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He’s already ruined his dress pants before he starts to touch himself. The ground under Light’s knees is soft. The recently disturbed earth gives under his weight. His knees, his shins, the tops of his nicest shoes leave an impression, marking his place in the mud.
It’s wet too, under him, like garden soil. His legs are going cold as the dampness seeps through the cotton twill and starts to bleed the heat from his body. A pebble digs into his ankle.
Light is shaking. His fingers rest on the faux gold of his belt buckle, but he isn't moving to flick the pin away from the frame. Bile rises in the back of his throat and it makes his face twitch. Everything keeps turning up in a sick sort of smile. His mouth feels wrong, unnaturally stretched and pulled, but he can’t drop the expression. His lips sting, dry, spit in the middle.
It isn't until his gums start to burn and his mouth tastes a little like blood that Light realizes he’s been breathing like he’s running track. Like he’s playing tennis. He swallows hard but his throat is so tight that he can’t manage. He’s wracked by a sputtering cough. His lungs burn.
Theory devised by The A.C.E: after an intense workout, the mucous membranes of your nose and throat can rupture and begin to bleed. These small breakages cause blood to run down the back of the palate, leading to a metallic taste in the back of the throat.
He laughs now, loud and sick, and his throat keeps spasming. He’s alone, no million cameras, no bugs, no chain. A tremor runs through him, rolls out from his chest and ends in his fingertips. Light bends to touch one hand to the dirt. He pushes his nails into the grit, making a fist in the black earth.
Everyone has gone home. He’d stood silently for nearly an hour waiting for his father to give up on him. Soichiro had reached into the pockets of his black suit and withdrawn his wallet. He’d given Light money for a taxi home, told Light that, “a man has to move on,” and then left.
It’s windy today, cold and overcast. The sun is falling below the horizon in a slow arc, blanketed by red clouds. Light looks down at his hand, red too. Glowing faintly.
—
Killing L. Killing L is all Light has thought about for the last 343 days. Daily. All day. The infinite seconds and the infinite gaps between those seconds contained nothing else. He has grown heavy with it. Time has grown heavy with it, bent and warped around it.
Theory devised by Yagami Light: Killing L, the thought, the action, has mass and thus takes up physical space.
Theory devised by Yagami Light: Mass in physical space can distort time. Time and space affect each other like lovers.
Everything else in Light’s mind has been pushed aside, the pink lobes of his brain taking new shape to accommodate this weighty thought. He can feel his body contort to carry it; this need, this burden. Light’s insides have slid around: pink, dark, wet. The body is shockingly malleable. Light has proven this to himself. His brain, his whole body in fact, has warped into something unfamiliar to accommodate Killing L . It isn’t unlike the way a woman’s organs will shift to make room for a child. Things in him pull and become misshapen. Something terrible is taking place within the unreachable parts of him. He is sick, bloated with the need. Or he is glowing with it.
Theory devised by NIPH: After pregnancy, women experience permanent changes to the body including the shape and density of certain bone structures. Some categorize this as a negative experience.
—
Time is a row of silver buckets suspended in black space.
Theory devised by Yagami Light: Time is a row of silver buckets suspended in black space.
Every bucket is spilling over with killing L. The thought of killing L is water or a darker fluid. It cusps the shiny lips of all those shiny buckets. Killing L is thicker than water so it slides, viscous, down the clean metal faces of the pails. The liquid runs in rivulets down the metal and drips off into the open, waiting void. And then the void is full too. The liquid rises, filling the space like a breached hull, a ship taking on water.
One could choke on killing L because of its viscosity and slightly bitter taste.
Theory devised by NIH: One can drown in less than an inch of water.
Light has not left that room, not really. He has not left those seconds between the silvery ring of L’s spoon hitting the floor and the man’s body crashing into his own. The ribbon of time frays there, for Light. Or it curls back on itself, stitches its ends together. Maybe Light stands surrounded by that ring. Maybe it blindfolds him. Maybe he is the string, ends tied together, beginning and end indeterminable.
