Chapter Text
Most things in Light’s life revolve around an unending desire for perfection. He doesn’t waste time dwelling on where that desire came from because if he wanted to do that, he’d scrape time out of his perfectly structured days to sit down with a smarmy woman in a pencil skirt to talk about his generally bland childhood and he just doesn’t care to do that. Not when what he can at least recognize is an illness allows him to function in society just fine.
There’s no room for blips in this schedule. His interactions are practiced, he times them in his head. He rations out time to each of his most relevant classmates and he does not let them extend past their limit. He wakes up at the same time everyday, that much is a given. His shower is no longer than ten minutes, and he performs the rest of his extensive hygiene routine with enough efficiency that he’ll be pristine for the school day within an hour after waking.
His mother knows to cook him the same thing for every meal, even if she cooks something else for the rest of the family. And his family, they don’t think much of it. This is just Light’s thing. His mother calls it dieting (even though he does this to maintain his current weight, not lose weight), his father calls it picky eating (yeah, that may be a little more accurate, although infantilizing). Sayu doesn’t call it anything because she’s thirteen and doesn’t give a crap about her brother’s eating habits.
(And if his mom waking up late has caused Light to feel like something inside him is tearing as he frantically checks the glistening watch his father gave him, glancing between the cupboards helplessly as time ticks away, as his hands stutter with indecision because if he cooks for himself, he’ll be out of step and his entire day will be off kilter, and every second he spends anxiously debating what the fuck he should do is a second wasted, and he decides he would rather go to school without breakfast than go to school with the wrong breakfast at the wrong time, so he sits at the table as he would if he were eating breakfast, checking his watch, waiting, waiting, eating his imaginary breakfast, before he stands and leaves for school with en empty crator in his stomach, that’s neither here nor there.)
Today is no different. He puts on his ironed uniform, enjoys his perfect breakfast that he cuts with focused precision. Sayu grabs a bag of chips out of the pantry before mom can stop her and darts out the door with her ‘breakfast’. That changes every day, with varying levels of nutritional value, which is probably the cause of most of her ailments in life that she constantly whines about. Her preteen acne, her headaches, every test she’s ever scored poorly on. It’s because she lacks structure.
Light’s not like that. He eats the same thing every day, at the same time everyday, and he feels perfect.
His mom shakes her head slowly, waving it off. “That girl… that’s not a breakfast, that’s a snack. She’s gonna be starving through all of her classes and lord help her if her grades slip anymore than they have. The semesters ending you know, exam season will be here before she knows it!”
“Agreed.” Light says, taking a sip of miso soup.
Mom chuckles, extends a hand—
“Don’t!” Light says, ducking out of the way of what he’s sure was intended to be an affectionate hair musing. He checks his watch, and feels the tear start to form. Hears it, only slight. Still too much. “Please, don’t touch my hair, mom, you know I don’t have time to re-style it.”
She retracts her hand and rubs it with her other one, shoulders slumping. “Ah, you’re so meticulous, Light... Your hair does look nice. Eat up, then.”
He finishes his breakfast, and heads to school. Taguchi stops him to talk in the hallway, talking about whatever annoying thing Nijimura did last night during cram school. He’s animated and onesided for the most part, which Light would appreciate (not being much of a socialite despite his impeccable social skill), if Taguchi didn’t talk so much. For so long. Light checks his watch, as discreetly as he can.
“God, Yagami, are you even listening?” Taguchi catches it anyway and Light looks up at him, forces a smile. “No, don’t try to back step now, you were just waiting for me to shut the hell up, huh?”
“We should get to class.” Light says, trying to keep the pleading tone out of his voice. “We wouldn’t want to be late.”
“I don’t want to be late, because that’s a thing that can actually happen. You can’t possibly be late, because you like to be in class before class even starts, just waiting for class to start! Not even on your phone, or chatting, or studying, just staring ahead… it’s neurotic and creepy, man, would it kill you to be a little late every once in a while? Need to prove you’re human…”
It wouldn’t kill him.
It would tear him open and rip through his insides. It would be agonizing, but it wouldn’t kill him. Just make him wish he were dead.
“I’m not neurotic.” Light insists, instead of saying that. “Is it so bad to enjoy structure?” He stills, carefully checks his watch. “I’m going to class, don’t cause trouble with Nijimura, though. It’s not worth it.”
Taguchi’s criticism dissolves on the spot as he glows. “You were listening!”
But, he’s not anymore. He gets to class in time, he sits and arranges his desk. He’s well prepared, and his stomach’s full, and his clothes are ironed and pressed. He feels clean, organized, and good. There’s nothing wrong with feeling good. This is the best way to feel good.
He transitions from class to class just like that, weightless and perfect because he’s dedicated to his ritual and he sticks to it. And as long as he does, it never fails him. He eats the same lunch he always does, he diligently takes notes, he leaves school, his interactions falling perfectly within the margins he’s drawn for them. He checks his watch. He’s making perfect time.
