I Love The Light Grows Up In Wammy's House Premises But I Also Think I Love It In A Very Different Way

I love the Light Grows Up In Wammy's House premises but I also think I love it in a very different way than most people do

Like I don't see it as a Childhood Friends/Rivals™ trope for Lawlight, I very much see it as Light growing up being told that there's someone better than him, someone he must not only surpass, but become—and I think he does the opposite of what BB does. He starts to hate L not because of anything L actually did (because they wouldn't have met) but because everyone keeps implying that L is better than him when Light KNOWS that he's the superior one. Beyond finds out that L is addicted to sweets and immediately changes his diet to include cakes and candies, while Light immediately wipes everything sweet from his mental list of desired foods.

He is perfectly polite, he's the baby of the group, and he can do no wrong in every other aspect of life except for the fact that he vehemently doesn't want to take L's place no matter how hard they push him. He wants to become his own sort of detective on his own merit, and he'll be damned if he has to use L's name while he does it. If he solves any cases it's anonymously, under a pseudonym.

And if he ever meets L, they won't be friends. But that vaguely disconcerting teen/man that sometimes sits in the corners of rooms and talks to no one is very interested in what Light has to say, no matter what it is, and seems to both enjoy it when Light talks shit about L and yet is still somehow annoyed by it. They get into heated arguments and he'll steal Light's things and pull his hair and mess up his clothes no matter how many times the caretakers chastise him for it (though even that happens surprisingly rarely). Light would stop talking to him entirely if he wasn't his only hope of getting out of Wammy's little genius factory both physically and mentally intact.

Light makes plans to run away and runs them by the broody teenager he's tolerated, who helps him pick out any holes in his plans, but somehow the staff always seem to catch Light before he can escape. It happens so often that Light even begins to think that someone's snitching on him, but he's only ever told one other person, and he wouldn't care enough to stop Light from leaving....

Would he?

Or, alternatively, Light never meets that stranger in the corner. Instead, Watari happily sternly informs him that L has personally selected Light to help him on cases. Isn't that great? Isn't it an honor? A and B are practically roiling with jealousy, Light should be grateful.

But Light is not grateful. He takes the news with a big ole fake smile, and silently plots L's mysterious disappearance before he's even come face to face with the man. He wants to make it on his own, he doesn't want to be reliant on L's name and Wammy's money and generosity forever, and he loathes the fact that he's been metaphorically chained to L's title in all the ways he didn't want to be.

A tiny Light, accompanying a teenage L places and becoming his face (both because L is petty and because he thinks its funny when police are introduced to a little kid as their Consulting Detective) around the world, all while they throw vicious barbs back and forth and spend quiet Christmases together and throw each other under the bus for fuckups and try foreign cuisines together and struggle to keep (L)/gain (Light) the power and ground they both don't even actually want.

L gives Light all the cases he doesn't want, like he's doing him a favor, and Light regularly calls A and B to smack talk L behind his back and turn the rest of his successors against him.

I can even imagine some amalgamation of both of these scenarios happening, or even eight more vaguely like them in the vein of L and Light being both completely antagonistic towards each other while also simultaneously growing so codependent that they can't stand not knowing what the other one is doing at any point in the day and also get absurdly jealous whenever anyone else even speaks to them.

Or EVEN a scenario where L doesn't pay attention to Light at all until he's grown and out in the world on his own. Light makes a quick name for himself, decidedly divorced from Wammy's influence, and eventually meets L on accident through a case L is working on, wherein L becomes intrigued with him and looks into his history only to find that he's a Wammy kid and L goes "Oh. You're one of mine."

To which Light takes decidedly poorly given that the claim both riles and razes Things™ in him because growing up with the vaguest desires to be like the man in front of you even though you loathe him and those desires were quickly squashed and never thought of willingly or voiced aloud leaves behind both the intense need to alienate yourself from said man entirely and to get close enough to become better than him for all to see and witness—only for Light to find that he can't alienate himself completely from L anymore because L decidedly won't let him and he can never quite seem to surpass him either because L is constantly nipping at his heels, echoing his thoughts with brilliant deductions of his own, and it turns out that trying to intellectually sprint past someone who only starts running when YOU do and has a distinct headstart is harder than it looks.