Theory devised by W.B. Yeats: Time can be broken down into a series of wheels or circular graphs.
—
The headstone before Light is a stand-in. It’s a substitute. The face of the lesser stone is glassy and polished all the same. Light watches his reflection untuck his shirt, watches the trembling motion.
At a stonemasonry thousands of miles away, an artisan is hewing the granite that they will shape—with hand tools—into the permanent headstone. The stenciling for the lettering is traditionally applied by rubber stamp. The rubber stamp will be hand carved as well. The name will not be L’s name.
Theory devised by H.S. Zim, al-Kindi, and others: The roman letter L ranks as the eleventh most frequently used letter. It is the most commonly doubled letter. The letter L appears on most British and Roman letter keyboards on the home row—indicating the high frequency of its usage.
There is so much more whittling involved in burial than Light could have predicted.
Theory devised by Herodotus and others: Whittling is, perhaps, the oldest human art form.
—
The day after L’s death, Light’s father asks him what L might have preferred to happen to his corpse. He doesn’t pull Light aside to ask. This conversation takes place in front of the whole task force. It happens in the room L died in. Light is standing about seven paces away from where he’d held the body.
Soichiro has to ask. Anything that might have been on file, a will, a burial plan, was wiped clean along with everything else in the digital flood.
The whole task force turns to Light then. They all assume that L and Light had broached the subject of preferred body disposal during one of their late nights. And they had.
—
In early September L’s feet are cold. L’s feet are touching Light’s feet. It’s not an accident. Neither of them will own up to it or admit there is anything to own up to.
Light doesnt know very much about who L is. He knows even less about himself.
What Light does know is that he aches every night.
In September, in their shared bed, L says he’d like to be completely obliterated after death.
“I suppose cremation. Dumped into some body of water with impossibly fast straights so I'd disperse. I’d be fish food, or perhaps less than that. Pieces so small they wouldn’t be worth eating. Nothing.”
Light’s body settles closer to L’s body.
“I don’t understand,” Light says.
L nods. “You shouldn’t.”
In September L talks too casually about his own death. They are always in bed when it happens. This might mean something. This might be an invitation to ask the kinds of questions that might ruin everything.
L wonders about it aloud. Tells stories in his monotone about sexually motivated killers. It’s like he’s trying to help bring Light up, do a little raising. It edges on disturbingly paternal at times.
“Murders are about sex more often than one might think, Light-kun.”
“I know.”
“It’s not uncommon for the most complicated cases to boil down to nothing. Just some repressed desire, a latent something.”
“I know.”
L turns to face him, shifts so that his shoulder touches Light’s. “If Kira were to succeed in killing me, do you think he’d find it sexually gratifying?”
L doesn’t look frightened in the least. This scares Light. He goes on aching, pressing his thighs together.
—
And then months pass and Light kills L. Killing L occurs. Light’s body does not return to normal.
In his new, body Light looks to the task force and they look back to him.
“Do you know, Light, what he might have liked?” Soichiro asks so gently with his worried-father face.
Light has creative freedom. Total control. He is the only person alive who knows that L had always wanted his body to disappear completely. No one knows but him. No one has a say about what happens L’s body but him. Light is sick with freedom after all those months of confinement and restricted movement.
Theory devised by Walz, Muhlberger, and Pauli: Many animals, including humans, exhibit thigmotactic behavior when made to exist in large, open spaces. This biological instinct can present itself as panic when an animal is provided with too much freedom of movement.
Soichiro tries again when Light doesn’t answer. “Something will have to be done with the body regardless, son.”
Light’s mouth forms the word “grave” without his permission. And then it pours out of him, “a burial, he wanted a burial. Here. In Japan. And an open casket. And—” he’d choked here, in front of his father, “an autopsy. To see if Kira left anything inside.” When he excuses himself to vomit, nothing comes up.
