Chapter Text
L awoke the morning of his sixteenth birthday thinking only of breakfast pastries and the Crossword Killer, his current case. It wasn't until Watari asked him about it while delivering the desired sweets that he even remembered his soulmate mark should have appeared overnight.
Most people might marvel at how you could manage to forget the coming of such a monumental occasion. But having a disinterested view on romance and a million other, more important things to think about—most of them having life or death consequences—will do that to you.
L pulled back his sleeve to behold a small collection of kanji binding his left wrist with a pitch promise. For a moment, he put a deliberate effort into not translating it. He simply looked at it, pleased for some unfathomable reason at how the finite shade of black contrasted with his skin like ink on paper. At how the symbols seemed to be a dancing form of written art when your eyes skimmed them.
Then he looked across the top of his strawberry foot-stack (saturated with powdered sugar, whipped cream, a scoop of ice cream, the works), and informed Watari that his soulmate's name was Moon Yagami.
DN
Yagami-Light had difficulty falling asleep his last night as a fifteen-year-old. Though he hid it well, even he was not immune to the anticipation of knowing the name of his soul's match.
Light didn't doubt that such a person would have to be quite a remarkable individual. Just as remarkable as the young prodigy knew himself to be.
He woke up a good hour before he usually did, and as soon as the dream scraps drained from his mind enough for the consecutive series of words, "Birthday-Sixteen-Soulmate-Mark" to replace them, he was ripping off his nightshirt and checking his torso for elegant scribblings.
It was a somewhat embarrassing leap of logic to check the patch of skin directly over his heart first. Soulmarks rarely appeared there. A deep and personal bond had to be formed before the mark would shift there from wherever its first place of origin had been.
Light found the name sprawled in a vertical line from the knuckle of his index finger to the side of his wrist. L. Lawliet. Light traced it with a fingernail a couple of times, then with the first writing utensil he grabbed off his desk. He inhaled and silently rolled the texture of the word around on his tongue, with all those looping variations of l and a nice clean cut-off at the t, grinning and giddy and more present than he'd been for a long time.
"L. Lawliet," he confided to his room.
It wasn't until he was starting his first worksheet of the day at school that Light realized why the mark had such an oddly specific placement. The name was almost brazenly visible when he angled his hand to write.
Throughout that day the mark was a constant reminder to do his best, to become his best, in anticipation of when he and Lawliet would meet.
DN
Given his extensive resources and talents, L could have easily tracked his soulmate down. He had every incentive to do so. Sheer curiosity and the promise of one who could allegedly understand him on a deeper level would be enough motivation for anyone to rush the encounter.
He didn’t. Instead, the great detective L focused on, well, becoming exactly that. A great detective. His reputation wasn’t quite all there at sixteen, but it rapidly grew to match his abilities over time.
Whether he could mindlessly accept the idea of having a soulmate was a matter worth considering. At great depth, with some strawberry shortcake at three in the morning. Very little was known about the whole process and if you were to analyze it scientifically, what was known could easily be called into question.
What was known was this: Once a person turned sixteen, the name of their supposed, “soulmate” appeared somewhere on their body in the middle of the night. Sometimes this brand would change or move according to the soulmate’s identity, or the person’s relationship with their soulmate. If your soulmate died, the mark would grey and fade. However, luckily for the widower, a person could have more than one soulmate throughout their lifetime, which meant a new mark may appear.
Hardly a conventional means of encouraging humans to procreate.
Many studies have been done on this topic. Most of them turned out to be frustratingly fruitless. It was almost as though what little evidence existed had been laid out specifically so people would assume that there was an active higher power, or destiny, or fate, simply so they could remain content with the excuse that it could not be explained.
L supposed he couldn’t rule out that “higher power” possibility quite yet. Not until those studies started finding something. Whatever improbable possibility remained could and must be the truth, and so on.
Occasionally L would go through an obsessive phase where he would gather everything he knew about soulmate selection—All the files, all the anomalies, every single piece of pertinent information. Then he would sit and stare and bite his thumb until Watari talked him out of it. This was the biggest unsolved case since evolved humans started rubbing grey cells together with the intent of using reason. It was maddening.
On the topic of soulmates, when L wasn’t nagging about the process he was worried about the product. He would never admit to worrying, should you ask him. Most worries ordinary people had about their soulmate were along the lines of, “What if they don’t like me,” “What if they’re in a relationship when I meet them,” “What if they don’t care for this or that or—“ What if, what if, what if. Such worries seemed foolish to contemplate in the detective’s mind. It was a well-known statistic that soulmate matches worked without a hitch 95% of the time, excluding unusual circumstances such as a death, an amputated limb, altering the mark with an ordinary tattoo, etc.
