Chapter Text
There are so many people dancing and fucking in Mello’s million ducat mansion that the temperature inside is at least ten degrees hotter than outside. Light imagines all the dancers, in their various states of undress, stampeding off the balcony into the canal below. She images the heat from their sweaty bodies would be so incredible it would boil the water in the street dry. Even the champagne is hot.
She would be outside, fanning her naked tits under the moon, if she didn’t have work to do. Alas, there is always work to do in the Silver Ring.
“Isn’t black for mourning?” Ryuk asks.
She snorts up all seven feet of him to look into his sunken socket eyes and his lipless, toothy, smile. “Black suits me.” She gestures her fan in a wide motion over herself. The dress is black yes, but her sleeves luxuriously fall from her shoulders and there’s a slit running almost to her hip on either side of the skirt. With her black mask and her thick copper hair pinned up in curls she looks delicious.
“Suits you?” Ryuk presses.
“Suits the diamonds anyway.” She smirks, snapping her fan shut and tapping the bone handle against the fist sized diamond on her clavicle set amongst its sisters.
Ryuk snorts. “Have you seen him watching you?”
“Mello or Near?” She is careful not to glance around the room.
“First names?”
“We are ever so close,” she mocks, “me and the boys.”
“I see, I see,” he snickers, “well then it’ll excite you to know you have a new suitor.”
“Oh?” She watches his inhuman face though the tips of her ears start to turn red with interest. “Does he look like he wants me dead as much as Near and Mello?”
“I can’t tell.” Ryuk hums. “His mask is almost as good as yours.”
Light unfurls her fan again, plucking a glass of champagne off the tray as the waiter passes. He starts to move away but— “Oi,” she snaps, “where are you fucking manners?”
The waiter stalls, eyes wide with an animal fear.
“My friend too.” Light cocks her chin towards Ryuk.
The waiter looks up, swallowing so hard you can see every vein in his throat and offers the tray of glasses to Ryuk. He’s staking hard, but trying not to, and the glasses are tinkling against each other. Ryuk takes one, with a little bow, and Light starts to explain—
“He’s from the Golden Ring, you know? He—” The waiter is already running away. “He’s the Royal Commissioner!” Light hollers after the fleeing back of the man like the words are a hex.
“It’s no use.” Ryuk sips his drink. “Don’t mind them.”
“Absolute bullshit.” Light fans herself in grand exaggerated motions. “Now, what’s he look like?”
“Is that why you lubricated me?”
“Call it payment.”
“Don’t give me pennies for real work.” Ryuk laughs, like a pig. His face contorting lewdly enough that some of the humans nearby them shift a little further away, or as best they can in the crowded ballroom.
“Have you been able to flag another waiter tonight?”
“Hmm, no.”
“Then tell me about my suitor.”
“White suit, white mask, black hair, black eyes.” Ryuk sighs.
“We match.” Light realizes.
“A cute little pair.”
“And he’s watching me?” Light sips.
“Even now.”
“For how long?”
“Since before I spotted him. I can tell.”
“Old or young?”
“Middling, handsome though.”
“What kind of eyes?”
“How should I know?”
“Can’t tell from here?” Light taunts. “Going blind?”
“I told you; his mask is almost as good as yours.”
Light runs her tongue along her teeth in her mouth. “And you don’t recognize him?”
“I’ve never seen this man before in my life.” Ryuk says. “But everyone who’s anyone is here tonight.”
“Yes, but you have to be someone to get in. Which means we should recognize him.”
“You haven’t even looked at him.”
“No,” Light agrees. “But I can tell where he is.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Then why has my back been to him since you got your drink?”
Ryuk ’s grin widens impossibly, and he laughs. “I love you. You are just—”
“Yes, yes, I know. Stop smiling.” Light takes another sip of her champagne.
“You should talk to him.”
“Why? So you can watch?”
“I want to know who he is. It’ll be fun.”
“You can’t die. I can die.” Light reminds.
“He must be smart if he knows who you are without being introduced.”
“I’m not in disguise tonight.”
“You’re still wearing a mask.” Ryuk says.
“Hardly, it’s just wire. Usually, it’s skin and magic. Nine millimeters thick. This is nothing.”
“All the same, he’s watching you.”
“Maybe he thinks I’m pretty?”
“Lots of pretty shit here.”
“The diamonds then. He wants to rob me.”
“Not with eyes like that he doesn’t.”
“Then it is lust.”
