author note: well, damn. it would be nice to be able to just post this thing without feeling like i have to explain myself. why i wrote and posted this, while not having written or posted other things. a lot of people are probably expecting such an explanation. but every attempt at one i can even think of to say sounds shitty.

it will have to suffice to simply say that my emotional state remains spider-webbed with cracks and this is frankly all i am capable of at the moment. if that is not satisfactory then you may feel free to join me in cursing my pathetic fucking humanity.

but in case you make it past this sad excuse for an author note and decide to actually read the story, it takes place sometime around chapters 002 and 003 of the manga. after the Lind L. Tailor incident but before the formation of the task force. in the anime that should be around episode 3, i think.

maybe this isn't even worth posting, but if i didn't post it then it wasn't going to be doing anything but languishing on my laptop. and i figure this is at least better than nothing.

edit: Shimose Kayaku made a Russian translation of this one-shot, as well as cool atmospheric fanart,which i've made into the cover picture for this story

if you're interested you can find Shimose Kayaku's Russian translation with the following link (ohmygawd this website is shit with the links, they don't even work with spaces, so I have to give really lame instructions) on the Ficbook website under their penname Симосэ Каяку and the title "Бессонница", if you type into the search bar "ficbook" and then a period and "net" and then a slash, "readfic" and then another slash, and then the numbers 7786835

and if you would like to see the full fanart rather than just the small cropped version, you can find it if in the search bar you type "fanfics" and then a period and then "me/images/fanart" and then an underscore and then "o/2019/01/18/" followed by the numbers "4619191547763652" and then another dot and and then the letters J, P, and G, but lower case

and that should get you there, hopefully

sleepless

(i'll sleep when i'm dead - there will be time enough, then.)

The room, high up on the eighteenth floor of a hotel, possessed a stunning view of the city.

L, quite typically of himself, couldn't sleep—not just wouldn't but quite literally couldn't, his eyes, even while bearing their heavy, dark bags in which they had collected so many such nights of sleep-loss, remained wide and limpid—and he paced the dark room in thought, the furniture all pushed to the side to make more space for this restless movement. His computer had been set up on the floor so that it was easier to move about it.

He would pace the entire length of the dark room in long, agitated, erratic strides, gazing about the shadowed walls and peering into dark corners as if they might contain some clue that he had missed, some little detail he had accidentally kicked, like a fallen button, and which had rolled silently across the floor and settled there, but he kept finding himself drawn to the window.

There, in front of the pane of glass that stretched from the floor nearly to the high ceiling which hid itself in the darkness a few meters above his head, he kept finding himself looking out past his reflection—that apparition that stared through him with its sullen death-like eyes set deep in shadowy, bruised eyesockets, which always somewhat disquieted him when it met his gaze, as it felt so completely as if he were staring at a stranger, some mysterious, chronically ill figure, which seemed, with every banal look and despondent movement, to suggest that it came from a life and a history of pain and suffering so much more horrifying than his own—at the night sky lit a warm indigo purple from the lights of the city, and he would crane his neck to look up into it, feeling a compulsive urge to do so, though he did not know what he was looking for, and did in fact neither see anything nor expect to see anything.

It was a city sky, and as such it lacked stars, which had suffocated and flickered out in the purple haze. And yet this was hardly a loss, for the city beneath it scintillated with its own pinpricks of light against the near-black silhouettes of its contours.

Twinkling lights of yellow, white, red, every now and then some blue, some green. It was almost as if the city itself had become the night sky, had switched places with it, like a lake which depicted in perfect and excruciating detail the mountains which had once reflected their grand images into its surface, and even though the mountains had been obscured in the thick and impenetrable fog which rolled off the surface of the lake, the water held their images still, held them so completely that they no longer reflected them but themselves became them.

And so L, utterly sleepless at three in the morning in the dark hotel room, stood before the pane of glass that so carefully held his own reflection—and what if that apparition, that tortured stranger one day became him, the way the city had become the sky?—and stared blindly, searchingly into the mouth of the indigo-warm night with its dark and sawtooth teeth of star-beset city.

