50. going through a divorce au

TANYA I LOVE YOU FOR THIS PROMPT. i’m having an off day today so apologies because this is not good at all but it’s the best i could manage when stressed as heck. ily and i hate these fucking idiots.

—-

“I get the flat,” Light says, loud and clear and grinning angrily. His lawyer is a pretty woman who is taller than both of them in her heels and she looks uncomfortable already.

L is representing his own interests.

He says, “That’s ridiculous. It’s my flat. I pay the rent and it’s in my name. I’m afraid there’s no way.”

“I saw to its upkeep, and, even if it was with your money, I’m actually the one who physically paid the rent, because you always forgot to make the deposit. You would have been booted out of the building months ago if it weren’t for me and we both know it, but instead you got to wank around on the sofa - pardon my explicitness, Akiyama-san - on the first of every month while I made sure all our bills got paid and that the electricity didn’t get shut off.” The edges of his mouth are sharp with displeasure and his grin is shiny like teflon. L’s afraid it might start peeling at the edges.

L just cocks one of his eyebrows. “’Wank around?’”

"It’s the only just settlement.” Light stands abruptly. “Excuse me for a minute. I have a phone call I need to make.” He straightens out the cuffs of his shirt, but leaves his suit jacket folded over the back of his chair. L knows he’s only going for a smoke break.

A beat passes after the door clicks shut and Akiyama-san gives him a pained and patient smile. “These things can be very hard for both partners. They say divorce counseling is often just as necessaty, if not more so, than marriage counseling.”

L nods perfunctorily. “Makes sense. As a rule, divorce is more necessary than marriage. Lollipop?” He’d been digging around in his pocket for one and he’d come up with two. Bubble-gum and blue raspberry. She’s definitely not getting blue raspberry.

Akiyama-san blinks and this offer looks not to have broken the ice but to have reinforced it indelibly. “No.” Her lipstick is pale pink. L doesn’t have to be the detective that he is to put this together with faint stain on Light’s neck to know that they’re fucking. Light, as a general rule, puts out to anybody who he is professionally involved with in order to both seal their loyalty and collect blackmail material, should it become necessary in future.

L shrugs, unwraps his own lollipop, and says around it, words muffled with spit, “I have to make a call, too.” He leaves his phone on the table when he goes, and when he gets out of the building he finds Light igniting the end of a fresh cigarette with one that he’d clearly already smoked down to the butt. He drops the latter on the ground and when L walks over he crushes it under his tennis shoe. “The doctor says you’re not supposed to be doing that.”

Light’s eyes crinkle prettily at the edges and he doesn’t look surprised to see L out here. He takes a long drag and breathes the smoke out in his face. “The day you schedule that psych evaluation he recommended you have is the day I quit.”

L plucks the cigarette out of his mouth. “Touché.”

Light turns as if he’s going to take it back, but instead he grabs L by the ratty hairs at the back of his scalp and kisses him, hard like hunger, teething, nicotine all over, too much tongue and not enough affection, and when he pulls back he shoves L away from him and against the red brick wall behind them and says, “You won’t survive without me.”

L’s stomach turns and he’s sick with a nostalgia felt for things that never happened. “No, maybe not. I guess we’ll find out.” He sticks the cigarette back between Light’s lips and goes back inside.

He lets Light keep the flat, in the end, but he doesn’t vacate it, and so they end up living exactly as they had for the last several years, except with divorce papers instead of a marriage certificate. Eventually, they get a fish. L never goes for his pysch evaluation and Light never stops smoking.