“You’re just teasing me now,” Ryuk slouches over her. “Blue balling me with this bullshit when we both know he’s something else.”
“I’m stalling cause that something else probably means assassin.” Light groans.
“Near wouldn’t hire men to kill you, too noble, and Mello needs you.”
“Plenty of other deep pockets in the Silver Ring.”
“Go, go,” Ryuk shoos her, like a cat.
Light snaps her fan against his knuckles, making him yelp, but turns away from him towards the staircase. The mezzanine looms over the ballroom and even at the fringes of the crowd the ballroom is almost too packed to move. Light darts through the crowd, in her personal bubble of unimpeached space, gliding between bodies and in a few moments she’s up the stairs.
Leaning into the railing on her forearms she puffs up her tits in her dress as she slouches next to him. “It’s rude to stare, don’t you know?”
The man is handsome. That much is true. There’s something a little gaunt about his pallor, like a corpse, but his hair is thick and his eyes are glistening with wicked magic. He has lightning inside him. A kind of fury that sighs off the shoulders of his white suit, running a wire down his straight back. He’s taller than her, older than her, but so magnetic she wants to rest her temple on his shoulder.
“I didn’t want to interrupt your conversation.” He says, eyes settled on her. They have followed her the whole way here and now they ignore the heaving ballroom entirely.
“So you gawked at me instead?” She puts her chin on her knuckles, inviting him to look down her dress. His eyes skirt down, as she expects, but his smirk is strange.
“I suspect you like people looking at you.”
“It’s nicer when a lady knows a man’s name.”
“A man?” He quirks.
She hesitates. “Are you not--?”
“No, no, I can be a man.” He declares. “It’s all the same to me.”
She frowns but only because she doesn’t want to admit a turn of phrase like that makes her more comfortable in this queer man’s company. She pushes up into her hands, leaving her glass on the railing, and turns her whole body towards him. “I don’t know you,” she says.
“It would be strange if you did.”
“I know everyone who’s anyone,” she continues, “and only people how matter are here tonight.”
“That’s not entirely true.” He flicks his hand over the crowd. “Fifteen waiters, Thirty-six guards—”
“Twelve musicians and two cats.” She sighs. “What’s your point?”
“They’re here too.”
“They’re not wearing a mask and a thousand ducat suit.” She challenges, walking her fingers along the railing in front of him.
“The cellist has a lovely doublet. That’s at least two hundred ducats, don’t you think?” He grins at her, eyes never leaving her face, but she’s getting sick of how tense this dance is making her.
“Do you want to go somewhere? Somewhere quiet?”
“So you can hypnotize me?” He replies.
She tenses. “I don’t hypnotize people.”
“No, I imagine not,” he sighs. “Magic, yes?”
“Something like that.” She huffs, getting bold enough to slide her arm through his. She presses up against his side and he looks down into her face with a delighted smirk. Like she’s a joke. The mirth in his eyes, the pleasure, makes her want to claw his face. She’s no one’s joke.
“Angry, confused,” he murmurs, “and you just push harder.”
“What’s the other option?”
“It’s called a fight or flight response.”
“My responses work perfectly.” She clicks her tongue against her teeth.
He chuckles. “Let’s go somewhere quiet.” He gathers up her hand and his whole body radiates cold in a way that makes the sweaty heat of the party slide away instantly.
He leads her, arm in arm, away from the music. There are plenty of party goers rolling around in Mello’s private sitting rooms and bedrooms. Naked party games are being played in some rooms, roulette in others, moaning and fucking in most.
The white mask takes Light to an empty room, ushering her inside with a hand on the small of her back and clicks the door shut behind them. Throwing herself on the loveseat she curls up on her side, skirt tangled around her legs, fingers playing with the curl of her left earlobe where a tear drop earing dangles on a silver chain. She toys with it, testing how the low light hits it, as the white mask sits by her feet.
“You’re a strange man.” She says.
“You seem to like those.” He leans back into his hands, her calves along his lower back where he sits on the end of the loveseat.
“If you want something you should spit it out.”
“What do you think I want?”
“If you want me dead, you’re doing an awful job of it.”
“We’re alone, aren’t we?” He remarks, his icy fingers tapping lazily at the ball of her ankle above the strap of her heels.
She curls her legs a little, struck still by how painfully cold her is. He makes note of her recoil and rests his whole hand on her ankle as if to test her.