But that thought just made him think of the lights then as maggots, the insects that crawled in the old corpses of old cases, and his fists clenched at his sides.

How many, now, were dying from Kira's hands while he stood there helplessly, cluelessly before this window?

Indeed the only help he was was that Kira couldn't kill him, and the only clue he had was that there was something about him that prevented Kira from killing him, while something enabled Kira to kill all the others.

L stared into the dark, now rotten-seeming maw of the city, and thought of all the people who were currently dying by some other cause than Kira—and there were countless such causes, undoubtedly countless people dying, and L did not care about them one bit.

He had long ago acknowledged that it was not all the death that bothered him, but rather the failure of not knowing who, not knowing how, not knowing why—all those other countless deaths did not bother him because there was no mystery in them. Death was death was death—nothing interesting about it at all. Everybody would have their death. The only interesting thing about death was the particular circumstances of each one, for they were all different, all belonging to individuals, even if those individuals could not have been considered to have been individuals in life.

Yes—death itself was of no interest to L, but the circumstances of death were what he lived for. All the different ways that people could die—it was absurdly, grotesquely beautiful, and he wanted to know. He wanted to possess the knowledge of these deaths, the way the eighteenth-floor hotel room possessed the stunning view of the city, a view which he did not himself possess no matter how insistently it commanded his eyes.

He was falling into poetics again, and it angered him—he always fell into poetics, when he got stuck on cases, when there was literally no further he could get with the information he had in that moment, when there was nothing to do but wait, wait for time to pass.

The best thing to do, at times like these, would have been to sleep. Passing time was all that sleep was good for. You close your eyes at one point in time, and then when you open them again, the present is several hours the future of what you'd thought was the present, which was now the past. Sleep was no doubt the closest humans would ever get to time travel.

And yet, L could not sleep, despite how deprived he already was of it. He'd long ago last track of how many hours of sleep debt he'd stacked up, but he was sure that if sleep were money he would long ago have gone bankrupt.

But sleep was not money, and so he did not accrue debt from losing it, and sleep refused to allow him a peaceful, unconscious time-travel between the now when he had no further evidence to work with and a then in which he would, and so he was forced to wait in all the wartime suffering of wakefulness, the heavy and burdensome presence of consciousness.

And so, having worn the current details of the case to nothing, like a dog gnawing through bone, L had fallen into poetics.

It was times like these when his overactive mind, with nothing concrete to occupy it, took to making a murder case of the world around him—nothing went by unnoticed, and everything was dangerous, everything hurt, everything was connected.

The cold wood floor beneath his feet—and oh, how hard it had been for Watari, upon this strange whim of his, to find a hotel with rooms with wood flooring rather than carpet, because he hadn't wanted its itching between his toes and distracting him—pressing threateningly up at him—

And the stranger in the glass slowly overtaking him with its haunted eyes, its inordinately, irrationally tortured mind—

And the city that marked the mouth of the world that spread so vastly outside of him that he couldn't wrap it within the confines of his skull—and in this vast world and universe L was nothing, not even a ghost, and nothing he did even mattered at all, what was the point to all this when all life was ultimately empty—?

And the faint and muggy dizziness that occasionally made him stagger, made his vision blur for a brief moment like a lightning flash and then it was gone—and how was it, then, that he could feel so close to involuntarily passing out from sleep-deprivation and yet still be awake and functional—?

It was all connected, all of it clues to some vast, unfathomable mystery that ached deep down in the dark void of his chest, forever present and forever unsolvable, such that there were times he felt he solved crimes as some kind of a poor substitute and solace for the profound and untouchable mystery of being which he could not solve let alone touch.

Sometimes he thought he had read too much philosophy, and too much poetry. Far too much poetry.

Lines would creep into his mind like stray cats—for instance that fragment from Verlaine that went, so softly in French but so devastating, "Blessent mon cœur / D'une langueur / Monotone"—bits and pieces he'd accidentally memorized, had somehow retained apparently just for such disconsolate moments as these.

