Chapter Text
I
There is a softness to Light's body that doesn't feel quite right in the first few hours, even days, after his release from captivity. At first, he wants to think it's from the crash of the adrenaline that had come with thinking that his own father was so convinced of his disgrace, so ashamed and enraged, that he would shoot him in the head at point-blank range.
Light's mind never quite goes quiet, for better or worse, but he finds himself giving up on any counter explanation for the cuff locked around his left wrist. Instead, he just starts trying to think about how to deal with it.
He glances down at his wrist and across the room to his father as they become acquainted with L's brand new control room.
Deep in his nerves, there is still a faint signal of betrayal, flashing and burning toward his fingers and toes. Elsewhere, in the layers of skin above the nerves, there is a simpler impulse, to ask his father for permission or help.
The latter, mixed with the former, makes his throat tighten up and remember the ache of pleading in terror, some three days before. Hasn't this gone on long enough? Is this really happening?
L has explained the general allocation of space. Soichiro Yagami is to have a room, even a floor, of his own. There has even been some suggestion that both Sachiko and Sayu might be brought to join him, should circumstances dictate that the task force's family members might be better protected by being sheltered here, rather than being spared the crossfire. But not Light, for obvious reasons. He's already confined again.
He glances down at the tether trailing from his locked cuff. It looks slack and somewhat malleable. It isn't the shortest leash he could have been given, but whatever comfort the offer was a few days ago has started to wear off into uncertainty.
He tests his arm again, swinging it in an idle circle, motion dangling from his shoulder. He barely hears the click of each metal link touching, as it seems to be so well-constructed that it just sounds like distant rain.
He looks up a little higher and catches L's ever-weary eyes on him. He blinks as they make eye contact.
It feels too easy for L to do this, like it hasn't even occurred to him to be uncomfortable with being chained together. Back in the last hotel room, the reality of it hadn't really had the opportunity to settle in. In such close quarters and with so much bustle of getting ready to move into the new headquarters, Light's body had allowed him either the nervous energy of finally being free or a deep, empty kind of sleep that was almost startling to awaken from. Like he didn't even have the ability to dream or imagine being alive as he slept on sofas and the ends of beds as L kept sitting up on a computer or occasionally draping himself over some other piece of furniture or the floor, not far away.
It's an ugly feeling, but Light leaps for the first uncomfortable thing he can think of without really showing any anger or irritation about it, tone circling an imaginary drain.
"What if I need to go to the toilet?" he asks, but more vicious heat creeps up from beneath his shirt to the front of his neck and onto his face.
He thinks he hasn't really had much of a reason to be embarrassed for years, but now the memory that he'd asked to be kept in a cell, where anytime he needed the toilet involved climbing and crawling and twisting to get to his feet and over to the cold, metal thing, and further contortions still to make use of hands bound at his back to manage a bare standard of hygiene, solidifies into something more permanent.
He had not eaten much, he thought. An adequate amount of food had been brought to him each day, but he'd always sent them back with scraps. Nothing tasted very good, when eaten while caged like an animal in the world's least ethical circus. Still, he'd known he would die without water and some food, so some humiliation had been unavoidable. After all, Light did know that no matter how much it burned inside, he hadn't wanted to die.
It was easy to minimize and ignore the indignity of it, in the silent eye of the camera, but now, not to know who apart from L had seen and how often L had, his body remembered how to feel shame flaring toward the temperature of anger.
He'd asked for it. Surely, there had been a reason for it.
Light draws a deep breath and lets it out through his nose.
It helps give some of the unexpended heat somewhere to go, if only in his mind's eye, but there's still a sticky mire down the center of his body, like disease or a lingering bruise after an injury.
His stomach hurts, and he knows that his body only half-remembers the cycle of hunger, digestion, and anything that must follow to repeat the cycle afterward.
The fingers of his left hand twitch toward his palm.
Thought moves at a speed immeasurable by the tools used to measure any other empirically obvious reality, so Light doesn't really know how long it takes between his sense memory narrating the last weeks to his body in an instant and the tether tugging a bit closer to L as he raises his hand to about the height of his shoulder.
L twists his bound right wrist back and forth as if to demonstrate both the security and laxity of the thing before looking back up at Light's eyes from where L sits, curled up on a chair as usual.
"There's no reason I can't let you close the door as far as the chain will allow. You didn't seem to struggle with this concept yesterday."
Light immediately considers the fact that if this were about protecting him – from himself or any unseen power that had controlled his mind without his awareness – then this concession might have been denied for fear that Light might harm himself.
He doesn't want to do that, so he doesn't mention or suggest it, but the silence on the topic only seems to create a slightly thicker scab over the moral injury he has already inflicted upon himself.
"Fine," Light says, and since he can't get away from L, he turns to walk past in front of him, across his father's path. "I want some water and to use one, then. I'd also like a bath," he says, expecting that there is no reason to refuse that, either.
Written by a human on Ellipsus.