When singularly important people passed away, such events always had the tendency to be publicized to the point that it seemed as if the entire world wept for them in unison. When the renowned physicist John Dalton died in 1844, forty thousand people came to view his coffin over four days. When Princess Diana died in 1997, more than thirty-two million people watched her funeral on television. Pope John Paul II's in 2005 was viewed by more than a billion.
The people who attended the funeral of the world's three greatest detectives—the only people alive who even knew that he was no longer in this world—had been able to get to the cemetery with two average-sized cars and one motorbike between them. To the world that had owed so much to the person they knew as L, his death would go as unremarked as the other tens of thousands that came every day. Even the highest members of the ICPO would have passed October 16th, 2007 quietly unaware of L's death, just as they would have been of that of any other nameless DOA in the out of the way Japanese hospital he'd been declared dead en route to.
To the world at large, L's death would mean nothing.
To the eight people who stood over his nameless headstone on the foggy morning of the 19th, it meant one of the worst tragedies that could have possibly struck them.
To Light Yagami, it meant his life falling apart at the seams.
He hadn't spoken more than ten words since he'd frantically called for Watari that fateful night, all but screaming into his cell phone that he'd woken up to find that L wasn't breathing, he didn't have a pulse, call an ambulance, do something, please, help—to no avail. The ambulance came, Watari had wrenched Light away from L and unlocked one end of the handcuffs, had helped the EMTs load L onto a stretcher, followed them out of the building... and returned not an hour later, face somber and drawn, to give the task force the bad news.
There had been nothing they could do. It didn't even take getting to the hospital to determine that. At just past four in the morning on the 16th, L had died of sudden, unexplained heart failure in his sleep. L, Ryuzaki, Hideki Ryuga, Eraldo Coil, Marie Deneuve, the hundreds of other aliases he'd amassed, people he'd been—extinguished like a blown out candle.
Everyone fell to pieces when they got the news; Matsuda screamed and swore that they'd all be next, that Kira had gotten them and it was all over. Mogi was ghost-white and looked almost ill, Soichiro seemed barely able to keep himself from joining in Matsuda's panic, and Light—
Light felt like he was watching himself from outside his body, seeing himself crumple against his father's shoulder like he simply didn't have the will to stand, shaking and fighting back tears and swatting away the hand of anyone who tried to take away the handcuff still dangling from his wrist. He didn't scream like Matsuda, or say much of anything to anyone. All he heard himself say was one single sentence: "We were supposed to die together."
No one slept any more that night. Watari made tea and tried to keep things as calm as he could manage; in the fog of shock and fear and sadness that Light found himself blind in the middle of, one of the sensations he could remember the most was the rattling sound of cups on saucers as the old man set them down with trembling hands. Much of the rest was a blur. The passage of time felt too slow and too fast all the same, his body felt disconnected from him, like he was floating away from it, leaving it slumped against his father's side on the couch. The numbness was not in any way preferable to the alternative. It was a numbness like sleep paralysis, a numbness that came with a deep-rooted terror of how it would feel when the numbness was gone. At some point someone managed to remove the handcuff off his wrist, and though he didn't notice when hit happened, he was keenly aware of its absence once it was gone.
Three months with the cuff never being off for more than a few minutes at a time, three months of never being more than six feet away from L, of being with him twenty-four hours a day, and he would never even see the man again. It seemed like a cruel joke, like something that simply couldn't be real.
How many times had they repeated the same promise? Just the day before, L had looked right at him and said as long as we're handcuffed together, we share the same fate. If I die, so do you. Light had believed it. He'd believed it every time he'd sworn it himself. Who had he been kidding? Had he thought that somehow if L's heart were to stop, his would just know to do the same thing in turn?
I could make it, his mind said. A knife, a gun, a rope, twenty-three stories from the roof to the ground. I promised we'd die together.
Sometime after sunrise, Soichiro stepped away from Light, calling home to talk to Sachiko and Sayu. He put the phone on speaker and held it so Light could hear them, even though he couldn't talk to them himself even if he had been able to force himself to speak. He thought very hard about how much he loved them, and told himself that was why it was good that he hadn't died. Matsuda sat with him then and Light let him rub circles against his back, even though the other's hands were still shaky.