Theory devised by Michael Gershon: Some nerve cells in the gut operate independently of the central nervous system. The gut is the second brain.
—
Light does some research into how headstones are made. He does some research about fonts and serifs and stateliness. With Watari dead, the aesthetic considerations are left to Light. Light: the surviving friend. Light: the only friend. He dips into L’s personal funds to pay for the man’s funeral.
Headstones on average cost between 90,000 and 270,00 yen. You will pay more for handmade stones. You will pay more if all records of the creation of the stone must be destroyed. You will pay more if all artisans are required to sign an NDA. You will pay even more if you must make secret even the traces of your secrecy.
In total, you will not scrape even one tenth of a percent off of the dead man's wealth. You will use the dead man’s money to buy a suit. This suit is the first suit your father did not pay for. The dead man only ever wore stretch denim and cotton blend.
Theory devised by the pigment industry, generally: White is the cheapest color of clothing. No dye is required. However, the maintenance of white clothing may be more costly.
L’s shirts are burned. All of his personal artifacts are. Men in dark suits with English accents arrive a day after the death and start carrying things out of taskforce headquarters in matte metal boxes with fat latches dangling off the side. The clicking of latch slapping steel dives Light up the wall and then some.
He feels like he’s being mocked.
That night, when he takes the elevator—silent, alone—up to their old quarters to gather his things Light finds every drawer open. The kitchenette has been cleared of teacups and silver spoons. Counters have been wiped down. Hairs have been plucked from sink basins.
The whole place smells like antiseptic.
In the bedroom Light finds that the sheets have been stripped.
—
Light pushes his hand further into the dirt until his fingers disappear. The ground is alive with so many little things, ants and earthworms. Grabbing a fistful, Light lifts his hand to his face and investigates the dark mass. Something in it squirms. Light’s stomach flips.
He makes a fist. There is no more movement in his hand.
He wipes his palm on his thigh. It does nothing to clean his hand. He’s only managing to push the dirt around.
Touching his own thigh makes him ache. In the pit of his stomach something larger than his conscious mind flickers, grows hot.
—
When Light kills L, he is sure to hold the other man’s body. It’s the best thing he’s ever felt or ever will feel again. He will return again and again to this moment, knowingly trap himself within a loop he constructs. However there are smaller reels of film he can run before the main picture.
Theory devised by Yagami Light: A heart attack happens in stages under normal circumstances. The death note perfectly replicates all of these stages. Death by heart attack is not instantaneous.
Beside him, L begins to breathe hard. He clears his throat. Light has never seen L out of breath. It makes the man look weaker, older. Light wets his lips as a cold thrill works its way up his spine. Light feels his own pulse in his face.
L rolls his shoulders unconsciously, the man is too busy staring up at the screen where Watari is dying. L is experiencing pain in his arms.
And then L is trying to stand, working his jaw.
Theory devised by NIPH: Pain from a heart attack will radiate through the body. This pain typically feels more like pressure, and so is often ignored by patients.
Theory devised by NIPH: A heart attack can last up to 20 minutes.
Theory devised by NIPH: Some heart attacks are painless.
L begins to fall. Light’s knees hit the floor with a sickening thud. The pain doesn’t register.
L is heavier than he’d expected. They haven’t touched like this since they fought. His shoulder is sharp where it connects first with Light’s rib cage. It’s like a dull stabbing.
L is warm in his arms, across his lap. Light has never touched someone so completely, never held on to another body like this. He becomes aware of lost time.
Light fails to make sense of his own expression. The muscles of his face contract and pull tight. He shivers hard when he and L make eye contact.
Theory devised by Rudolf Virchow: cell death throughout the body begins within 5 minutes of low oxygen intake or circulation.
