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As always, Light laughs at him.
And the echoes crack, harshly, L’s worn-out bones.
“You?” Light all but spits in the incredulity.
Autumn wind is howling, chilling through L’s fissures.
“You. Lost. To me!” Light is screaming now, though it is redundant.
Though redundancy only gnaws at L.
“You lose!” Light is yelling, and L’s eardrums pulse in phantom pain.
Light screeches, “You. Love. Me?” he did not have to repeat it. “You are a fucking joke, that is what you are. You are pathetic!”
L’s mouth is not moving. His lungs don’t seem to move, either.
He thought it could be his last words.
They were.
And he never wanted to hear the answer.
It is maybe the twentieth time.
Light keeps getting mad, madder and madder, and L ponders whether Light could be as trapped as L is, in a circle of torture that never ends.
He must be.
Otherwise, why does he hate L more, more and more?
L wonders at which point in the cycle Light typically wakes up. Perhaps when L supposedly admits to having feelings? Most often, Light rages over L’s supposed love confession, mocks, acts disgusted. For an understandable reason, perhaps.
L can understand his disgust.
L suspects that the universes change - it does not seem to be one loop of the same timeline, as L consistently gets thrown into consciousness at dissimilar locations, at different stages of the case - based on the folders, the data he manages to notice. Noticing is difficult when, every time he awakens, he is already unable to breathe, his chest is fully seized. He’s dying.
But it’s not just that. The technological advancement stage changes. Fabric of clothes. State of the location.
Sometimes, there are bruises on Light’s wrist; though Light hides them.
L feels the same. Always.
Wishing he had the strength to move and the space to hide.
“I’ll destroy you!” Light roars another time, approximately thirty-first that L can recall, the words are familiar and meaningless.
There is sick amusement trembling in L’s chest, like the last phantom beats of his halted heart.
L is dying. He is already destroyed.
Tormenting him with cruel words serves no goal and brings no value. Comprehending that only serves to lacerate Light’s composure.
Perhaps, L would react if he could. But his muscles are useless now.
His mind, without his input, is learning to tune out heartache.
It’s abundant. Fruitless. It signals for him to turn away, to leave or run, and he can accomplish none of that.
He is learning to deafen, blind his senses.
Light’s shouting never fades. Louder and louder, it crushes into him like a cyclone; it used to shock the walls around them like peals of thunder.
“It’s a lie,” L whispers hoarsely in his head, as the darkness is encroaching on the corners of his vision. It’s a lie, of course. “These are all lies.”
He hopes that one day he’ll start dying in darkness and silence.
The thought is a comfort. Nothing else is.
L’s hypothesis is as follows: Light wakes up when L says some version of “I love you”.
Peculiarly, L does not recall this happening in their original timeline. Not only would L never be as trusting as to reveal it, but it would also open him to Light’s manipulations. Open him to even more hurt.
Light seems to take great pleasure in hurting him.
Or, maybe, it is just revenge for something so regrettably “pathetic” that it spoils the game. For something that Light can’t understand, much less not despise
That is understandable. Light’s rage, Light’s contempt.
The full spectrum of emotions L can effortlessly evoke in him; it’s a little flattering, even.
Small victories. Small happy moments.
Small mercies.
L feels phantomly better from them, really.
L’s loop starts with Light’s “You lose”.
It is triumphant, ordinarily.
Or used to be.
After what now feels like months of waking to live perhaps a minute or two, L concedes that he might have lost count of these “loops” on the eighth, perhaps.
It could have been a hundred times, and could have been twenty-five.
Light is undoubtedly going through them, as well. Otherwise, his behaviour would not be so absolutely escalating, as his thoughts spiral upwards, his conclusions solidify, and his hatred rises one note up with his every step.
Otherwise, like a script, L could have memorised this encounter.
The lone thing it does is become an escalating torment.
L tried, and tried, and tried speaking to Light, uttering a single word, making some kind of gesture; however, it proved to be quite a challenge given his half-paralysed muscles and stilled vocal cords.
Without that power, he was not about to give Light any indication that each piece of nightmare was getting stored in his memory.
Light would have had too many reasons to grind him into dust.
And L would have to die about a hundred more times to do that.
He dies a dozen times, maybe, when it happens.