Sometimes, scratching out of the dark corners of his mind, he found whole poems had somehow been stashed there, like random junk in an attic, things which had no use or purpose or significance except to be pulled out later, wonderingly, as one asked, "How did this end up here?"

Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven," especially, would echo around in his head, reciting itself from start to finish as his gaze shifted between the face in the glass to the night beyond it to the face within it to the night stretching itself over half the earth, feathering morning and evening at its diaphanous edges.

L would hear the tapping, the tapping at the chamber door, would turn his head to glance behind him at the door of the hotel room, his teeth on edge.

Was Watari knocking?

No. No, just the tapping of The Raven as it knocked about in his mind, with it echoes of "Lenore, Lenore," and sometimes his lips would twitch wryly simply from the utterly arbitrary fact that the name started with L.

"Merely this and nothing more," he would think, gazing out at the city, which would suddenly feel vast and empty. "Merely this and nothing more," and yet still he could not sleep.

So many times, during cases, he would curse sleep's existence, curse it for throwing its wrench in his plans, in his need to figure things out. Sleep, it was so useless, such an utter waste of time, an annoyance, a vexation, getting in the way of his goal, and he would hate it for its existence, deep down with the indignation of the child who looked at the world and thought, "This world doesn't make any sense; it's rotten; it's wrong"—

And then there were these times, when he wanted nothing more than to sleep, to get away from his own mind, to let the constant, suicidal whirring stop, and he would crouch down thinking to lie on the floor, for maybe he would be tired enough to fall unconscious there and finally sleep—

And the raven quoth, "Nevermore." In his head again and again, "Nevermore; Nevermore," and he would grit his teeth and hit a fist against the floor, wondering why.

Why should he be unable to sleep, now of all times?

"And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor," he would think, "Shall be lifted—nevermore!"

And, the poem having finished itself, would restart itself at the beginning, playing over and over in his mind till it became a background noise like the ticking of a clock—just a steady beat with which to measure the steady passage of time.

The need to sleep was going to catch up with him, sometime later, he knew, pounce at him out of its hiding place just when he least wanted it to.

He forced himself down on the floor, lay on his back looking up at the ceiling, but even though shadows fluttered at the edges of his vision with the flapping of sable raven wings, his eyes were wide and open as if they had lightbulbs burning behind them.

Was Kira, wherever he was, whoever he was, lying awake in the clutches of insomnia as well, or was he sleeping now? And if he was sleeping, was it fitfully, distressed by disturbing dreams or terrible nightmares, or was it deeply and restfully?

L did not know. L wanted to know. Was Kira sleeping? What was going on in Kira's mind, as he rested and plotted? What clue would slip from his masterful grasp like a marble from the child who, during recess, had won far too many to be able to hold them all with his own two hands?

Poetics, again, sleepless poetics. L wondered when to stop trusting his mind.

The hardwood floor was uncomfortable—maybe, for the next hotel, he would ask Watari to make sure it had carpet—and he wasn't sleeping, so he got up again, found himself drawn back to the window and staring past the dead-eyed apparition.

He was not sleeping, and he cracked a wry grin. It was highly unlikely that Kira could possibly sleep less than he did.

He gazed out into the dark, thought longingly of sleep—"Nevermore," quoth the raven, "Nevermore!"—and laughed to himself, because he had never really needed much of it anyway, and because he knew that later, when it finally dashed out of its hiding place to crash him to the ground like a large, dark, overzealous dog, he would go down cursing it.

And in that brief moment of weightlessness before he plunged into the depthless darkness and drowned with it in his eyes and in his lungs, he would be wondering, distantly and in abject terror, when, if ever, he would eventually wake up.

end.

author note: the lines "Blessent mon cœur / D'une langueur / Monotone" are from Verlaine's poem "Chanson d'automne" ("Autumn Song," in English) and the English translation of the line is "Lay waste my heart / With Monotones / Of boredom." it has way more effect in the poem itself with all the context and the formatting and everything of course, but yeah.