But the thought that somewhere out there a person existed who might be able to see right through him, who could be used against him; that someone could muddle his logic in favor of irrational emotion, that there was someone who could become—and likely was—destined to be his greatest weakness…
That didn’t sit right with him.
No indeed. No matter how he sat, spine straight or slouched or twisted in a question mark, the notion didn’t sit right with L at all.
DN
In Light Yagami’s class, it seemed everyone and their grandmother was obsessed with their soulmate.
Not Light. He had loftier, more sophisticated priorities than matters mundane enough to ensnare the attention span of the pubescent masses.
…But not many.
It was just that everything else was so… So tedious. And if it wasn’t tedious, it was awful. And then even the awful became tedious and somewhere between seventeen and philosophizing about everything—because he was an unrecognized genius with too much time, and too much brain and idle ‘extra-hard’ puzzle books had stopped challenging him when he was five—he started to question the point of it all.
So, yes, if charged with imagining who the name on his wrist was like in person… he was a little guilty.
Read: Exceptionally guilty. Beyond a reasonable doubt.
The sky outside his classroom window seemed to invite imagination with a polite and earnest nature, whether it be garbed in steel grey, hazy orange, or a rare blue. It would be rude to refuse. Especially on the occasions where it had expended the effort of donning its finest shade of azure just for Light.
He knew that it was stupid to imagine because then he would hope, and then his hopes would be let down and it would be a bad start to whatever relationship he and his soulmate were supposed to share. But the whole thing about a soulmate was they weren’t supposed to be what you hoped for. They were supposed to be better. By no means perfect as a person, but perfect for you.
Light tried to imagine what was perfect for him. He listed off all the usual traits the usual people desired in their soulmate. Attractive, funny, charming, dedicated, understanding. But he found that he didn’t much care about any of these traits but one: Intelligent. Light couldn’t stand people who didn’t think on his level. Most days he found it within himself to be generous; he made peace with the fact that the world was, by comparison, filled with unmitigated idiots. But there were days when Light despised them altogether, wanted to avoid all interaction with them, to abjure every smidgen of the taint that was their incompetence.
He could tolerate—and maybe if this soulmate thing worked the way it was supposed to—learn to love a lot of things. But it was a necessity that whoever Lawliet was, she possessed an above-standard margin of intelligence. Genius, preferably.
Light did think of his soulmate as a girl. He made that assumption because it never occurred to him that they could be anything else. However, if he had stopped to question whether being a girl was a required trait, he would have found that it was no more required than a pretty face so long as there was a brain behind it. He would realize that assuming his soulmate was a girl was a hasty miscalculation.
But he did not consider this. Thus, Light scoured all the top-performing academies worldwide, plus their graduates from the past five years, searching the lists for girls by the name of L. Lawliet.
He didn’t find anything for obvious reasons. But that was all right. Light would be disappointed if it was that easy. The search for his soulmate was a puzzle that doubled as a loyal companion. He fell back on it to stave off boredom, abhorrence, and self-imposed queries about whether the world—whether everything—was worth it.
You know, the usual teenage angst.
DN
Something was wrong with L’s soulmate.
The detective didn’t often go outside, but if a legion of ants were going to steal from his sugar bowl, the least he could do was investigate. He lay on his belly in the grass, examining the small mound where the dirt met the sidewalk. Several larger ants guarded the mound. L didn’t bother them, and they extended the same courtesy. He watched as the small lumps of dissected sugar cubes disappeared into the earth, whisked away on an insectoid assembly line.
Then he happened to glance at his wrist and found that the kanji symbols he’d worn for years no longer circled the bony joint. They had been replaced by four letters. Four letters in harsh capitols slashed across the skin. These letters were a shackle, a proclamation, or some equally dread omen.
K I R A
On second thought, L supposed that they could also spell AKIR, RAKI, or IRAK, but given the placement of the letters, KIRA seemed most likely. Also… it was a bit of a hunch. A bit of something that couldn’t be explained, unless L wanted to stop and try to deeply psychoanalyze himself, but he’d much rather research other developments.
So he did. Later, L would ask Watari if he had heard of a soulmark changing, and whether it meant the soulmate’s name had changed too or if you’d somehow transferred to a completely different soulmate. Watari was understandably dumbfounded. Some database digging found a few instances of the former, but this was not enough to abate the mentor’s internalized worry.
