god of the fryer
Dec. 1st, 2024 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quicktimeeventfullHello!! Here's a bit of a fast food AU I used to write on my breaks when I was personally in fast food hell. I will simply not be finishing this because frankly this was, overall, one of the worst experiences of my life and I don't wish to relive it but there was enough already written I figured someone might enjoy reading it anyway.
CW for abelism and abelist slurs.
Light is not above working in a fast food restaurant to put himself through university. He tells himself this mostly because it’s what his father told him, in a slightly exasperated tone, when he’d driven him to work this morning.
“Light,” he’d said, “Plenty of people take on part time jobs to support themselves. You don’t have some special quality which makes you better than them.” Then he’d stopped the car, put on the same wax museum smile he’d used years ago when Sayu was throwing tantrums, and said, “Have a good day at work, son,” in a tone which brokered no argument.
As of last week, Light doesn’t even live with them anymore. He has his own, terrible little apartment, even though Touhou is easily close enough to bus — his parent’s idea, definitely not his. His father only drove him here today as a last favour. Light feels like he’s being sent to the gallows. He has no idea why this is happening to him.
So here he is, standing in front of what looks like the world’s saddest salad bar but is actually his collection of hamburger toppings while a girl in a backwards baseball cap reads off the menu in a sharp, clipped voice. She is going to be his manager.
“So we’ve got three basic burgers — regular, buttered bun, and regular with an extra bun in the middle.”
“Like a Big Mac.”
“Yeah,” she says, blandly, “but calling it that is grounds for instant termination.”
He stares at her. She sighs. “I’m joking, but still, please don’t call it that. If someone asks for one, just say we have three basic burgers … anyway, we’ve also got a bunch of special edition burgers. There’s a cheat sheet pinned to your station..” She taps a laminated sheet listing a series of increasingly bizarre burger names and the ingredients which go into them. There are six.
Light Yagami, top of his class in every school he’s ever been to, is fairly certain that he does not require a cheat sheet to memorize six hamburgers.
“All you need to worry about are the toppings, anyway. The guys at the grill will do the patties, and whoever’s on fry will bring you buns. Oh, and anything with mushrooms or fried onions. They’ll do that too. We’ll get you trained on some of that later. It’s honestly pretty simple. You’ll probably fuck some stuff up today, but I’m sure you’ll have it down in a couple of shifts.”
“I won’t fuck anything up,” Light reassures her. She laughs, which he finds offensive.
“Thats the spirit.”
She wanders off towards one of the girls standing next to the grill.
Light exhales slowly.
The building isn’t as horrible as he was expecting. His vision of the back of a fast food restaurant involves dark, cramped quarters and grease stains on every available surface. In reality, it’s obsessively clean and painted in off whites and a weird salmon colour that isn’t as ugly as it sounds. This makes sense, now that he’s thinking about it — it faces right into the dining area, so the customers can see into it. You can find the grease stains if you look, but they’re mostly around the fry and grill.
His section is shielded by a half wall which he can just barely see over. His toppings (lettuce, onions, tomatoes, pickles, shredded and unshredded cheese, and some strange red and green sauces which he cannot identify) are refrigerated interior of the actual counter, so it’s freezing cold.
Behind him, everyone is already milling about themselves, talking and nudging each other with a companionability that is equal parts nice to watch and achingly melencholy for reasons he does not with to acknowledge.
He takes his laminated sheet off the counter and scans it. He is very determined to do everything perfectly, especially now that his manager laughed at him for saying that he would. Regardless of what his father said, it’s just hamburgers. He got a perfect score on his entrance exams. He has literally been helping the NPA solve crimes over the dinner table since he was eleven. He can handle this.
The bell on the front door chimes, and a man in a scrappy white shirt and a hurricane of black hair walks through it, shoulders hunched, and skitters through the dining area, past Light, and towards the break room. Skitters really is the right word for it — he moves like he’s being hunted.
“God.” The voice comes from behind him. Light flinches, then turns to see his manager beside him, staring at the space where the man had been. “L’s on fry today. Fuck. I told Misa she was absolutely not allowed to switch shifts with him today. I didn’t want to be dealing with him and training someone new.”
There’s a scraping nastiness to her voice which Light does not like. It’s different from the tone she’d sed with him earlier.
“Is he new, too?”