L gasps a little, his body taking in air, but his heart failing to force the oxygenated blood to his brain. His lips are going a startling blue, his pupils dilate. L’s brain is dying; Light is choking it, taking from it, depriving it of something it needs. Light’s own mouth falls open.
Light is feeling sick so he smiles like it.
L looks shocked for a moment; the feeling of a heart attack is a new sensation. There are so few things L doesn't know. There are data points to register, even now, and L does so on impulse. Light can see him thinking—the mad way his eyes dart around. And then the man looks quietly pleased. He’s learned something new.
Theory devised by Virgina Woolf: death is the only experience one will never be able to describe.
L is surprised by the sensation of dying. He is not surprised by Light. L knows him in that moment as L has known him in every moment.
However, It is only in that moment, under L’s gaze, that Light begins to know himself.
Light sees himself from impossible angles: sees his own face tilted up to meet the eyeline of someone taller; sees the back of his own neck where his hair brushes the first notch of his spine; sees his naked shoulder blades in the shower.
Light can see his own cruelty, his own brilliance. He can see his reliance on his father and mother, his imperfect devotion to his sister. His pettiness, anger, and childish insistence that things could be made better with the use of a single blunt tool.
He comes to know that he is beautiful and cold, and wrong about many things. He is afraid like a child. He is a child. He is destructive, dangerous, and unwell. Again and again Light sees his own fear. He is full of fear. He spends most of every day afraid.
He sees the disdain he levels at others. The disgust he holds for the world. He sees his loneliness. Emptiness. The hours he spends isolated. The superficial, shallow connection he has to his peers. His peerlessness.
He sees his displays for what they might be, what they most likely are. He understands his own myth-making as myth-making. He understands his willful separation from the rest of society. The selfishness of his martyrdom. The egoism of his self-imposed pseudo-intellectual isolation. He sees every force—supernatural and otherwise—that has dragged him kicking and screaming away from connection.
His moments of joy are only moments of successful strategizing. He is unhappy. He sees the missed chances. The wrong choices.
There is something pathetic about him; about his self-abnegation; the self-righteous ways in which he buries needs. He sees his own desperation and the destruction it has wrought.
He sees his life as it is, as all lives are: a series of means with no ends. There is only process. There is no state of having become.
And there is more. He sees himself until there is nothing. He sees until he sees the spaces between himself and all his personas. He sees those spaces filling with this death. He sees those spaces emptying out again.
And then L’s gaze goes blank.
He is brain dead before his neck goes limp.
When L stops breathing Light does not feel victorious. He does not feel safe. He feels exposed, stripped.
And then he is being pulled away from the body by rough hands. He looks over his shoulder fighting out of the other person’s grip. It’s Aizawa. Light shoves the other man off and hits the ground, his knees taking the brunt of his fall again.
His father is bent over L, doing chest compressions with folded hands. He’s counting out loud, even toned, reliable in a crisis. Mogi is setting the plastic body of the defibrillator on the tiled floor, tearing open the foil packets of the chest pads.
There is one of those machines in every room beside every door. They dangle in their red bags from a hook under signage reading AED.There are defibrillators in the elevators too.
L is a paranoid man. Was a paranoid man.
The kit comes with silver scissors. Light’s father is cutting L’s shirt off of him. The two flaps of white fabric fall open. L looks like a pale bird that has spun out mid flight.
The machine starts up, and a clipped female voice gives instructions: “Apply pad to patient's bare chest.”
Light is crawling back toward the body. He moves unconsciously, pulled toward L. He fails to register what his father is shouting at him.
The machine whirs. It's too-steady voice says “Do not touch the patient.” Aizawa grabs him again, pulls him away from L by the ankle. And then L’s body convulses. The force of it pushes air out of his lungs.
Aizawa is shouting at Light, saying something about voltage, but it’s all very, very far away.
He wants to be alone with L. He doesn't like all these other people here, intruding.
