfire of questionable sanity.
This just wasn’t his day.
“A place to live,” Lawliet answered before Light had a chance to speak.
Light was getting awfully tired of staring incredulously at this guy, but it didn’t look like he’d be stopping any time soon.
“Are you-” he began. He didn’t care how wretched and malnourished these pitiable specimens of humanity were; they were not setting their filthy feet in his apartment.
“My uncle has been lonely lately,” Lawliet interrupted calmly, “now that I’ve finished school and commenced a full-time career-empty nest and so on. I imagine he would be delighted to acquire a few new troublemakers.”
“He must be quite the masochist,” Light muttered.
“Or he actually cares about other human beings,” Lawliet returned idly.
Light was not going to rise to that either.
Well, not in front of a newly-arrived Matsuda and three unnaturally-attentive children.
What was with those kids, anyway?
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Matsuda greeted the boys, holding a hand out to Trouble to shake. “I’m Touta Matsuda, and I’m hoping you can help us find out what happened to Sander.”
Warily, the blond accepted Matsuda’s hand. “I’m Mello,” he said. “And this is Matt and Near.”
Matsuda finished introductions and pushed his hands into his pockets. “Do you think you can help us?” he inquired.
The three exchanged meaningful glances.
“Only,” Mello, ever the spokesman, declared, “if we get to go home with him.” A skinny finger stabbed towards the personification of disorder on the other side of the candy bowl, a SweeTart heart raised halfway to his mouth.
For the first time, Light glanced over at Aizawa sitting at the adjoining desk. The man had one hand over his mouth, and barely-contained mirth danced like fireworks in his eyes. Never in the record of human history had anyone had to try so hard not to laugh.
Light couldn’t blame him-this was a farce.
-
It was very aggravating that the boys’ uniformly unwavering eyes made him feel like he had come before a panel of unsympathetic judges-it was kind of supposed to be the other way around.
They sat in a row across the table, Mello still popping chocolates like a drug addict (a comparison that made Light shiver despite himself-for who could say what a few years might let chocolate become?), Matt having moved on to his third lollipop, and Near with one knee drawn to his chest as he crafted strange mosaic-like designs with Mello’s discarded wrappers.
Light folded his hands on the tabletop, trying not to notice Matsuda pacing thoughtfully behind him. The pair of them were a textbook case of Good Cop/Bad Cop. Or at least Good Cop/Irritable and Impatient Cop, which generally turned out to mean Bad Cop in the long run.
He really needed to work on that.
As it was, he tried to look Mello in the eyes, which was not as easy task given that the boy was avoiding his gaze. Eye contact, like arguments, agreements, and the tango, took two participants.
“You knew Sander?” he prompted.
“That’s a leading question,” Mello decided.
“This isn’t a courtroom,” Light informed him. “You’re not even witnesses, per se, and we’re not holding you-you came here of your own volition, you may recall. We’re just trying to figure out why someone would do something like this-and who did, and how we can take them into custody and make this city that much safer for everyone.”
Matsuda clapped him on the shoulder. “This, friends,” he declaimed, “is why Mister Light Yagami has always dreamed of a career in law enforcement. He was pursuing justice before he was potty-trained. Nursery school criminals fled in terror.”
Mello snickered, Near smiled faintly, and Matt gave a nervous giggle.
There was their in.
Damn if Matsuda wasn’t good at this.
“Matt,” Light’s cheerful partner went on, “I hear you were friends with Sander, is that right?”
Matt toyed with his lollipop. “Kinda. Just… it’s mostly small groups out there, you know. It’s the three of us, and Sander hangs out with other guys, but we run into them sometimes, and we’ve worked the crowds together with them before. Sander’s-Sander was-real friendly, so-y’know.”
Near bulldozed an elaborate foil geometry with both hands, scattering the pieces, and then delicately began to rearrange them, one hand rising to twirl a finger into his pale hair.
“Sander is short for Lysander,” he volunteered. “Morris is the surname. He told me once. People tell me things.”
People probably did. Near looked fantastically harmless, so much so that it completely concealed what Light gauged as a very considerable intelligence indeed.