She looks him in the eye, refusing to withdraw further and he smiles.
“Do you want to hire me for something?” She challenges. “Or are you just wasting my time?”
“I would like to hire you, please.” He pats her ankle.
She frowns. “Can you afford me?”
“No details? Your first question is money?”
“Whatever you need I can get.” She assures. “All that matters is if it’s worth getting it for you.”
He chuckles. “I can afford you.”
“Mello Kheel is my current employer.” She continues. “He pays me a thousand ducats an hour. Can you match that?”
“I’ll double it.” He says.
She snorts. “Now you think I’m a joke. If you were that wealthy, I’d know you name. I’d know all your secrets. I’d know you intimately.”
“Yes, that’s what you do, isn’t it? Buy and sell secrets.” He sighs.
“I’m a spider.”
“You’re a gossip monger. Like so many fish.”
Light scowls. “Who are you?” She toys with her earing, catching it in the light well enough to make him squint and turn away slightly.
He swallows, sighing. “I’m from the Golden Ring.”
“An exile?” She murmurs.
“No, not like your friend the Royal Commissioner,” he tuts. “I’m here on business for the Queen.”
“Business?”
“I’m undercover.” He declares.
“And what do you need down here?”
“I looked up there, in the Golden Ring,” he admits. “But they don’t have you there and I need someone with your tenacity. Your ferocious, insatiable, greed.”
Light scowls. “You’d be greedy too if you were born down here.”
“Would I just?”
“Everyone is.”
“Maybe so,” he tuts. “I don’t mind it, either way, it’s useful.”
“What do you want?” She twists her earring between her fingers.
“I need a piece of art that can be neither replicated nor forged.” He recites, like he’s said the phrase often. For how long she doesn’t know but if she had to guess she’d say he’s said it a thousand times. Maybe two.
“Easy.” She smirks.
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
“I paid a lot of clever people in the Golden Ring,” he tuts. “And none of them could please the Queen. You think you can?”
“They’re lazy up there. Of course I can do it.” She says. “But it won’t come cheap.”
“A thousand an hour you said? Or would you like two?”
“Never mind that. Keep your money.”
“Suddenly so altruistic or have I merely piqued your interest?”
“With something so bland? You wish.” She snorts. “No, the price just changed.”
“And what is your price little spider?”
“You’re at court?”
“The royal court you mean?”
“What other court matters?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I want to be a lady at court.”
“The Golden Ring isn’t made for mortals.” He tuts. “The princes; Death, Famine, Pestilence and War… Any one of them would snap you into little plaster pieces. You wouldn’t last.”
“You can’t afford me then?” She challenges.
He blinks at her, expression shifting, and all at once he laughs. The sound is warm and it splinters a lightning bolt of heat through her gut that she crushes down hard. He squeezes her ankle, his hand much colder than his laugh; “if that’s your wish it’s a fair price for what I ask. If you can do what I want, then you can have what you want.”
She fingers her earrings, sitting on another question. There are more things she wants to ask. Many more. The only persons she’s ever met who has attended the royal court in the Golden Ring is Ryuk and even then he’s been exiled a long good while, before the princes came of age. She opens her mouth to ask something, but he smirks at her and the cold hand nearest her slides up the slit of her dress, curling under her thigh. Normally she would consider such an advance but tonight she kicks out, jerking herself up into a sitting position, and slaps her fan against his suited forearm with hard plastic clack.
His hand withdraws, only slightly. “No?” He seems confused by this.
“Haven’t even kissed me.”
“I don’t kiss.” He warns.
“Do you not participate in foreplay either?” She chides. “I don’t even know your name. Do you know mine?”
“Miss Light, Spider of the Silver Ring.”
“And you?” She presses, but her hand if off her earring this time and she’s so swept up she forgets to touch it. The motion would feel forced anyway.
“L,” he replies. “Lord of something, noble child of somewhere. What would it matter? You’ve never been to court.”
She scowls. She can’t fight the feeling he’s laughing at her. Laughing at her for being Silver and not Golden. For never seeing all the fine things he’s seen. Like she’s ignorant.
“Can’t kiss or piss poor at it?” She shifts, lowering her legs so she’s sitting next to him along the edge of the loveseat.
“A personal limitation.” He shrugs.
She snorts. “No kissing then, but—”
“But indeed,” he grins, hand sliding over her knee.
She slaps it away again with the hard band of her fan against his knuckles. He hisses but it morphs into a laugh. “Not in the mood my lady?”