—
Light follows L’s corpse around like he’s haunting it. He doesn’t quite know how to leave it alone. He sits in the back of the ambulance, watches strangers put their hands all over L’s body. One of the EMTs opens L’s mouth with a cupped hand, says something about plasticity. No rigor mortis.
His father keeps telling Light not to watch. Light hardly blinks the whole ride to the hospital.
They fit a tube down L’s throat. The sound it makes; like L’s body is choking, capable of rejecting things even in death.
The doctors work L’s lungs for him. They wait on him.
Light trails the gurney. L is so pale against the green sheets. They haven't covered his face yet because L is not legally dead. Light is the only one in the world right now who knows the truth. Light knows and L knows. Another one of their secrets.
Light runs one finger over L’s wrist as they walk flanked by two EMT’s. He knows he is touching a corpse; everyone else is still uncertain as to what L is.
Theory devised by Schrödinger: Certain systems at the atomic level can exist simultaneously in mutually exclusive states. Observation by an external force collapses any possible superpositions into a single, definable state.
Light’s face goes hot, his hands numb.
Soichiro is walking ahead, flashing his badge to make the doctors open doors. He does all the talking, voice collected and authoritative. Light follows his father, saying nothing. He doesn't have a badge of his own to flash.
Light is wearing new shoes that day. They squeak on the linoleum flooring with every step.
The doctors push Light aside once they are in the operating room. He expects to be kicked out, thrown into some waiting room like this death, L’s death , is the same as any other. So Light makes himself small in a corner, takes up as little room as he can.
Either he is tacitly permitted to stay, or he makes himself so still, so unobtrusive, that the doctors don't stop to worry about him.
He can't see L’s face though the crowd of bodies around him. They perform compressions, the movement of the doctor's straight backs and locked arms so distinct. They stop every two minutes to hit L with increasingly high voltage.
L jolts and gasps every time and Light has to remind himself that it’s only air being forced up through L’s throat. The man isn't breathing. The Note is irreversible.
Only L’s arm is visible to Light through a gap in the wall of green scrubs. His forearm is so pale and thin. A doctor lifts it, ties a tourniquet around the limb, and starts flicking the inside of his elbow. They inject L with something and then they wheel him back out of the room, one of the doctors walking with a strange sideways step to continue administering CPR as they walk. Two others flank him, removing electrodes from L’s chest.
Light is not allowed to follow when L is taken into the room with the gamma camera. Soichro’s badge accomplishes nothing. A nurse, a younger man who pulls his mask down to appear more personable, explains to Soichiro that L has been administered a tiny dose of radiation to allow for his blood flow to be photographed.
Theory devised by Henri Becquerel: All visible light is a form of radiation.
No one speaks to Light. He feels like a child.
—
When he first learns that L was resuscitated successfully four times, he excuses himself to go be sick in the restroom attached to the waiting room. The overheads wash him out. Light has never looked so pale. The tile floor is absurdly shiney, clean to the point of disorienting.
L died five times. Light made him die five times.
He wishes he were in the bathroom he’d shared with L, the one they’d fitted with a plush bath mat near the toilet to remove one of the unnecessarily indignities of throwing up.
For the first time in his life, nauseous and cried-out on the floor of a public restroom, Light thinks that he might enjoy killing himself. The thought passes quickly, so quickly, that Light hardly manages to register it tearing through his mind.
It comes back to him later, occasionally.
—
L tells him that what they do is not sex. It's not sex because L and Light are two people who can never have sex. Light becomes okay with this.
L jokes about Light’s virginity.
L jokes about keeping him intact.
L jokes about sending him home to his father untouched.
L jokes about sending him home to his father raped.
L says things that make Light beg to be raped.
They lay in bed together breathing as one larger creature. Light is allowed to hold L’s hand still under the covers and rut into it. They are both clothed.
”What would you do,” Light asks one night, breath hot against L’s shoulder, “if we were two different people?”
L smiles and shakes his head, “nothing.”