“Can I have more chocolate?” Mello cut in, dropping a handful of wrappers in front of Near.
Light opened his mouth to ask just how many hollow limbs the boy possessed, but Matsuda preempted him by tossing more heart-shaped chocolates onto the table.
“Don’t make yourself sick,” he cautioned. “They’re not going anywhere, so there’s no rush, okay?”
Mello chewed on his lip, sizing Matsuda up critically.
“What’s your game?” he wanted to know.
Matsuda grinned. “What,” he responded, “a guy can’t just believe in mankind?”
Mello raised an eyebrow.
Matsuda resumed a search of his pockets and turned up four more chocolates and two lollipops, which he set on the table by their predecessors. “Guy also gets a bonus if he figures it out faster,” he explained.
Matt frowned, and then he muttered, “C’mon, Mel.”
Mello bristled. “Shut up, Matt,” he shot back.
Light seized the trailing thread.
“What is it, Matt?” he pressed gently. “If it’s important, we need to know.”
Matt squirmed under Mello’s glare and said nothing.
“Mello saw Sander’s body before the police did,” Near piped up distractedly, maneuvering a scrap of gold foil into place.
“I hate you!” Mello snarled.
“Which you wouldn’t’ve stopped doing if I’d stayed quiet,” Near noted.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Matsuda interjected before Mello could construct any weapons of retaliation out of candy wrappers.
There was a pause.
“Who would’ve listened?” Matt asked into it, smiling a little.
“Mello was scouting around the restaurants and the alleys that day,” Near told them idly. “Matt and I stayed close to home with the hats.”
For once, it was hard for Light to extract the relevant case information from the biography. The image Near presented-the thought of three thin, dirty boys dividing the labor and defending their turf, begging passersby and raiding trashcans for bits and pieces to cobble together into survival… It was Near’s matter-of-factness that unsettled him most of all-this was habit for them. It was natural. It was systematic, and it was their world.
They wouldn’t have wanted his pity, but they would have used it against him in a second.
“But later you got scared,” Matsuda filled in quietly, “and today you came here.”
Mello scowled. “Wouldn’t you?” he demanded.
Matsuda smiled sadly. “If I saw a little boy lying in an alleyway, dead, bruised almost beyond recognition, and cut open from collarbone to pelvis? Yes, Mello, I would.”
Mello was a little paler now, stranded in the flat glow of the fluorescent light.
“I just didn’t want it to happen to any of us,” he muttered, “is all.”
“You made the right decision,” Light assured him. “What do you know about Sander? Did you see anything unusual around him, or anyone leaving when you found the corpse? Did he have enemies?”
“No,” Matt murmured, fidgeting. “Nobody really cares about us, you know? I mean-sometimes people get mad at us, like it’s our fault we make them feel bad for having money or food or a house or whatever, but we really don’t bother anybody.”
Light looked to Matsuda, who shrugged.
“But no one really bothers you, either, do they?” Light hazarded. “Is it possible Sander was somewhere he shouldn’t have been and saw something he wasn’t supposed to see?”
“If that was the case,” Near replied, eyes on his project, “the mutilation could have been a distraction.”
Matsuda drummed his fingers on his chin. “When do we get the autopsy, Light?”
Light glanced at his watch and noticed out of the corner of his eye that Mello’s gaze was on it.
“Should be within the hour,” he answered.
Matsuda sighed. “All right.” He set his hands on the table and addressed the boys again. “So you’re going to stay with Lawliet?”
There was a great deal of emphatic nodding.
Matsuda had another question: “Do you want to help us solve this case?”
Light stared at him.
“Matsuda,” he protested, “they’re children!”
“Children,” Matsuda replied, “who know the ups and downs of this city better than we do. We’ve got to use our resources, Light.”
The triumvirate was consulting, silently again.
That was just creepy.
Matt and Near sat back to let Mello speak for them.
“Since we’ll be at Lawliet’s anyway,” he declared, “you can come ask us about stuff.”
Light fought the urge to roll his eyes.
“Or,” Mello suggested, “he could bring us here with him every day.”
Light raked his hands through his hair, trying not to give up on humanity entirely.
There was no winning with these people.
[Chapter I] [Chapter III]