She snorts. “Lawliet’s been working here for six months, but he still acts like it’s his first sixteen minutes. Look at it this way, I guess — no matter how badly you do, you’re not going to be the worst one here. He’s kind of a retard.”
“Oh,” says Light, not sure what to follow that up with. He hadn't been aware people simply said things like that out loud anymore. She seems to mistake this for companionability, and smiles at him. He smiles back, automatically, and she turns and walks away.
Maybe he should have said something, but it’s his first day, and what is that going to accomplish, really? Keep your head down, he tells himself. It’s just for a little while. If he can figure out whatever the hell his parent’s game is and play it properly, they’ll realize that he doesn’t require whatever lesson they’re trying to teach him and they’ll let him stay at home and eat their food until he graduates and can get an actual job at the NPA which does not involve putting tomatoes on top of lettuce or calling your coworkers retards.
He stares at his little laminated sheet of six varieties of the exact same food. From the corner of his eye, he can see L scuttling out of the break room, a baseball cam jammed on top of his mass of black hair. He does not join in with everyone’s chatter.
Someone sprays something on the grill and a cloud of grease rises up towards the ceiling. Not to be dramatic, but he already wants to throw himself into the fryer.
#
He is a burger god. Of course he is. His manager — her name is Tomoko, and he should probably start remembering things like that — praises him loudly for his formidable talents in memorizing the six recipes and remembering to put the toppings on buns instead of, what, his face. It’s absurdly easy, but they seem impressed for some reason. So that’s neat.
The less great part is that people absolutely will not stop shouting. They aren’t angry. This just appears to be the only way anyone knows how to communicate. Literally everything — the need to restock the lettuce, the number of french fries L needs to make, whenever L needs to drop a chicken into the fryer — requires shouting. To acknowledge the shouting, the shoutee has to shout back. Light is required to shout at the customers whenever he’s finished bagging their burgers, so he is contributing to the problem.
The only person who isn’t yelling is L, which makes him Light’s favourite person in the restaurant. Right now, possibly Light’s favourite person in the entire world.
Light absolutely despises unnecessary human noise. Even when he takes his exams, he shows up no more than a minute early, so he doesn’t have to sit through the panicked whispers and incessant rustling of papers and pens which always proceeds them. Between all the yelling and the hiss of the grill and the gurgle of the fryers, he’s just about ready to throw himself directly into the meat grinder.
Luckily, he has always been excellent at coping in adverse situations. So he makes absolutely perfect hamburgers and wraps them with absolutely perfect folds and pairs them with the perfect number of napkins. If he pays total attention to what he’s doing, he can almost ignore all the sounds.
He’s focusing well enough that it takes him a while to notice that the number of french fries which appear by his side is almost entirely random. Sometimes there are more than he needs, and sometimes there are less. This actually evens itself else nicely, so it doesn’t occur to him that anything is going wrong until Tomoko touches her hand to one of the bags, then makes an irritated noise deep in her throat.
“These are cold,” she says, and tosses it with what Light personally thinks is excessive force into the trash can. “Just check before you bag them.”
She marches off.
He assembles a Seismic burger (three buns, secret sauce, shredded lettuce, fried onions, and a slice of cheese — and shouts at a customer to take it and its associated heart attack.
From behind him, he can hear a new voice rising up among the clamour. Light stops what he’s doing for the first time since customers started walking in through the doors.
Tomoko is standing in front of L as he cowers back fro her. He must be tall when he stands up properly, but right now he’s just this tangle of limbs trying to knot and disappear into itself. She’s talking in a voice that’s curled like a fist — quiet, but it carries, and Light can’t help but notice how everyone seems to have paused to listen.
“This is the third time I’ve seen you drop double fries,” she says. “And I know it’s not the first because Yagami’s been bagging them cold.” Light feels a twinge of unfairness. No one told him he was doing anything wrong. “And you missed two orders of chicken. Yuri had to come back and cook them herself. I don’t know why you can’t get this --“
“If everyone would just be a little quieter —“ L starts. One of the guys by the grill cuts him off, abandoning any pretence of not listening.
“How else do you want anyone to tell you what we need?” His voice is acidic, but L looks at him like he’s just thrown him a life raft.
You’re misunderstanding, Light wants to tell him, the same way people shout advice to characters on television. He’s not being kind to you. That’s not a real question.