This is what being perfect feels like.
He’ll go home, and do his homework, some independent studying and note taking just to keep up on his skills, while he has his studying snack. He’ll have the same dinner he has every night, maybe his family will have it too, but probably not (they lack structure, it’s why they fail at their pursuits so often). He’ll have his second shower of the day, polish up on his hygiene, and he’ll go to sleep at the same time he always does, even on weekends.
He doesn’t have cram school, so he’ll have more free time than usual. He doesn’t like free time. He doesn’t like the space in between. He wishes every day could be identical. Boring, but safe. Segmented, compartmentalized, neat, tidy, clean. He pauses as he feels the tear grow, spreading down the center. He checks his watch, and he needs to keep walking if he’ll get home on time. But, what about the space in between? Is he just going to have to stare at a fucking wall, or aimlessly at his laptop screen, just so that he doesn’t skew his entire day off track by stepping out of line, out of his margins, and god forbid, lose track of time?
The thought is nauseating.
He wishes, more than anything, that every day would be identical. He works so hard to make it that way and yet, his life feels disastrously messy and imperfect in a way he can just never fix. The tears worsen and he shouldn’t linger on them, but it’s so hard to ignore. How tight his chest gets when he makes the mistake of thinking about the disorder of everyday life.
Light doesn’t have to think about it for long.
He doesn’t have a chance to struggle, there’s a cloth over his mouth and nose, an arm like a noose around his neck. He hopes the rag is clean, but doubts it.
And he blacks out.
There’s a sharp headache behind his doey eyes, cracking open to meet the ceiling. He instantly recognizes that it is not his ceiling. It’s too white, too rough. He sits up, slowly, because it seems as if he jostles his own brain too hard it begins to throb. And instantly, the uncomfortable sensation sets in, that this is not a part of his ritual. He never had sleepovers growing up, and now that he’s in his last year of high school, he’s seldom close enough with his friends to be invited over. He’s glad to be isolated like that. So little room for error, for the messiness and clutter of a social life. He doesn’t like the company of most people anyway.
And there’s no reprieve from the tear, quickly forming in his inner fabric, as he slowly looks around. Taking in his surroundings with mounting horror. This isn’t his room, it looks like a hospital room and a jail cell had a grotesque love child. The amenities are glistening and everything is white, but the bed is bolted to the floor, as is every other piece of sterile furniture, save for a wooden chair pushed up to a desk. Light throws his legs over the bed, flinches at the feeling of cold tiles where there should’ve been wooden panels. And he startles again when he detects the metal cuff around his ankle, and the load bearing beam it leads to. The chain is heavy when Light lifts his foot thoughtfully.
Before even Light realizes it, he’s trying to sooth his inner freak. Trying to calm what his family calls his thing.
He needs to focus on what matters. Which is, that he’s being held captive, he doesn’t know by who, and he doesn’t know why. It’s obvious—he doesn’t have close friends and this would just be a cruel joke, and if his parents decided to ship him off to a psych ward Light read up on them in preparation and this is not a psych ward.
He’s uninjured, albeit hungry and thirsty, so he doubts this is some sort of torturing scenario and he has no useful information anyhow, it’s not like he’s a government official. He’s a seventeen year old high school student (the top performing one in the country—but what the hell does that mean to a kidnapper?). Light lands on sex trafficking, or ransom. He may not be any sort of important cog in the government machine but his father surely is.
While he ponders, he doesn’t realize he’s been curling in on himself. When he does, more tears start to form, on every edge of his inner freak, that Light was usually very careful to keep perfectly folded and confined in his chest. Because Taguchi was right, Light is neurotic but only when things don’t go as planned, or when his mom wakes up late and doesn’t prepare breakfast the way he needs her too, or when the power in their neighborhood went out and he couldn’t iron his clothes for the following day, or when—
Light perks up, lifting his head at a sound. It’s the door, that looks heavy and metal, churning. It pops open to produce a tired looking man, tall and hunched, with uncut, windswept black tresses. His eyes are round, dark, and bored. He’s pale, the color of the moon… but also gray, faded. Ashen. He pushes the door closed behind him and drags himself closer to Light, tension building as Light straightens and braces.
The man bends at the waist to be immediately in Light’s face.
“You were asleep for two days.” He says, his voice thin and eerie. “Don’t do that again. I was excited that you were here, only for you to leave me mind numbingly bored waiting for you to wake up.”
Light swallows around nothing, eye contact with the stranger unfaltering. He searches for a response in the unknown. He’s still tearing apart, hands curled in his shirt collar. He should ask a relevant question, on the off chance this clearly unstable man will offer him an honest answer. Instead, he asks, “Can I have a shower?”
And knows it’s too late to backtrack when the strangers eyes are met with a vague brightness. A sign of life in otherwise vacant, flat irises.
