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The call comes and for just a minute everything is back to normal.
Before then, Light is at home, laying on his back in bed, because Countermeasures is closed. No one is there. The task force is reconvening, but there’s a mourning period to be expected. L’s body has to be examined, his cause of death—heart attack—confirmed, and then disposed of. There will not be a standard funeral, but Watari told the task force that he would like for them to visit L’s grave after the fact.
It’s been twenty-six hours and fifty-two minutes since L.Lawliet has died.
Light has been keeping track of the time. He knows it down to the minute, because MIkami, a blessing and savior of a man, is an obsessive and noted the time as he’d written L’s name. He can’t stop thinking about it, can’t stop watching the time tick onward in a world without L.
L is gone, and Light has won. The thought comes with a degree of triumph, an echo of the feeling he’d felt as he stood on the roof and burned the piece of the Note with L’s name scribbled across it. This is what he wanted.
It feels strange not being at Countermeasures, which has been like a second home in addition to a prison and a workplace and a battlefield. He’d lived there for the entire duration of the Yotsuba case. Coming back had been an event, since Sayu had insisted on celebrating his return from the trip he’d lied and told her he’d taken.
When he’d gotten home, he’d looked around at all of the decorations and ornaments and what have you in his room. They’re all coated in a thick layer of dust, a coating of abandonment. It’s a representation of his past lives, the ones he’d abandoned; first his peaceful-but-dull life at Suginami with Kamoda, then his misplaced ambition to capture Kira with L. Those versions of himself were naive at best and stupid at worst.
He’s happier now. He’s won.
It’s been twenty-six hours and fifty-three minutes since L.Lawliet has died.
Light can’t stop thinking about it.
Then the call comes.
L. Lawliet has been dead for twenty-six hours and fifty-five minutes, but the caller I.D. on Light’s phone reads UNKNOWN NUMBER and for just a moment L is alive.
Frantically scrambling towards the phone, Light picks it up with his hands trembling minutely. He imagines that L woke up at the hospital, that they managed to resuscitate, to revive him.
He answers the phone and holds it to his ear, and in his head he hears L’s laugh and his smooth, smooth voice.
Yagami Light.
The phone nearly slips out of Light’s hands, and he fumbles it for a few seconds before managing to get a grip on the device again.
“H-hello?” Light stammers.
“Yagami. I apologize for calling on such short notice,” says a voice distinctly unlike L’s.
A breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding rushes out of him all at once, and then feels silly. L is dead. He can’t call Light on the phone. He can’t do anything anymore except molder, and they’re going to take even that from him today.
“Watari,” Light greets. “It’s not a problem. What did you need?”
Watari sounds hesitant on the phone. “Well, it’s a matter of L’s funerary services…”
“Yes?”
“L left very specific instructions in the event of his death,” the old man elaborates. “He wanted to have a Western-style funeral and burial, but the processes before that are to be completed in the Japanese manner.”
Light can’t imagine what this possibly has to do with him. It’s certainly a curiosity, and Light knew that L was from the West—not that you could tell from listening to him speak or looking at him, of course, nothing about him screamed foreigner but he was nonetheless—but having a split Japanese and Western tradition seems a little on the nose to him.
“Um, all right,” he says, trying to come across as simply meek and in mourning. “What does that have to do with me?”
There’s a pregnant pause before Watari continues, “L wanted you present. Specifically for the cremation.”
Light can’t help the nervous sputter that comes out of him. “W-w-what? But I’m not family!”
The cremation ceremony is traditionally an extremely private affair, performed exclusively by family members. It involves carefully picking up the bones of the deceased and placing them, one at a time, into the burial urn. It is almost unheard of to have even a close friend present, let alone someone like Light. Let alone the man who killed him.
Watari’s voice doesn’t betray any emotion, but Light imagines he isn’t exactly pleased with the situation either. “Yes, but L requested that you be present, and I intend on honoring his request, if you would come.”
What Light wants to say is no, I’m not going to come honor L’s bones, but the words get stuck in his throat. He clears it with a cough and says, “Um. Sure. I guess.”
“Excellent,” Watari says, like they’re talking about dinner plans. “The cremation is in a few hours. I’ll send you the address.” Then he coldly hangs up on Light.
The address that Watari sends takes Light to a nicer part of town, not too far away from Countermeasures. Light couldn’t expect that Watari would spend anything less than the most for L’s funeral, but the place is frankly huge. Light vaguely remembers the crematorium they’d gone to for his mother, and on their modest budget—not yet as dire as it would become—they’d only been able to afford a small place. They’d had to do the bone-picking in the same room the body was burned. He’ll never forget the smell.