The first phrase Light screams makes him close his eyes.
And Light falls silent.
L can’t breathe through it - it is physically impossible now - but he can focus on filling his mind with thoughts quiet, fragmented, sensations-focused, useless.
Stand there unsteadily until his body loses the last grains of balance and crashes onto the gravel-covered, concrete floor.
He knows that process intimately.
This time, he simply must not look at Light.
“What the hell…” Light whispers. The tone is unhappy; L was imagining that it would, at least partially, have victory curled in it like a monster avenged and satisfied.
Light’s intelligence has been L’s nicotine. L has no addiction left in him, and the feelings fluttery and cloudlike rend at him now.
His unusable throat is feeling parched.
“You’re alive!” Light cries out, two heavy, shaking steps closer, eyes wet and furious, and it’s a thunderbolt lighting up L’s funeral pyre.
He can’t talk anymore.
L does not know for certain why Light persistently keeps trying to break him every time, at his end.
Human hatred does not run this deep. Resentment is often deep waters, and fury is turbulent currents. Light is worse. He is a tempest on its own - and this is a maelstrom devouring them “alive”.
L’s mind is a mess. Thoughts like sick creatures and decaying sea plant life.
Light is raging at him, coming closer, and closer, and closer, each word tightening the net around him.
L closes his eyes until he falls.
Light is mad at him.
L cannot fully understand it.
He is fully aware that the mind overtaken by the shackles of death cannot perform appropriate functions. He is cognizant that the second he becomes awake, his brain is confounded with memories searing it with an overbearing amount of trauma no human can safely handle.
Neural connections are not supposed to be able to char that fast - yet it feels like every version of him that has come before has had some shadow of this torment already enswathing, suffocating him - them. When he comes to it, the shadow becomes charcoal at best and gasoline at worst, and his dying, half-dead thoughts are embers made for it.
He wonders what is happening to them. To him. Have they truly lived? Can they ever survive? By the logic of justice and monsters, this must be a purgatory of sorts - looping minutes, junctures of reality tethered to two unexplainable landmarks in their history.
Why “I love you”?
Why “You lose”?
L would never say the former and could never say the latter.
Light has never felt the former and had been euphoric over the possibility of saying the latter.
Has something changed in him? For him?
L wouldn’t know.
Purgatory is meant to have a purpose.
It is meant to torture and purify, and, perhaps, some centuries ago, at some intersections of the crossroads of choices they had never made or gotten to make in the first place, someone decided that Light must win and L must suffer. That every story is a circle of events that ends with L dead without Light, and Light - beginning to take over the world, as, it seems, the narrative would always turn out to be.
L sees the point in characters that are doomed from the start. In Light’s possibly short life, Light gets to drown the world in his disdain for it, and rule the wasteland where his dreams lie six feet under.
And L was the first real thing for him to burn.
L doesn’t know when Light died or how. But L does only ever keep his gaze on the truth of it all, when he can, and deducing what could have brought Light’s expected end is painfully simple.
L used to walk to his demise, and now he can only stand there for Light.
Maybe Light is tired of boredom.
“Look at me!” Light rages. It is borderline deranged, and L hadn’t seen it going any other way.
He failed, as his stories kept foretelling he would.
His humanity would demolish him. He knew that and despised it as much as he wished he could despise Light.
Light would eventually conquer the fortresses of his heart and mind; make him kneel.
The knowledge infuriates, devastates L more than anything has ever could.
His body is trembling, and the force of it was almost inhuman once - when L could have won, still, - and now, it’s ash.
He kneels for Light - his own choice, his admittance.
Not devastation.
Not defeat.
Not one that L can’t fathom.
L is quite certain he knows Light’s sins. It is killing, it is betrayals, manipulations, and lies.
Though one could argue that Light’s lies often do more good than bad - after all, his play in innocence and justice protects people from the unkind truth. Light’s lies are the reasons that the Task Force members didn’t blame themselves for believing in him, for indirectly letting him kill. Light’s lies are the reasons his family slept soundly at night. Light’s lies were a reason Misa Amane was happy, and Kira’s followers had hope that the future would be brave, bright, fair - even if it could never have been.
Light’s lies were the reason L had once learned what real hope for connection feels like.
Even if it did not last.
L used to believe he would choose being loved over being the one in love any day.