Light was the only one not to eat breakfast, though for once he could tell that he wasn't the only one who didn't want to. Watari had only just cleared away the dishes when Aiber and Wedy arrived, both stricken. Wedy's makeup was streaked under her sunglasses and she smoked too many cigarettes. The air was heavy with smoke and Light felt dizzy. Aiber kept cursing in what Light thought might have been Italian and pacing around the room like he thought he'd find L hiding behind some piece of furniture.
They both asked the same question: "Was it Kira?"
Was it Kira? Was it Light Yagami?
Soichiro, Matsuda and Wedy, surprisingly, went to Misa's room after that—he could see strange looks in their eyes when he didn't even try to stand to come with them, but even if seeing Misa were usually a positive, which it wasn't, being there in person to give her the news was too much. Far too much.
Mogi and Aiber gave Light some space, at least, but he could feel that their eyes weren't leaving him. In a way he was grateful, but around that little grain of gratitude was a swirling mass of regret and guilt and pain all wrapped up in that strange dull daze, filling him with the urge to disappear, to hide away somewhere, curl in on himself and wait for everything to go away. No one would allow that. He couldn't allow that. What part of him was lucid enough to think that through reminded him of that—over and over and over. I'm alive. I'm alive. I have to be alive.
Watari brought Light two cups of coffee and nearly dropped the second as he took it to Aiber instead of where he'd set it, a few feet to Light's left. There was no one there to drink it. There wasn't going to be. Light's head spun, and he drank his coffee down despite the fact that at some point he'd put far too much sugar in it.
He looked up at the monitors and watched Misa's room, saw her facial expressions from a dozen different angles as his father and Matsuda told her what had happened. Disbelief, first. ("You're kidding, right? He's still out there with Light, isn't he?") Then realization, fear. ("No... No way...") Then a slow, dramatic collapse in to tears. Light was sure she had to be putting on an act, at least partially—sure, she'd declared L her friend yesterday (yesterday, yesterday, he was alive just yesterday) but would that be enough to undo all that resentment? Or could she be...
No.
Matsuda smiled a smile that Light could see was forced from all those angles, quickly rushing to Misa's side to make some attempt at cheering her up. Wedy cradled her head against her chest, stroking Misa's hair. "It's alright, honey, just let it out. Everything's going to be fine, okay?"
Even Misa, amid her theatrical sobs and whimpers, peeped out the same miserable question. "Did Kira kill him?"
Did Kira kill Ryuzaki? Did I kill Ryuzaki? Light clenched his fists, swallowing down another mouthful of sickly-sweet coffee, told himself that was why it was good that he hadn't died. This is the only way I'll prove to everyone I was innocent.
Am I?
"I didn't kill him," he said to empty air, to Watari, to Mogi and Aiber, to himself. To convince someone.
Mogi quietly turned off the monitors, and the room fell into a dead silence that barely broke for hours after. Watari seemed to be handling everything that had to be dealt with, and everyone else began to drift off to their own corners of the building. Soichiro personally appointed himself (and occasionally Matsuda, if he couldn't be there) to the task of not leaving Light in a room alone for more than a few minutes at a time when it was at all possible. He convinced himself to focus on that little bit of gratitude, to understand that it was because they cared about him. Rationalize it: only L had still been suspicious of him. When the others said "Kira" they meant "this Kira," anyway. Even L knew that Light wasn't still Kira, at least. The others didn't think he had been in the first place. They didn't want him to die. He shouldn't die. Right?
The autopsy report should have set their minds at ease, and a month prior it would have; it hadn't been a heart attack, specifically, but simply a rare, fatal complication of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy—a heart condition L would have had to have had all his life. Any other time in the investigation, everyone would have been satisfied that it wasn't Kira's doing, but when they'd heard it said aloud that the current Kira could kill a man with high blood pressure by causing a stroke, could not only kill with disease but kill with a complication of an existing disease... the only comfort that came was that no one, even Watari, had known about L's condition until the coroner reported it to them.