This isn’t like that. Light walks in and the main hall is glittery and marble. He stands there, overwhelmed, and then seemingly out of nowhere Watari appears. Light looks down at the man. He looks just as put-together as ever, but his expression lacks some degree of the characteristic warmth that has always marked his expression. Maybe he’s grieving. Or maybe he just doesn’t like Light.
“Yagami,” he greets. “Thank you for coming. The body has already arrived, so we’re in the next room.”
The word we piques Light’s curiosity. There’s more than one person here?
Watari seems to pick up on this. “You’ll meet them in just a moment. Come with me.”
Light is guided to a smaller side room. It seems like a sort of intermediary space, because all that’s in here is a small shrine decorated with bouquets of yellow and white chrysanthemums and a picture of L. It’s a funny picture, almost like a screenshot of a video, presumably because L made a point of not letting pictures be taken of him.
Well. Not until the very end.
There’s one other thing in the room. A teenager, maybe, but a slight one, with a surprising shock of white hair. They turn when Watari enters with Light in tow. Light has no idea what their gender is.
“Hello,” they greet. “You must be Light. I’m L’s sibling.”
This is surprising. L didn’t seem like the type to have a family. “Oh. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” L’s sibling says, and gives Light a cherubic smile. “But same to you. You must have meant a lot to him if he wanted you here.”
The smile that Light gives Near in response is tight around the sides. Part of him wants to scoff, and another part wants to grimace, but what he actually does is say, “I suppose.”
L’s sibling bows their white head slightly and turns back to L’s shrine. Light surveys them from behind, pretending to follow suit and pay his respects at the shrine. They seem very innocent, from this first impression, but if they’re anything like L then he should be worried about them. He’ll have to keep an eye on them.
He doesn’t have much more time to scrutinize the child, though, because an attendant walks in and informs them that the body has finished. Watari is the only one with the key to the oven, and he goes ahead first to transfer the remains to the bone-picking room. It only takes a minute, and then Light is brought along.
The bone-picking room is not as ornate as the rest of the rooms so far. Whereas the rest of the crematorium is decorated in marble and exquisite, this room looks like an empty hospital room. The only things here are the steel table upon which lie L’s warm bones, a couple of white, rectangular urns, and three sets of long funerary chopsticks.
There is typically an attendant in the room to identify each bone as it is lifted, but Watari shoos them out, saying their services will not be needed. It doesn’t take much convincing. This is supposed to be a private affair.
Of course, Light doesn’t belong here, either. He feels it now, as he approaches the table and sees what has become of his enemy. He’s nothing more than bones and ash laid out on the table. Any brilliant thought that was ever in that head is now gone, has been gone since his heart stopped at Isokawa Warehouse, and he will never think or feel or act again.
It’s a good thing. It’s a good thing, because L was going to kill him, was going to sign his death warrant personally before handing him over to the people who would see him strung up. No matter what happened at the warehouse, one of the two of them was going to die. It was Light or L.
So he killed him.
And now Light is having to honor L’s memory with his family as part of some sick joke L’s playing on him after his death, and now Light has to pretend he’s forgotten everything they said to each other before he killed him, and now he’s stuck in a room with his bones and Watari tells him to stand at the end by the foot and take the bones and place them in the urn personally because it’s what L wanted, the bastard.
The extra-long pair of funerary chopsticks they give him clatter together quietly as he tries not to tremble. The very first bone they’ll be picking up, Watari says, is the first bone of his big toe. Light reaches out, since it’s in front of him. The table and the bones radiate heat from the cremation process, like a living person, like instead of picking up L’s bones he could reach out and touch him and he’d be warm and alive and turn and smile at Light.
He takes the first bone of L’s big toe and carefully drops it in the first urn.
L needs three urns in total. Watari says this and his voice gets a little choked up, because it means that L was youthful and spry and his bones were healthy and didn’t disintegrate in the fire. It means he was taken long before his time. Light ignores this expression of grief, because he needs to.
The only bones left are that of the hyoid bone, the jaw, and the skull.
L’s tiny sibling passes him the hyoid bone with their chopsticks, looking at it reverently. The hyoid bone is sacred, all-important; Light is surprised they don’t want it in its own little box. It is the connection of L’s body and mind.
With the bone held precariously at the end of his chopsticks, hovering just above the urn that is to be L’s final resting place, Light hesitates.. He doesn’t immediately drop it in, instead looking over to the others, who are for just this very moment looking away, down at the next bone, L’s jawbone.
A terrible desire crosses Light’s mind, and before he can stop himself he has pocketed the hyoid bone. It’s not a small bone, and it’s a strange U-shape with little nubs that stick out, so he almost fumbles it or snaps it in half in his pocket, but somehow he manages to do it before anyone notices.