“If you could just talk to me instead —“
“Six months,” Tomoko said. “You’ve been here six months. I’m trying to handle a new trainee — who’s already three times as fast as you, by the way — and you’re screwing up the line.
Someone drops a set of three buns in front of Light. He looks up, startled, then assembles three sets of cheeseburgers and turns back.
“I apologize,” L is saying now. He’s actually physically stepping back, as if Tomoko’s going to hit him. From the way his voice is getting lower, more ragged, the way it’s speeding up like he needs to rush to the end before all his words topple over, Light can tell he’s trying not to cry. “It will not happen again.”
“I find that difficult to believe, because it’s already happened three times today and it’s been happening for the entire six months you’ve been here. If you want to keep your position —“
“It’s not going to happen again,” L says, words all in a rush now. He’s blinking quickly. “It will not. I can guarantee —“
This is absolutely the stupidest situation that Light has seen in his entire life.
There are many people who look down on adults who cry in public. Light has never been one of them. What he hates is people who look for little cracks of vulnerability and press down on them until they break, then hold their hands with their palms out and act like they had nothing to do with the result. It’s a peculiar kind of cruelty.
It should be patently obvious to anyone that L is trying his best — if that’s not adequate, they should just fire him instead of batting him around like this. The way they’re talking won’t accomplish anything other than getting him even more upset, which has not once in the history of humankind helped anyone do a better job. It’s bad management, and it’s fucking sad and frankly cruel.
Light thinks of the word retard slipped to him like a gift he didn’t wand and which he’d accepted anyway. He sidesteps Yuri as she drops patties onto his station and strides over to L.
Light steps between him and Tomoko and clamps his hands down on L’s shoulders. L looks up at him. His eyes are wide and so black they’re disorienting, like the aura of the night where a car’s headlamps drop off, and he looks not just upset but actually terrified.
But he holds Light’s gaze like it’s a shelter being offered to him.
“Okay,” Light says. “Just look at me, okay? Focus. You’re okay. You’re doing fine.” He isn’t, really. It doesn’t matter. The truth is a malleable thing best tossed away in favour of the information which would be most useful in any given situation. “Do you remember what you were supposed to make?”
“Three orders of fries, two with cheese, and three pieces of chicken tenders,” L says, snapped out in a tidy rhythm.
“Okay,” Light says, “Make that. One at a time. Don’t worry about all this other stuff. It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Yes,” L says. He presses his knuckles to his mouth. He’s swallowing hard.
“You’ve got this. I know you do. You’re okay?”
“I’m okay,” L says. He nods, once, as if to prove it. That’s why Light asked him — if you can get people to say something about themselves, most of the time they’ll end up believing it.
Light smiles at him. “Then go on.” He squeezes L’s shoulders, grabs one of the fries, and turns away.
Everyone is staring at him. He finishes his three burgers, wraps them up, and sets them on the counter. “Customer thirty-eight!”
#
“You’re a miracle worker,” Tomoko whispers to him when three hours have gone past and there haven’t been any errors. He smiles at her. He doesn’t think it’s such a miracle — all he did was decide not to treat someone like dirt.
His miracle lasts for about twenty minutes longer, after which L sends double fries and can’t seem to get back on track, but at least no one starts snapping at him again.
#
After work, Light steps into the bus shelter and finds L already curled up on the seat, his knees pressed to his chest, staring straight into the traffic. The lights from the passing cars flicker on his face.
“Which bus are you taking?” Light asks, just for something to say.
“Oh,” L says. “None. I’m waiting for my brother.” He brings his thumb to his mouth and chews on it. It’s such a bizarre, childlike gesture. His coat, a long army-green thing which hangs off his skeletal frame, seems too thin for this weather.
“Older or younger?”
“Mm. No.”
For a moment, Light thinks that L’s batting down the conversation, but he takes another look at the spellbound way L stares out into the rivers of cars and realizes he’s just distracted. “You’re a twin?”
L tilts his head very slightly. “Still no.” But there’s something different in his voice now — like it’s a game they’re playing, this guesswork.
“Triplet, then.”
L smiles. It’s sudden and starting. He tips his head further in Light’s direction and looks at him from the corners of his eyes.
“Correct, Light-kun.”