“Brilliant.” The man replies, bringing his thumb up to his mouth to chew on it, still in extremely close proximity to Light. Having to be so close to someone who puts their disgusting, germ riddled hands in their mouth is making Light feel sick, and not just from the hunger, dehydration, and what he assumes is chloroform still floating around in his system. “You can call me Ryuuzaki. And yes, you can shower.”
“May I-“
“Aren’t you more concerned with showering than where you are, and why, and who I am?” Ryuuzaki rattles off, finally creating some distance between him and Light. He one ups the teenager uncomfortably, then slides his gaze off with a vague, satisfied smile. “You have a classic case of OCD. And it’s bad. Some things you just can’t notice from afar, you know, Light Yagami? Up close, you’re more disordered than I thought. It’s brilliant.”
Nothing that so called Ryuuzaki says is making this entire situation even slightly less confusing.
“I don’t understand.” Light says, lets the pleading tone through. Maybe he can appeal to the man through what most humans possess, compassion. “This- I want to go home. Why am I here?”
“You’re here to satiate my boredom, Light.” Ryuuzaki drawls, refocusing on the high schooler. “I’m dissatisfied with my life. With my career, my accomplishments, and my vices. You’re bringing color into my colorless days… if that sounds a little more poetic than ‘you’re going to be my human toy’.”
Light drains further, tears worsening, feels the blood leave his face. “I- I still don’t understand, Ryuuzaki.”
“You will. I think you’re a quick learner, Light Yagami.” Ryuuzaki turns to another door and opens it to reveal a bathroom. “You have everything you need for hygiene. Most everything. If it’s insufficient to your standards, you’ll just have to speak up… and I’ll see what I can do. You were pretty much randomly selected for your new role, so I only know about you what I see. On your walk home from school, you were suffering from an anxiety attack while compulsively checking your watch. Classic symptoms of OCD. I wasn’t certain at first but I am now.”
As if on cue, Light checks his watch, and physically strains. It’s late afternoon, and he’s just now waking up. His schedule is ruined. This shower wouldn’t even be a morning shower, it’d be more like an after dinner shower. He hasn’t performed his hygiene rituals in two days and he feels all the effects at once. His greasy hair, the taste of sleep in his mouth, his overgrown body hair, his sweat tacky skin. He checks his nails, which are unkempt now too.
He goes back to his watch, then back to Ryuuzaki, who was clearly watching the entire affair, and all the motions Light suffered as he sifted through everything wrong and unclean about himself.
There’s no point in defending his case to his kidnapper, Light knows it too. He isn’t dense. And all the comments he’s received about his uptightness, those aren’t because he’s too perfect. He can’t let his own mother touch his hair, he skips meals if he can’t eat the perfect one with the perfect balance of nutrition, and he has to wash his hands repetitively after coming home because he touched his own homes door handle. Among other troubling and disrupting issues.
But all his compulsions had worked perfectly fine with his simple life. They rarely bothered him at all (except for when they did, and he was in his last year of high school and had never kissed a girl because the human mouth was a cesspool of bacteria, and the unbearable chemical scent of perfume made him convinced most girls that made moves on him were covering a horrific body odor, maybe because they didn’t shower often enough, and he was sick at the thought, disgusting mouths, disgusting sweat).
This isn’t his life. This is a kidnapping scenario, and he has a chain around his ankle, preventing him from escaping.
For the foreseeable future, until an investigation opened and he was eventually found, or until he managed a daring (and meticulously planned) escape on his own, none of his rituals meant anything. He couldn’t live the same day over and over, putting all his energy into obeying his tight schedule (and hyperventilating over the spaces in between).
“I can’t shower.” Light finally says, still reeling in the aftershocks, the blood curdling sensation of being torn away from his home, and the most characteristic parts of himself, the perfection, being torn away to reveal the inadequacy beneath. Just a smart high schooler with an illness. It doesn’t feel real. “I can’t remove my clothing with this cuff around my ankle. Would you mind removing it?”
“Huh.” Ryuuzaki says, bending down to inspect the cuff. “I’m already kind of into this… I thought I’d planned for everything and yet I didn’t think that you’d need to take off your pants at some point. Guess we’ll have to postpone the shower.”
“Y-You could cut them off.” Light suggests, cursing himself for stammering but the suggestion that he go any longer feeling this filthy is honestly mortifying. “If you plan on keeping me prisoner, surely you have spare clothes.”
Ryuuzaki keeps up the blank stare, and then a smile unfurls on his dry mouth. “You’re suggesting that I, your kidnapper, cut your pants off? And you’re doing that with a straight face? It sounds like the plot to a bad porno.“
Light heats up but grits his teeth because he’s growing desperate and antsy. He feels like he’s being ripped apart and all he wants is for the feeling to go away, even if it’s just briefly. He needs this and he’ll take it however he can get it. He needs the normalcy, the cleanness, the routine. He counts with his fingers against his palm but it’s just not working, he needs to be clean like he needs to breathe.
“This is going to be interesting.” Ryuuzaki continues, tightening a hand around Light’s chain, hard enough that his knuckles turn white. “And dare I say, fun.”