Light comes and then he cries on his side of the bed. L does not move to comfort him.
—
Light smears dirt against the line of his zipper and then along the seam of his pant leg. He thinks that he might deserve to be dead. He thinks that he might deserve it, and he thinks it might make him feel a little better.
Light undoes his belt with one hand. The soft click of the metal makes him shiver.
He’s unobserved now.
No one is looking. It’s growing dark. He can hardly see his own hand. He shuts his eyes anyway—squeezes them shut so hard it hurts, so hard it pulls his cheeks and forces a grimace onto his face.
Theory devised by Herodotus: A living person may continue to desire the body of the deceased. King Herod continued to engage sexually with his wife’s body for seven years after he murdered her.
Light palms himself though the white fabric of his underwear. He dry heaves but does not stop. He is sick, but he has always been sick in some way. But no one is here to know how sick he is anymore. No one can tell him. The only person who could—who did— is between his thighs, 6 feet below him.
He’s hard. It makes him nauseous. His nose is running, top lip damp and shiny. He licks over the spot reflexively and sniffs.
He crawls on his hands and knees until he can rest his forehead against the smooth stone cross. L never believed in any God.
—
Special exceptions are always being made for the Kira investigation. Once such special exception has allowed Light to end up here, in an annexed room to a surgical theater.
Light is here alone. No one else wanted to come. Light is not a grateful person, but in his mind he thanks his father, Matsuda, Mogi, and Aizawa in that order.
There are two rows of benches in this small, dim room. It’s not unlike a lecture hall. In front of each bench is a single long slat of wood, tilted slightly. It’s clear that this room is meant for medical students who would rest their notebooks against the long, slanted desk.
Light has no notebook of any kind on his person. He keeps his hands in his lap.
L is a pane of glass away—his body is, anyway.
He looks so fragile, thinner and grayish in death. His cheeks, which had always been a little hollow, now read gaunt.
L’s body is naked, of course. Practicalities. Still, Light finds himself chewing on his lips. It’s a terrible habit but it settles him. He licks his bottom lip, searching for purchase for his teeth. The skin is tacky between his incisors.
Light wonders why L isn’t shivering, naked in that room with strangers, and then he remembers all over again. This is what L is now; unmoving, quiet, an object.
The morticians—there are three of them—begin work. To Light they look idle, too relaxed in their passing of scalpels. Light can’t hear them through the glass, but they seem almost chatty amongst themselves. Gossips. Light imagines names for them and imagines writing those names down in the Note.
They cut him open in the shape of a Y, and then they peel back the layers of him. One of the flaps covers L’s face.
The examination table is on a slight incline. A thin stream of water runs down the metal slab. There are little slats in the table around L’s bluish feet that allow the blood-water to escape. So much of L is being lost down the drain—so much blood tossed out like nothing. They are losing so much of him.
A little panicked something flutters to life in Light’s chest. For a stupid, wholly irrational moment, he imagines opening up that drain. He imagines fitting his hand into the wet dark to gather up the smallest pieces of L.
He’d ladle handfuls of L out of the dark vortex of the drain. He’d rescue all of him. Hold him again, wet and sloshing in the bowl of his palms, but it’d still be a kind of holding.
He can almost feel it, the cold, dead blood cupped in his hands. It’d be pinkish, so diluted by all that water, but it would still be L. L would be in his hands and Light would figure out some way to store him, bottle him up.
He could drink it.
Theory devised by the Hellens: Hema is synonymous with life itself. When one is wounded, they leak their life.
Theory devised by Homer: Blood is black.
Light crosses his legs. He’s dizzy again.
When they crack open L’s chest. He hears it through the glass. It sounds like a silver ax meeting the reedy trunk of a sapling.
It sounds like a surgical retractor has been set between the two halves of a sawed open ribcage and widened. It's a new sound.
Light has been breathing open mouthed for the last ten minutes. When he swallows his throat sticks, dry.