Later this would be discovered, but right now, halfway across the world from a certain mound of glucose-thieving ants, a student had just picked up a black notebook.
DN
It took Light a while to realize his soul-mark had moved. He was a bit too occupied by the seemingly elaborate prank the notebook presented to notice that, as he wrote down the first name, the mark shifted across his hand like liquid mercury. That mark had become such a fixed part of his body Light took its presence for granted. He was performing his justice, cleansing the world, writing with fervor. The sky wore pitch velvet and played coy about his curtains, reassuring Light of her approval with the protection night freely offers secret happenings. But something seemed… off. Nothing about what he was doing, of course, this was glorious, an experience near spiritual. But what he was seeing was just… off.
Light stared at the notebook of names, the pen, and his hand. There was a word missing. A very important word.
He dropped the pen. Lawliet was gone. All that remained was a large bold L on the back of his hand. It was barely visible when he rotated his wrist to write.
Why? Why had his relationship with his soulmate changed drastically enough to warrant a shift in mark placement? Light hadn’t even met her yet! Why wasn’t he permitted to see the proof of his other half’s existence when he wrote? While he worked to scrape the rot and filth from this world? Was she unworthy? Was he unworthy? No, preposterous. And why was there only one letter now? It wasn’t as though erasing the word Lawliet would make Light forget it, he’d long since memorized that cascade of syllables, elegant and foreign. So why change it? Light liked his soulmate’s name. Being reduced to a single letter felt like he was being cheated, or degraded, or…
He didn’t like it.
He loathed it.
Was this a hint? A warning that he might try to murder his soulmate if he knew her full name and what she looked like? Light was indignant that anyone or anything would presume so. Who would be dumb enough to kill their soulmate? Did Light look like the kind of person who would cut down what he was sure would become the second-most dear thing to him? (Second only to his work, which was more important than any individual.)
Unless, of course, Lawliet disagreed with what he was doing, in which case it would make perfect sense-
No, stop. That was ridiculous. Of course his soulmate would support him. What kind of soulmate would she be otherwise? How could they be together if she was against him, against his new world? A world without fear, a world worthy of the one most beloved by that pristine world’s God?
But since whatever controls such things has neither a name nor face, Light could only resolve to learn to live with it and never forget what had been taken. Lawliet. Out of spite, Light doodled the word over and over on scrap paper, printer paper, heavy cardstock, in every variation imaginable. He committed it to muscle memory so thoroughly that sometimes if he wrote his name in English, he would accidentally write an A instead of an I after the first letter.
He destroyed it all afterward, of course. That name was his. Purging it from his body could never change that.
DN
It wasn’t until Light saw the big gothic L pasted across his television that he knew. He knew he was listening to his soulmate on the other side of that screen, accusing him of murder, of evil, blaspheming his righteous work. He knew something close to betrayal.
Which was stupid, because stupid stupid Light he had known that assuming anything about his soulmate could lead to disappointment, and he did it anyway. He’d assumed L would side with him but then she – no, he, that much could still be detected through the voice distortion – did just the opposite. L condemned him. L was going to sentence him to death.
L probably didn’t even know who he was hunting down. (How could he? If he was aware that his soulmate was Kira, and he knew both Kira’s true name and his approximate location Light was as good as dead. Since failing so soon was not an option, Light had to believe that wasn’t the case.)
But Light knew. He knew in a moment of fury that something must have gone wrong. This couldn’t be his soulmate. This imposter wasn't his destined one. Every preconceived notion Light possessed regarding soulmates abjured the thought.
And he knew L’s full name. L. Lawliet.
Lawliet was nothing like he was supposed to be. Lawliet was just L.
He knew it wouldn’t work, but that didn’t matter. He carved over his previous victim’s name with a viciousness that almost tore the paper. L. Lawliet. Damnable Lawliet cursed Lawliet, that name Light knew as well as his own.
Of course, it didn’t work. He knew it wouldn’t.
Which was ultimately a good thing, because once his rage had abated Light was glad it hadn’t. Not out of any emotional obligation Light held towards L, but because he looked forward to this game of wit and caution about to take place. Whether L was his soulmate or not was now an irrelevant fact. All that mattered was who would win. And Kira planned to ensure his absolute victory.
Yes, as of now, Yagami Light knew lots of things.
Yet there was a small part of him, easily squashed by the deafening war cries of hubris and egomania, which felt as though perhaps he knew nothing at all.