Up until he learned that being loved without loving could be boredom and confinement of its own.
And loving, even with the excruciating pain and haunting loneliness, made him feel as if he could have once truly lived.
L was not certain what his own sins were.
Was it that he didn’t save enough people? Was it that he let Light live?
Was it that he loved Light?
Was it that he did not find a way to, post-mortem, force Light to repent?
L did not believe that this was ever possible. Light would never admit that he was wrong. That gods did not need to be cruel. That they could measure victory in something other than the damage they’d cause.
That they did not have to decimate everything in their way. They could have merely chosen a different path.
Light would never consider playing in retribution - much less living or dying for it.
So what could Light realistically have grasped from this seemingly endless cycle? Purgatory was meant to be a cycle of torment. L was not assuming that torment of his own bore any emotional significance to Light; nonetheless, L’s admittance of being human in the form of confession of love surely was the catalyst of what supposedly should have been some impactful change. Based on Light’s explosive behaviours, L’s life was closing each iteration.
As if Light was expected to acknowledge L’s suffering eventually. To wish to save him rather than kill him.
The theory was too kind. Rational to a fault. Dreaming of Light’s victory being pyrrhic…
L could not rely on his judgment on this occasion.
“Bow,” Light throws at him the next time, more composed than L remembers him having been in long flickers of days and nights.
L kneels before Light can finish the word.
Light hates it with his whole black heart.
L doesn’t claim to know him.
L doesn’t attempt to talk.
L stares up at him - and it feels, for them both, as if L is staring Light down instead.
Light hates him more.
Hazily, L has been wondering why this punishment.
Was he destined to recognise that Light had won? Light has been triumphing over him time and time again.
What lesson was worth L’s pain?
What repentance was required to complete it?
If they were someone else, and L were assessing the near-ouroboros of it, he would suppose that his vice was giving up on himself too fast; being drawn to Light, coming too close for survival, not attempting to confess, to give in enough to get a chance to negotiate with Light. Precisely what the loop was pushing him to do, while not fully allowing it. Teaching rather than giving a chance to orchestrate an insincere performance.
Perhaps L should have confessed to pretend to kneel. Pretend to bow.
Exactly what L was doing now, to outplay Light in Light’s unwilling game.
What was L fated to do to make amends with the world he let Light flood with blood?
Perhaps he was meant to admit to his pain? If not speak the words, then explain in some more visceral way.
He disdained the idea. If incorrect, it could effortlessly condemn him to shatter under the weight of the act.
He could not deduce what Light had to say.
Killing L could not have been his agony.
L does not hope it will end.
Hope is destructive. Overly specific. Difficult to subdue.
Hope has been his downfall before.
It prevented him from being harsher. From fighting more offensively.
From being heartless, uncaring, brutal.
Inhuman.
A good man could never have brought Light down.
L was not truly good - but he was too kind.
He was paying the price a thousandfold for his compassion, his wish to understand, the desire to be close.
It had not hit him until he was on his knees once more, and Light was prowling closer, closer than ever before.
L is all tense, wound up tight.
His mind is in a haze. His mind is not his own.
And his body, as usual, is starting to slow down, lignifying, readying to slow down and, ultimately, stop the breathing.
Repeat experience has been growing cutting, and grating. The depth of the wounds is reaching too near to the brain, heart, lungs.
It is teaching his systems to brace for the pain. To relax for the last breath. To prepare for the darkness enveloping his senses.
He does not bow as Light closes the distance. He merely cannot hold his head up anymore - not the way he has managed before.
Light grips his chin, trying to force it to lift.
And L hates with despair the moment his strength fails and Light succeeds.
Just as the first time, L shuts his eyes on his volition.
His last exhale shakes.
And he feels, like in a play Light can admire later, for his triumph, the fresh chill slide down his cheek.
He wakes up on the floor, in Light’s arms.
Light is holding him in a death grip. L’s arms are weakly resting on Light’s forearms, and his face is buried in Light’s neck - not on L’s initiative, L is sure.
The room and they are tainted crimson. The colour seemed different then; finally, L can see the shade clearly.
Light’s presence is warm, and his closeness is asphyxiating.
The force of his hold feels like the roughness of tight, rusty chains.