Light wants to say more, but the blue lights of the bus flash across the glass of the shelter. They reflect L’s face, turning him into a strange and scattered thing. Somehow both inhuman and more human than anyone has a right to be. He straightens his messenger back on his shoulder and steps out of the shelter. “I’ll see you tomorrow, alright?” he says, then hurries out.
CW for abelism and abelist slurs.
Light is not above working in a fast food restaurant to put himself through university. He tells himself this mostly because it’s what his father told him, in a slightly exasperated tone, when he’d driven him to work this morning.
“Light,” he’d said, “Plenty of people take on part time jobs to support themselves. You don’t have some special quality which makes you better than them.” Then he’d stopped the car, put on the same wax museum smile he’d used years ago when Sayu was throwing tantrums, and said, “Have a good day at work, son,” in a tone which brokered no argument.
As of last week, Light doesn’t even live with them anymore. He has his own, terrible little apartment, even though Touhou is easily close enough to bus — his parent’s idea, definitely not his. His father only drove him here today as a last favour. Light feels like he’s being sent to the gallows. He has no idea why this is happening to him.
So here he is, standing in front of what looks like the world’s saddest salad bar but is actually his collection of hamburger toppings while a girl in a backwards baseball cap reads off the menu in a sharp, clipped voice. She is going to be his manager.
“So we’ve got three basic burgers — regular, buttered bun, and regular with an extra bun in the middle.”
“Like a Big Mac.”
“Yeah,” she says, blandly, “but calling it that is grounds for instant termination.”
He stares at her. She sighs. “I’m joking, but still, please don’t call it that. If someone asks for one, just say we have three basic burgers … anyway, we’ve also got a bunch of special edition burgers. There’s a cheat sheet pinned to your station..” She taps a laminated sheet listing a series of increasingly bizarre burger names and the ingredients which go into them. There are six.
Light Yagami, top of his class in every school he’s ever been to, is fairly certain that he does not require a cheat sheet to memorize six hamburgers.
“All you need to worry about are the toppings, anyway. The guys at the grill will do the patties, and whoever’s on fry will bring you buns. Oh, and anything with mushrooms or fried onions. They’ll do that too. We’ll get you trained on some of that later. It’s honestly pretty simple. You’ll probably fuck some stuff up today, but I’m sure you’ll have it down in a couple of shifts.”
“I won’t fuck anything up,” Light reassures her. She laughs, which he finds offensive.
“Thats the spirit.”
She wanders off towards one of the girls standing next to the grill.
Light exhales slowly.
The building isn’t as horrible as he was expecting. His vision of the back of a fast food restaurant involves dark, cramped quarters and grease stains on every available surface. In reality, it’s obsessively clean and painted in off whites and a weird salmon colour that isn’t as ugly as it sounds. This makes sense, now that he’s thinking about it — it faces right into the dining area, so the customers can see into it. You can find the grease stains if you look, but they’re mostly around the fry and grill.
His section is shielded by a half wall which he can just barely see over. His toppings (lettuce, onions, tomatoes, pickles, shredded and unshredded cheese, and some strange red and green sauces which he cannot identify) are refrigerated interior of the actual counter, so it’s freezing cold.
Behind him, everyone is already milling about themselves, talking and nudging each other with a companionability that is equal parts nice to watch and achingly melencholy for reasons he does not with to acknowledge.
He takes his laminated sheet off the counter and scans it. He is very determined to do everything perfectly, especially now that his manager laughed at him for saying that he would. Regardless of what his father said, it’s just hamburgers. He got a perfect score on his entrance exams. He has literally been helping the NPA solve crimes over the dinner table since he was eleven. He can handle this.
The bell on the front door chimes, and a man in a scrappy white shirt and a hurricane of black hair walks through it, shoulders hunched, and skitters through the dining area, past Light, and towards the break room. Skitters really is the right word for it — he moves like he’s being hunted.
“God.” The voice comes from behind him. Light flinches, then turns to see his manager beside him, staring at the space where the man had been. “L’s on fry today. Fuck. I told Misa she was absolutely not allowed to switch shifts with him today. I didn’t want to be dealing with him and training someone new.”
There’s a scraping nastiness to her voice which Light does not like. It’s different from the tone she’d sed with him earlier.
“Is he new, too?”
She snorts. “Lawliet’s been working here for six months, but he still acts like it’s his first sixteen minutes. Look at it this way, I guess — no matter how badly you do, you’re not going to be the worst one here. He’s kind of a retard.”
