He sleeps beside you, spare hand curled around the chain, six feet of arrogant beauty and ruthless intelligence softened and hidden.

You haven't slept for a little over 30 hours, now. Watari will start serving you milkier and milkier teas, eventually a chamomile accompanied by silent, endless concern.

Right now you're curled awkwardly around a laptop though, crouching carefully on the bed so that if Light moves in his sleep, there will be enough chain to accommodate it. His pleasantness can be easily correlated to how much sleep he has had, and the investigation is at too crucial a point to waste any time on moodiness.

Or perhaps that's what you tell yourself. His first smile when he has slept well is a heart ache you enjoy.

It's interesting to you how much he lets through. A 74% chance that he is Kira, or was at some point. Perhaps higher. You'll say 0.8%, the next time you're asked by one of the team, 13% next time you're asked by him. You're sure, though. You're so sure. Of what he is, of what he's capable of.

Sometimes though, you let yourself doubt, just a little. Never where it can be seen, and wrapped in so many layers of 'he thinks i think he thinks i think he thinks' that it's nothing more than an odd twitch in your diaphragm, but sometimes. Just a little.

More often, lately.

It's always on the bad days; the knife edge dark sky bad days, when everything tastes off and exhaustion catches up with you, when his acting is a little too good for you to dissemble properly and you want to scream to the skies because your entire team, this team of capable, intelligent men are so easily caught in his trap that they doubt your judgement, your judgement, and you the best detective alive, possibly to ever have lived. Trained most of your living memory to be what you are, awkward and difficult and brilliant. Their faith in you compromised because of sweet wide eyes and a thoughtful air. Their determination to be difficult because they can't see truths that seem so self evident.

On those days you let yourself pretend you'd come to Japan a little earlier, had happened across Light before those mysterious powers had, before Kira could be born out of the darkness of a heart devoted to justice and a mind to sharp to be laid idle without consequence.

It's a licorice all-sorts pretence, the fantasy of taking him home with you to be shaped. Multi-layered, but none of them flavours that appeal except out of desperation. Because the awful sandpaper truth beneath it all is that if he was not Kira, if he had only ever been the sweet, clever boy that he has play-acted so well over the last few weeks, he would never have caught your attention.

You would never have seen him.

Because he would have been boring.

Predictable.

And you would be bored now, are occasionally bored now, except that you're so sure, so sure there is something else going on, cracks just outside your vision.

So you preoccupy yourself with finding the ragged edges where Kira latches on, like scoring before a join; the dissatisfactions that form fault lines through his personality. You want to press your fingers into them and pull him smoothly apart so you can see. He shifts, and you snatch moments from the curve of his jaw, lose minutes to the careless topography of his sleep.

Then you force your eyes away.

If he thought it would compromise you, he would take you to bed in an instant.

And in the darkness, you let yourself think about it, let yourself pretend he'd seen. The game between the two of you ramping inevitably up in that direction, in a hand on your ankle, honey eyes that should still be closed sharpening as he wakes.

There are plenty of other things that colour, but you always think of honey. It's a strange association. Honey is an antiseptic, and he's a wound grown gangrenous in your chest.

You would tell him, 'there is a sixteen percent chance that you are Kira', and he'd flash that shark smile, the one he doesn't ever seem to realise gives him away, lays him out before you with his heart held open. He'd set his face and posture to 'nice young man' and his tone to 'harmless', earnest eyes as he says he trusts you to do what's right, if it came down to that. That he knows he's not Kira, and so it won't ever be a problem between you.

“That won't be an issue,” he'd say, and you can hear the truth behind those words even without him having spoken them. The arrogance of the trap he'd think to weave from the soft lines of your face as you watched him sleep.

But it's late, and you're tired, and tired of; ultimately, you are always destined to be on the winning side. There's no likelihood, no set of probably circumstances you can map out that ends in Kira's ultimate victory, and you don't want to think too hard about the mess this makes you, because it's far too late to fix it, and because you love him, just a little -which is far more than you've loved anyone else. Only it's not in spite of but because of what you know him to be, and you've doomed yourself one way or another. Most likely endings involve your own death, and for those mostly long before his. So you set your laptop aside, and look back on him once more before going to sleep.

His eyes are open, sharp and antiseptic.

His hand touches your ankle.

*

Sometimes you think that if you just try hard enough, you could see all the many ways it could play out, potential futures strewn before you like reeds.

But you're so sure that they all flower into his body, dead on the ground. Sometimes in the complex, sometimes not. Sometimes a heart attack. Most often a lethal injection, his face losing none of the anger or betrayal after death that it would hold in its final moments of life.

That's fanciful nonsense, though. Dead faces don't look like anything. Just dead.

You want to be wrong. You want to be wrong and you hate being wrong, have been known to blacken Wammy House for weeks after an incident of even the most minor defeat.

This one time, you want to be wrong.

But you're not.