It was easy to tell that that didn't mean much to anyone. It felt like there was a dark cloud over the task force that couldn't be shaken. Progress had abruptly stopped on the case; no one seemed to have the energy to do much work. Watching the others try and put up some semblance of effort, to Light, just looked like a child moving toys through a dollhouse. Everyone moved from place to place, acted like they were working, but nothing of any consequence happened as they did it. Like it was all just a game.
By the time Light was staring down the white cross that served as the only marker of L's existence in this world, he had just passed his third sleepless night. The others had started to piece themselves back together, but he was still reeling—starting to drift off at night and snapping awake to the sound of L's voice, the tapping of his spidery fingers on his laptop keyboard, the tugging of the chain, and then... nothing. Darkness and the other side of the bed cold to the touch. He'd given up trying to sleep all together. Dreamlike as the days had felt, or nightmarelike, he was beginning to realize that no good night's sleep would fix it.
Waking up wouldn't mean L being back. It'd mean facing the fact that he would still be gone.
His black suit was too big on him, and he'd spent far too long in front of a full length mirror as he'd gotten dressed for the funeral, looking over his body in the way he'd been avoiding since junior high just in hopes that he could make it feel more like his. His bony arms; his fault. His prominent ribs; his fault. The scarring abrasions around his wrists; L's fault. The bruise-purple dark circles under his eyes; both their faults.
This is me, he told himself. I'm alive. I have to be. He put on his suit, combed his hair and left his bottle of concealer in the cabinet. Taking it out would mean touching L's things, and there was no point hiding the exhaustion the task force had more than enough evidence for already.
Misa, dressed in a gothic black dress with a veil over her face, had wept against his arm from the moment he'd sat by her side in the car. Freeing his arm from her grip was more than his body seemed to want to do, and if her sorrow truly was genuine (and he couldn't explain his unshakable feeling that it couldn't be, so it had to be, didn't it?) it felt cruel to deny her the comfort of having another warm body to cling to at a time like this. The feeling of her leaning against him, the sound of her quiet little sobs, it was all strangely grounding. A reminder he was still there and real and present.
"Ryuzaki," Watari began, and Light wondered in the back of his mind if he'd prepared a proper speech. "We are all gathered here for a private funeral, just as you requested. Aside from those here at this very moment, no one in the world is aware of your passing. L will live on, as I have always promised you. In doing you this final service, I hope I've allowed you to truly be at peace."
Soichiro stepped forward in Watari's place, and as the old man retreated to the back of the crowd, Light thought he saw him dab at his eyes with a handkerchief.
"It's as he says, Ryuzaki. The public has no idea you're gone, and to the best of our abilities, we'll keep it that way. We're going to make it appear that you're still alive, leading us and other police agencies around the world. This is far from over." Matsuda sniffled loudly from where he stood to Light's side, his shoulders shaking so visibly that Light could catch the movement in his peripheral vision. The sorrow in his father's voice chilled him to the bone like a cold gust of wind; he trembled and rubbed at the still-raw band around his wrist to distract himself from the icy ache in his heart. "We swear to you, as detectives, as human beings, as your friends, that we will stop Yotsuba and catch Kira. You once promised us that you would bring us Kira's head, and I give you my word that we will do the same for you. My only regret is that you won't be here to see it. May you rest in peace."
"That's right," Light heard himself say. The others started at the sound of his voice, as if unsure they were hearing what they thought they had. He understood their surprise; it had been three days of silence from him. If not for their reactions, he wouldn't have believed he was speaking aloud himself. "We'll catch Kira, and put an end to this case. We'll avenge everyone who's lost their lives to this, and... that will be our last gift to Ryuzaki."
Misa let go of his arm as he stepped forward towards the tombstone, his body moving by its own accord.