“I don’t want to kill you,” Light’s voice rumbles, hoarse; from anger, or distress, or both - L may not know. “I can’t… defeat you if you’re dead.”
L closes his eyes, and Light’s breathing stops as he feels it.
L opens his eyes specifically to let him inhale.
“It is useless if you never acknowledge my victory and just…”
“It was a trial,” L states the obvious. “Somehow, I am not certain it was the last one.”
Light is silent for a heartbeat before he laughs, noise strained and dark.
“Purgatory,” he says.
L agrees.
“Purgatory.”
It surely is more comfortable to breathe without a vise compressing his chest.
He attempts to push away from Light, and Light grips him harder; L is quite confident that one of his ligaments cracks.
“You have nothing to say?” Light asks. He is aiming to sound dangerous, but L has been torn apart by his little fangs enough not to regret tearing back at him.
“Don’t demand compassion,” L says, persisting in getting his partially numb limbs to resist the embrace. “Desperation does not suit you.”
“Desperation?” Light hisses. L is parched and won’t compete with him in screaming. “You, fucking…”
L lightly kicks him in the ribs and, once Light instinctively loosens his hold, L moves off his lap.
“That’s enough,” L cuts any further protests at the root. The monitors near them are shining pale white with “All data deletion”, and the wax figures of panicked people around them are unmoving, stuck without life or faces. “We have evidently only gotten through one circle of this hell, and, based on the fact that we are returned to the position of crisis, there are likely more challenges on the way. I do not wish to waste any more…”
“You won’t even talk to me?!” Light’s scream is…
Wet, maybe.
Wetness is typically associated with something other than fury.
L holds steady, “You have not secured a second of my trust, therefore…”
“Every. Single. Time,” Light wedges between L’s defences. “That you… said that… what you said to me, you were already dying!”
And that stops everything.
L gets dazed by him for an unreasonably long moment of time.
He is astounded as Light seems to be telling the truth - such emotions always pierce the veils of lies.
It is that L was not equipped to see this as the truth.
It is quite awkward, really.
The shards of evidence settle together, cracks unfilled, though undeniably fitting. Fitting to the extent which makes it impossible to dismiss the pattern.
Dust of old, untouched conversations, rubble of walls and bridges devastated glimmer in the twilight, between the pieces.
“What… are you claiming, exactly?” L begins cautiously.
A wise habit.
Instead of “You know”, Light bites with “Don’t ask me”.
Shadow of parchedness is heard in his voice.
L sees why Light would have been upset.
It is unfair. Control wrenched out of his hands.
Rage at the pain of being powerless.
At L recursively, virtually post-mortem, giving him something Light cannot even touch, cannot reach.
And L - not the awakened one, but the one belonging to each respective universe, - not considering that his admittance could have ever truly thrown Kira off.
Could have been something Kira wanted to take for himself.
Whether out of desire, or vengeance, or need for something. Some trophy, conclusion. Understanding.
Hold.
…Oh.
“Either way…” L starts off.
Light snaps, “Stop it!”
“Either way,” L persists, “Whether or not we work with who we have been, what we have done, we might very well still end up hell, or limbo, or afterlife of a similar kind.”
That shuts Light up.
And L much prefers it to talking about feelings.
To letting Light finally brush his exhausted heart, blistered and buried under flakes of drying blood, with fingertips.
L is not fond of the possibility of Light grazing it again.
Some… other time.
“You can’t keep running,” Light grits out.
“I have been made to run,” L says. “Mentally, from destruction. Physically, I have been made still.”
Light falls into silence once more.
“Forget about me for a moment,” L says evenly. “We are finished with that segment. What had been done has been done.”
“You did this to yourself,” Light retorts.
L lets it slide, for arguing with Kira is an irksome waste of his time.
“Because of meeting you, perhaps,” he fake-muses. “Because of your cruelty and pride.”
“You’re just as arrogant and ruthless…” Light pushes in the rarest bout of self-awareness, though his cadence does not have a flicker of self-criticism.
“I wish to be out of here,” L interjects. “If you, for some arbitrary, perplexing reason, do not - don’t stand in my way.”
Light does not rush to escape.
Who knows why.
“Don’t try to leave,” Light says, colder, eventually.
And, despite his best efforts, L still registers a subdued “Don’t leave me”.