“Oh,” says Light, not sure what to follow that up with. He hadn't been aware people simply said things like that out loud anymore. She seems to mistake this for companionability, and smiles at him. He smiles back, automatically, and she turns and walks away.
Maybe he should have said something, but it’s his first day, and what is that going to accomplish, really? Keep your head down, he tells himself. It’s just for a little while. If he can figure out whatever the hell his parent’s game is and play it properly, they’ll realize that he doesn’t require whatever lesson they’re trying to teach him and they’ll let him stay at home and eat their food until he graduates and can get an actual job at the NPA which does not involve putting tomatoes on top of lettuce or calling your coworkers retards.
He stares at his little laminated sheet of six varieties of the exact same food. From the corner of his eye, he can see L scuttling out of the break room, a baseball cam jammed on top of his mass of black hair. He does not join in with everyone’s chatter.
Someone sprays something on the grill and a cloud of grease rises up towards the ceiling. Not to be dramatic, but he already wants to throw himself into the fryer.
#
He is a burger god. Of course he is. His manager — her name is Tomoko, and he should probably start remembering things like that — praises him loudly for his formidable talents in memorizing the six recipes and remembering to put the toppings on buns instead of, what, his face. It’s absurdly easy, but they seem impressed for some reason. So that’s neat.
The less great part is that people absolutely will not stop shouting. They aren’t angry. This just appears to be the only way anyone knows how to communicate. Literally everything — the need to restock the lettuce, the number of french fries L needs to make, whenever L needs to drop a chicken into the fryer — requires shouting. To acknowledge the shouting, the shoutee has to shout back. Light is required to shout at the customers whenever he’s finished bagging their burgers, so he is contributing to the problem.
The only person who isn’t yelling is L, which makes him Light’s favourite person in the restaurant. Right now, possibly Light’s favourite person in the entire world.
Light absolutely despises unnecessary human noise. Even when he takes his exams, he shows up no more than a minute early, so he doesn’t have to sit through the panicked whispers and incessant rustling of papers and pens which always proceeds them. Between all the yelling and the hiss of the grill and the gurgle of the fryers, he’s just about ready to throw himself directly into the meat grinder.
Luckily, he has always been excellent at coping in adverse situations. So he makes absolutely perfect hamburgers and wraps them with absolutely perfect folds and pairs them with the perfect number of napkins. If he pays total attention to what he’s doing, he can almost ignore all the sounds.
He’s focusing well enough that it takes him a while to notice that the number of french fries which appear by his side is almost entirely random. Sometimes there are more than he needs, and sometimes there are less. This actually evens itself else nicely, so it doesn’t occur to him that anything is going wrong until Tomoko touches her hand to one of the bags, then makes an irritated noise deep in her throat.
“These are cold,” she says, and tosses it with what Light personally thinks is excessive force into the trash can. “Just check before you bag them.”
She marches off.
He assembles a Seismic burger (three buns, secret sauce, shredded lettuce, fried onions, and a slice of cheese — and shouts at a customer to take it and its associated heart attack.
From behind him, he can hear a new voice rising up among the clamour. Light stops what he’s doing for the first time since customers started walking in through the doors.
Tomoko is standing in front of L as he cowers back fro her. He must be tall when he stands up properly, but right now he’s just this tangle of limbs trying to knot and disappear into itself. She’s talking in a voice that’s curled like a fist — quiet, but it carries, and Light can’t help but notice how everyone seems to have paused to listen.
“This is the third time I’ve seen you drop double fries,” she says. “And I know it’s not the first because Yagami’s been bagging them cold.” Light feels a twinge of unfairness. No one told him he was doing anything wrong. “And you missed two orders of chicken. Yuri had to come back and cook them herself. I don’t know why you can’t get this --“
“If everyone would just be a little quieter —“ L starts. One of the guys by the grill cuts him off, abandoning any pretence of not listening.
“How else do you want anyone to tell you what we need?” His voice is acidic, but L looks at him like he’s just thrown him a life raft.
You’re misunderstanding, Light wants to tell him, the same way people shout advice to characters on television. He’s not being kind to you. That’s not a real question.
“If you could just talk to me instead —“
“Six months,” Tomoko said. “You’ve been here six months. I’m trying to handle a new trainee — who’s already three times as fast as you, by the way — and you’re screwing up the line.