"I promised you that as long as we were handcuffed together, we would die together. I couldn't keep that promise, Ryuzaki, so let me make a different one now," Light said, finding strength in his words that he wasn't sure he still had. His voice was shaking, but he clenched his hands, took a deep breath—and tried to fill himself with determination. "Wherever you are now, I swear that I won't join you there until we've put an end to Kira. I'll do everything I can, no matter how difficult it is, and... I'll live to see Kira arrested. You have my word."
Aiber left a large bouquet of flowers on the grave as he left, murmuring a few words in Italian that Light couldn't understand. Wedy, for the first time since Light had met her, took off her sunglasses and left them with the flowers. ("For Marie," she said. No one asked for further explanation.)
Light couldn't bring himself to move from the grave with the rest of them, not at first. Matsuda called for him, but Soichiro ushered him onward, leading Misa by the shoulder. The sound of their footsteps trailed off and left him in silence.
I bet you wouldn't have believed a word of that, Ryuzaki. You'd say that that's exactly what Kira would say, making a promise a like that to get sympathy from the rest of the task force. I wish you were here to tell me that. I never thought I'd miss being accused of being Kira so much.
I don't know if I believe in myself either.
"Yagami-san?"
Watari's voice pulled Light back from his retreat into his head, and he shook himself free of that reverie as best as he could.
"Watari." The old man looked up at him with something wistful in his eyes—his eyes that were unmistakably reddened and damp. He put a gentle hand on Light's arm.
"The others have returned to headquarters. It's about time I bring you back, Yagami-san, before they begin to worry too much about you," he said, voice quiet and kind. He put a gentle hand on Light's arm. "Come."
Light allowed himself to be led to the car, the strange numb feeling returning as he turned his back on L's final resting place. Watari kept him steady, something distinctly fatherly in his demeanor that only grew more obvious when he spoke again.
"I met L when he was only a small child," he said, giving a small smile through what seemed to be fresh tears glistening in the corners of his eyes. "He had just lost his parents, and he had narrowly escaped death himself. Looking at that little boy for the first time, I couldn't have predicted anything that would come in the years after—least of all that I would live to bury him."
Why are you telling me all this? Light thought.
"I'm sorry," he said instead.
"So am I." Watari opened the passenger side door of the car for Light once they reached the black limousine, bowing his head. "Please."
Light took his seat and did up his seat belt as Watari got into the driver's seat next to him, drying his eyes with his handkerchief once more before starting the car. The fog was beginning to break, sunlight peeking through cracks in the clouds. The world did not weep for L any more than most of its people did. Watari was silent for a long time before he spoke again.
"There is something I must ask of you, Yagami-san," he said, eyes fixed straight ahead on the road. "Something that can still be done for Ryuzaki—something that only you can do."
"Something only I can do?" Light repeated, trying to force himself to think clearly. What was there that could still be done? What was it that was exclusive to him? Catching Kira, and everything leading up to that, would be a team effort. But...
"Ryuzaki asked something of you before his passing." Watari's grip tightened on the steering wheel, then loosened again in an instant. "It was one of his last requests."
Light blinked. "For me to succeed him as L...? But he only meant that as—"
"His first intention may have been to get a reaction out of you, Yagami-san, but that doesn't change that there was something genuine in his request. The task force may act as if they are still being lead by Ryuzaki, but without a true leader—without someone acting as L—they will fail. Kira will never be brought to justice. Ryuzaki believed that you were the most capable to become L, and the others will need you to fill that role."
Light fell silent, his heart pounding against his ribs. Take over as L? I already told him I didn't want his title, that I couldn't—how could anyone expect me to do it?
Is that really what Ryuzaki would want?
Watari cast a sympathetic look at him as they slowed to a halt at a red light.
"I understand if you cannot make your decision now. This is—"
"I'll do it," Light said suddenly, the worst out of his mouth before he could stop himself from saying them. "For Ryuzaki. I'll do it."
And if I fail... If Kira gets away because of me... I wonder if I'll be able to face Ryuzaki in the afterlife.
"Very well," Watari said, and squeezed Light's shoulder. "It will be an honor to work with you, L."
Light nodded, clenched his hands, and reminded himself to breathe.