Light has never seen the inside of a body. He’s seen drawings in textbooks, of course; even a few black and white photos, reduced and grainy, on biology exams.
The lines, the edges between organs, are harder to make out in real life. Really, it’s impossible to tell anything apart in all that wet red.
The photos, the classes have done nothing to prepare him.
The morticians root around inside L. His outside twitches with their movements.
Light looks down to his lap again and again.
And then they start to remove parts of L. They unpack him.
Everything is weighed in sterile glossy trays. His lungs are dark. His heart is the size of a fist. It drips.
And then one of the men in scrubs pushes back L’s bangs and takes a scalpel to his forehead.
Scalpel and then precision bone saw and then the top of L’d head comes off.
Light makes a sound. His hands itch. Things happen quickly.
Light sees L’s brain.
Light hand moves to his pocket.
Light shifts his hand within his pocket.
Light sighs like he’s had the wind knocked out of him.
Brains are, as a rule, smaller than we’d like them to be. The home of consciousness is more cramped than our living experience might imply.
Original origin of theory unknown: Every thought had in a lifetime weighs, on average, 3 pounds.
L’s brain fits nicely between two hands. L’s brain is firm. L’s brain is carried to a new table and set there. L’s brain waits, gray and pink and shining, alone on the metal slab. L’s brain is introduced to a long, thin knife.
Light jumps to his feet and arrives at the glass in a single stride. He batters the glass with both fists. The bullet proof barrier rattles in its frame.
The morticians look to him. Their heads turn slow.
Light is driving the side of his fist into the glass with the weight of his whole body.
—
The stone is cold on his tongue, his lips. He’s grinding himself against his palm in time with the wet sobs that keep ripping their way out of his chest and up his throat.
“You make me fucking disgusting,” he mumbles into the grave.
He can’t stop speaking now that he's started. He doesn’t recognize his own voice, raw with tears and unsteady moans.
“You are nothing,” he gasps. “More disgusting. More than me. You’re more—You’re the—You were—”
Light sobs, hiccups like a child, shouts in wordless frustration.
He pushes his underwear down and wraps a punishing fist around himself. Air rushes out of his lungs like he’s been punched. He can feel the grit of the dirt in his palm against his dick. It hurts. More than anything, it hurts.
It’s getting colder, the sun completely swallowed up by the horizon. His fingers feel raw, stiff at the joints.
Light shifts his hips forward, touches the head of his cock to the unblemished face of the headstone. He hisses, icy against his skin.
“Can’t fucking stop me.” He moans and then his throat closes up and he coughs hard until he dry heaves again. He’s eaten nothing in forty-two hours.
He’s smearing precum all over the stone. It just stings. It’s too cold. He’s pressing himself too hard against an unforgiving surface. There is no physical pleasure.
The lettering of the stone is raised; fresh and angular.
“Can’t stop me.” He says again, cupping his hand against the cross and forcing his dick into the space he’s made. He presses down hard, grinds himself into the stone until he’s gritting his teeth and seeing white bursts of light behind his eyelids.
He pulls away from the stone with a whimper. His dick throbs, it’s painful. The skin is bright red, growing numb. There’s dirt on him there. He’s so pathetic.
He hits the ground with a balled fist.
“You got me dirty,” he shouts like he’ll get an answer, “stop it!” He’s begging himself, begging L. “Leave me alone, let me have this. I won, I won .”
He’s sniveling and the sound of his own distress makes him angrier.
He collapses, pushes his face into the dirt. “Stop it! You have to—You have let me—m-make me—! Just stop .” His voice isn't his own anymore.
Belt loose, exposed, Light puts his hands in the dirt and starts to dig. He’s crying over pebbles and ants and pill bugs.
He should have asked to be alone with the body. What a disgusting thought. But the stone isn't enough. The dirt isn't enough. L is still untouchable, even now.