The weight of it sits heavy against Light’s thigh. He can’t believe he’s done it, that he’s stolen one of L’s bones for himself, but he has and it’s done. Near is passing him part of L’s jaw, which Light mechanically places in the final urn. A few more bones, and it’s done. They close up the last urn without questioning Light in the slightest. No one has noticed.
The rest is a blur. The burial is happening later, and Light isn’t invited until after he’s in the ground alongside the rest of the task force, so he ends up breaking away before Watari and Near go to the cafeteria to eat their special bentos (which Light doesn’t have, anyway) and going home.
He’s made it. He has it.
He pulls the bone out of his pocket and examines it, standing in front of his bed. It’s almost pristine, other than a thin layer of ash that surely coats Light’s pants pocket now. It managed to survive all the way here without any cracks or damage.
All that’s left of L is held in between Light’s palms. The rest of him is being buried today, locked away in the ground never to see the light of day. He supposes it’s apropos, since L was always hiding underground anyways.
But now a part of him belongs with Light forever.
Light sets the piece down on his desk and then sits across from it on the bed, elbows propped on his knees. He examines it quietly, tries to imagine it as his deceased rival, tries to see any of L in the blunt curve of bone.
“Hey, L,” he eventually says. “How are you?”
The bone does not answer.
Light gets home seething.
He’s furious from the moment L unveils his video and starts talking to them, to him. And then they get back to the office for the first time and instead of the rightful darkness and silence that should greet them in the absence of L, they find L’s little sibling. And L’s little sibling is Near, is Babel, is L’s little consultant, and they’re going to stick around to try and act as detective in L’s place. And it’s laughable, really, because they’re nowhere near L, nowhere near as cunning or brilliant or incisive, but instead of laughing Light is pissed.
So he gets home and he opens the secret compartment in his desk drawer, the one that won’t explode anymore and doesn’t contain a Death Note. Instead he finds L’s hyoid bone in its new resting place.
Sitting on his bed he cradles it between two hands trembling with fury.
How could they accept a child? Did they have so little respect for L’s legacy that they would let a naive kid take over in his stead? No—did they have so little respect for him, for Light, for Kira, that they would let Near take the lead?
It’s laughable.
He’s so busy looking down at what’s left of his greatest rival that he barely notices the smell of sulfur until it’s overpowering. Looking up, what he sees has him jolt so hard he nearly drops the bone in his hands.
L stands in his bedroom.
He stands oddly—L always stood so stiffly, hands clasped behind his back, shoulders squared off. It was a very deliberate way to stand. Now, his hands hang loosely at his sides, his head cocked at an angle and pitched forward just slightly enough that his perpetually-too-long bangs cover his eyes. He looks greyer than Light remembers. There is still blood caked around his mouth, on his clothes, in his hair.
He does not move.
Light doesn’t, either, doesn’t scream even though he feels it building in his throat. He backs up further onto his bed until his back hits the wall. In a panic, he tosses the bone across the room and hears it clatter against the floor under his desk.
The grim image of L doesn’t go away.
Like a child hiding from the dark, Light grabs his blanket and flips it over himself, cowering under the covers, trembling. He lays there praying, hoping it goes away.
It doesn’t.
Light ends up leaving first, running out the next day in the same dirty clothes to go to Countermeasures. He gets out to the street before vomiting on the concrete.
He doesn’t see it again while he’s out, but sometimes the smell of sulfur and ash washes over him and he shudders. Near and his father and the task force speak to him and he struggles to pay attention, and even the feeling of fury is gone, replaced by cold dread.
No work gets done that day, not by Light, and he packs up his things and drags his feet all the way home, but he has to get there eventually and when he does that thing is waiting for him. It stands there in that same corner, even as Light fearfully picks up the (still whole) bone and puts it back in his secret compartment for safety; it doesn’t disappear once the bone is once again hidden away. It just lurks there, silent and staring and stinking.
Barely any sleep greets him that night and the next morning he rushes out to the freedom of the outside, the fresh air and the sunshine, and stops dead when he sees it across the street.
The next few days continue much the same. He’s on the bus to Countermeasures and he sees it standing on the other end of the vehicle. He’s with Misa on a “date” and it hovers between them like a secret. It feels right at home at Countermeasures, and as he sits there in his usual seat it stands less than a foot behind him, but no one else can see it. Several times, someone passes through it without realizing, phasing through completely unaffected. If anyone can detect the smell of death on him—in this case, sulfur and ash—they don’t say a word. This is Light’s burden and Light’s burden alone.
He handles it for exactly a week.