Someone drops a set of three buns in front of Light. He looks up, startled, then assembles three sets of cheeseburgers and turns back.
“I apologize,” L is saying now. He’s actually physically stepping back, as if Tomoko’s going to hit him. From the way his voice is getting lower, more ragged, the way it’s speeding up like he needs to rush to the end before all his words topple over, Light can tell he’s trying not to cry. “It will not happen again.”
“I find that difficult to believe, because it’s already happened three times today and it’s been happening for the entire six months you’ve been here. If you want to keep your position —“
“It’s not going to happen again,” L says, words all in a rush now. He’s blinking quickly. “It will not. I can guarantee —“
This is absolutely the stupidest situation that Light has seen in his entire life.
There are many people who look down on adults who cry in public. Light has never been one of them. What he hates is people who look for little cracks of vulnerability and press down on them until they break, then hold their hands with their palms out and act like they had nothing to do with the result. It’s a peculiar kind of cruelty.
It should be patently obvious to anyone that L is trying his best — if that’s not adequate, they should just fire him instead of batting him around like this. The way they’re talking won’t accomplish anything other than getting him even more upset, which has not once in the history of humankind helped anyone do a better job. It’s bad management, and it’s fucking sad and frankly cruel.
Light thinks of the word retard slipped to him like a gift he didn’t wand and which he’d accepted anyway. He sidesteps Yuri as she drops patties onto his station and strides over to L.
Light steps between him and Tomoko and clamps his hands down on L’s shoulders. L looks up at him. His eyes are wide and so black they’re disorienting, like the aura of the night where a car’s headlamps drop off, and he looks not just upset but actually terrified.
But he holds Light’s gaze like it’s a shelter being offered to him.
“Okay,” Light says. “Just look at me, okay? Focus. You’re okay. You’re doing fine.” He isn’t, really. It doesn’t matter. The truth is a malleable thing best tossed away in favour of the information which would be most useful in any given situation. “Do you remember what you were supposed to make?”
“Three orders of fries, two with cheese, and three pieces of chicken tenders,” L says, snapped out in a tidy rhythm.
“Okay,” Light says, “Make that. One at a time. Don’t worry about all this other stuff. It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Yes,” L says. He presses his knuckles to his mouth. He’s swallowing hard.
“You’ve got this. I know you do. You’re okay?”
“I’m okay,” L says. He nods, once, as if to prove it. That’s why Light asked him — if you can get people to say something about themselves, most of the time they’ll end up believing it.
Light smiles at him. “Then go on.” He squeezes L’s shoulders, grabs one of the fries, and turns away.
Everyone is staring at him. He finishes his three burgers, wraps them up, and sets them on the counter. “Customer thirty-eight!”
#
“You’re a miracle worker,” Tomoko whispers to him when three hours have gone past and there haven’t been any errors. He smiles at her. He doesn’t think it’s such a miracle — all he did was decide not to treat someone like dirt.
His miracle lasts for about twenty minutes longer, after which L sends double fries and can’t seem to get back on track, but at least no one starts snapping at him again.
#
After work, Light steps into the bus shelter and finds L already curled up on the seat, his knees pressed to his chest, staring straight into the traffic. The lights from the passing cars flicker on his face.
“Which bus are you taking?” Light asks, just for something to say.
“Oh,” L says. “None. I’m waiting for my brother.” He brings his thumb to his mouth and chews on it. It’s such a bizarre, childlike gesture. His coat, a long army-green thing which hangs off his skeletal frame, seems too thin for this weather.
“Older or younger?”
“Mm. No.”
For a moment, Light thinks that L’s batting down the conversation, but he takes another look at the spellbound way L stares out into the rivers of cars and realizes he’s just distracted. “You’re a twin?”
L tilts his head very slightly. “Still no.” But there’s something different in his voice now — like it’s a game they’re playing, this guesswork.
“Triplet, then.”
L smiles. It’s sudden and starting. He tips his head further in Light’s direction and looks at him from the corners of his eyes.
“Correct, Light-kun.”
Light wants to say more, but the blue lights of the bus flash across the glass of the shelter. They reflect L’s face, turning him into a strange and scattered thing. Somehow both inhuman and more human than anyone has a right to be. He straightens his messenger back on his shoulder and steps out of the shelter. “I’ll see you tomorrow, alright?” he says, then hurries out.