“I don’t fuck like this.” She replies simply.
“What do you fuck like?” He wonders, head tilting.
“Come to my workshop, Mister L of Nowhere,” she orders presenting a silver foiled business card, “and perhaps I can elaborate.”
“You won’t come to me?” He turns over the card, inspecting it.
“I don’t go to secondary locations, not on the first date.”
“You’re here, at Mello’s party.”
“We’ve worked together a long while. I know he won’t kill me.”
“Know too many of his secrets?”
“You’re not paying for those,” she reminds him.
“I wouldn’t want them,” he tucks her card away, his dark eyes refocusing on her intensely. “What the Silver Ring socialites and businessmen get up to in of zero interest to me. I didn’t come down here to invest myself in politics.”
“No, you’re playing Golden Ring politics, aren’t you?”
His hand lifts from his side, cupping her cheek under her mask, cradling her jaw. He seems to want to kiss her, maybe just to try it, but he doesn’t attempt it and she doesn’t lean forward to submit to him. She’s not stupid and, in her own body, she doesn’t kiss anyone. Let alone fuck them.
“I have my own ambitions, yes.” He admits. “When I elevate you to court lady we can discuss them in more detail. After you get me the art I need.”
“Why would anyone need art like that anyway? Why would the Queen? Surely she has a whole school of artists.”
“Things are rarely what they seem.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Light nips at the heel of his palm. He grins, thumbing her cheek bone but never pulling away, if anything leaning forward and closer to her. “But then, if we agree, then we also agree that this artistic commission is something else. Something not quite obvious.”
“I suspect as much.”
“I can’t provide you with what you need, something worth of the Queen, unless you give me enough information to deduce what she’s really looking for.”
“I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”
“That’s not—”
His face ducks down and she inhales tightly. Her hand shoots up, covering her mouth, but L kisses her knuckles instead. Inhaling her with a sigh that could make mountains shiver.
She pushes him back. “Do you want to kill me or not?” She snaps.
“I haven’t decided.” He laughs.
He’s going to be trouble to work with, she can tell already, but he’s so magnetic she doesn’t doubt for a moment that he’s telling the truth about who he is and his commission from the Queen. Oh he’s probably obscuring some details, neglecting to tell her others, but Light is not intimated by that in the slightest. Her work requires her to dig through mountains of bullshit to discover the truth. She has wrestled dark secrets out of powerful men. She has uncovered decade spanning feuds, tracing them back to their root causes.
With enough time she’s sure she can unravel what L isn’t telling her but what worries her is the strange sensation sizzling between them. Something unspoken, unnamed. Something wicked and ugly. She needs to kill whatever this is because she senses it will only complicate things. It’s not love, plainly, but neither does it feel like lust. It’s something worse. Something confusing. If she didn’t know any better, she would say it feels like L wants to slice her into sashimi slices and eat her. It’s like he wants to be inside her skin.
She sighs, standing up and pivoting towards him in her heels. She’s going to say something very authoritative, end the meeting succinctly, but his hands grasp her hips and pull her closer between his knees so naturally that of course her hands steady themselves on his shoulders. He touches her not like he’s discovering her but like he’s remembering her. It’s uncanny. Frightening.
“I have a party to return to,” she says, “more contracts to make.”
“I understand.” He says but neither of them moves.
She swallows.
He thumbs her hipbones through her dress. “Ryuk, the Royal Commissioner, how do you know him?”
“You’re not paying for backstory either.” She tuts.
“Over drinks maybe,” he decides, ignoring her overall resistance.
“Call on me the day after tomorrow and—”
“The day after?”
“I’ll be hung over tomorrow.”
He laughs.
“The day after tomorrow,” she continues, “in the evening. I’ll get you your art.”
“So soon?”
“It won’t take long, not for the first piece.”
“There are likely to be several.”
“Yes, right, but for now—”
“Yes, for now,” he hums.
“I have to go.” She says, suggesting more than saying he should release her.
“Do you?”
“Yes,” she stresses. A little excited by the petulance and the confidence of the suggestion.
He leans forward and—
Light gasps, tightening up the whole length of her spine, as he licks a line over her navel through her dress. She can’t feel the heat or the wetness of his tongue, but the dress is so thin she can easily imagine it. He wants her to imagine it. He’s so close. So cold and strong.
She pushes his hands off her hips and stumbles back. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” he watches her go like a caged animal.