On the seventh day, he’s sitting in his bedroom with the bone in his hands again. He feels it under his thumbpads, smooth and knobbly. It had felt like triumph when he first held it this way, he tells himself, felt like taking home a trophy, but now a feeling of terrible bitterness overtakes him as he stares down at his burden. The image of L stands in its usual spot, unmoving, unbreathing, unspeaking, and Light finds himself dipping into that rage again.
“Do something,” he spits at it. “Fucking do something. Say something. Do what you’re here to do already! I’m sick of waiting!”
It doesn’t answer. It doesn’t do anything, shows no indication that it heard or can even think, and yet Light is so overwhelmed with the need to get up, grab it by the collar, and shake it that he’s convinced it must be doing this on purpose to upset him, just like L sometimes did when he was alive.
The memory of L alive and well contrasted with the reality of this grim, horrible thing makes Light sick to his stomach, and then he’s screaming.
“Say something! Say anything!”
And yet it does not speak.
Light lets out an agonized shout, bending over double and holding back tears of impotent rage and frustration and fear and dread and something else, and then before he can stop himself his hands clench and grip and squeeze and he snaps L’s bone, his precious, sacred hyoid bone, right in two. After his moment of blind frustration he gapes at it incredulously, at the destroyed ornament, and then looks back up at the ghost.
It’s closer now.
For just a moment Light is frozen in time and terror before scrambling backwards on the bed, just like that first night, but this time it’s not enough because it’s moving, it’s moving, and the unholy shamble this produces is horrific. The thing walks and it has such a pronounced limp on the leg L had twisted in their fight that it nearly topples it dips so low, but then it keeps on coming.
Worse is the noise coming out of its mouth.
It’s something like a croak and something like a gurgle, a grotesque facsimile of human speech that has Light regretting begging it for sound. As it meets his ears he looks down at the broken hyoid bone in his hand and is distinctly reminded of the function of the bone: it’s instrumental in creating human speech. Of course the thing can’t talk.
Light is taken out of this thought by the fact that the image of L is on him now. He’s cowering on the bed, raising his arms to protect his face, shaking with a fear he hasn’t known since L was alive and intending on killing him, and Light is sure that there’s a connection there, that he’s about to be strangled or killed in some other supernatural manner and there’s nothing he can do about it. He should have known, should have seen it coming, because L has always wanted to kill him.
The croaking is above him now, and for the first time he sees its face past the hair and the blood. He sees one great, big eye, and L’s eyes have always been dark but now it’s so black that it seems like a pit in his face, a hole so deep that it stretches right through the back of his head and into eternity, and it stares at him without even a glint of light inside of it.
Squeezing his eyes shut he waits for his end, the blood rushing in his ears so loud he can hardly hear the gurgling.
He feels it, the hand on his neck, and while Light expects it to be cold it’s actually hot, so hot he expects it to leave bright raised welts where it meets his skin, and he wants to scream but instead he lets out a little hiccupping sob and the heat of the hand on his neck is reflected in the heat of his eyes as he holds back tears.
What he doesn’t expect is the hand to move, to slide up from the side of his neck to his cheek in a gentle caress, and then ever so gently the pad of its thumb rubs the space of skin just under his eye.
Startling, eyes flying open, he finds himself face-to-face with it now. Its expression hasn’t changed, is still emotionless and wide-eyed and terrifying, and yet as it stands over him it raises its second hand to join the first on Light’s opposite cheek, and it holds him in a way Light always craved for L to do in life.
Squeezing the pieces of bone in his hands, Light lets out an incredulous noise. His whole body shudders, once, and the searing hot hands on his face don’t move and don’t burn him or choke him or kill him in any other way, and Light knows.
In his heart of hearts, in the back of his head, in every inch of his rotten body, Light knows that L would never have killed him, that it wasn’t him or L, not at the very end. Light knew it since he wrote L’s name, since just before, but he couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to, or that’s what he tells himself. L holds him now, in the mouth of death, cradling the man who sent him to his demise. L can’t even kill him now.
The tears fall unbidden now, and Light drops the pieces of bone to be forgotten on the floor before reaching up to try and take L in his hands, but the moment he does the specter disappears like smoke in the breeze. He’s gone, and Light is alone in his bedroom like he always was, like he’s been this whole time, and Light wants nothing more than for him to come back and hold him again, for him to speak and taunt and laugh like he used to, like he did when he was alive, like he did before Light murdered him.
He’s never going to come back. The realization comes too late, the door already closed behind Light. The only remains of L are buried underground or broken on Light’s bedroom floor, and that’s all there ever will be of him again.
It’s been two hundred and fourteen hours since L. Lawliet has died, and Light misses the smell of sulfur.