He digs until his hands go completely numb, so cold they burn. He feels insane with his hands caked in mud, nails chipped, dirt drying in his nail beds.
Light collapses again, arms shaking. He slips one hand under his body between himself and the ground.
”Can’t stop me.” He spits again. He’s drooling. Dirt sticks to his lips and gets in his mouth.
“Can’t stop me.” He fucks his own hand. Spits out dirt.
“Can’t stop me.” He’s still digging pathetically with his free hand. He’s lost all feeling in his fingers.
“—n’t stop me.” He’s on the edge of something horrific.
“Y-you—stop me.”
“L, please, please , fucking stop me,” he chokes out, terrified.
He sobs when he comes. Open mouthed, inhaling dirt, coughing it back up. He doesn’t even have the option of sitting his own sick after-glow. He’s curled on his side, choking, spitting. Gasping for breath his chest aches, his mouth tastes like earth. Mud cakes his lips.
“No, no, no, no.” He groans and his throat clicks; he sounds like a dying animal, a deer struck by a car, everything unsightly spilling out of him.
He looks down at his hand. The white sleeves of his button up are ruined.
Still coughing, still buzzing from the comedown, Light leans forward and smears the cum in his hand onto the headstone. Rubs the fluid across the fake name like he’s polishing an apple.
It feels good to dirty L in this way. It’s the most revolting thing that Light has ever done.
He’s hard again and disgusted and more turned on than he’s ever been. It’s more than the few nights of silent fumbling he’d managed with the living man. It had been different, with L alive. Scarier, maybe. L was capable of looking back at him.
It’s safer this way. L can't see him. Light is finally, truly, alone with him.
And here’s that thought again: he’d be better off dead.
He’s wearing a sick stain of mud and cum on his dress shirt. His tie is askew, his jacket covered in dirt, his socks wet through his shoes.
He reaches up with trembling hands and undoes his tie, only to knot it around his throat. Light gives an experimental tug and moans.
He shuffles forward on his knees until he’s close enough to rut up against the headstone. He whines in the back of his throat, it dissolves into a gasping laugh.
He tugs again on his tie.
”L, L I have to tell you. I have to tell you a secret. I have to tell you I’m Kira.” his voice is thin, his laughs sound more like wheezes, they wrack his whole body.
Light presses closer to the tombstone, his hip bones meeting the cold plane.
“Come on L, kill me.” He pulls hard on his tie, tightens the knot around his neck, “fucking kill me. I confessed, come on.”
“Do something! Come on, L. I just said it. I’m Kira! Quit stalling and kill me already.”
Light wraps his free hand around the back of the cross. “Turn me in, lock me up again. Firing squad, fuck me. L, come on. T-the chair, or in—injection.” His voice is so pitchy.
He rests his face in a crook between the head and the arm of the crucifix. It’s so cold against his face that his cheek buzzes.
”L. L, get even with me. Come on. J-just kill me. You said, you promised , you—!”
And then he’s coming again, face turned into the cross, grinding his nose against the unpolished edge.
He breathes into it for a while, unmoving. The rock smells like salt.
Light shoves his dick back in his pants. It stings. He has dirt everywhere under his clothing, it sticks to him. His forehead, his cheeks, the tip of his nose are muddied too.
His hands move to brush himself off despite the pointlessness of the motion. He’s running on muscle memory.
Light stands on shaky legs and looks down. There is so much evidence of his body, of what he’s done.
And low in his stomach, in his aching groin, it feels good to know he’s ruined something of L’s. It feels good to take from him.
He’s still crying, silent, wordless. His eyes leak of their own accord. Wiping at his face again, Light realizes it’s started to drizzle.
He should welcome the rain, be glad he doesn’t have to get back on his hands and knees and scrub L’s stone clean. Then again there are a lot of things that Light should feel that he never manages to.
For a moment Light considers taking off his jacket and draping it over the headstone to keep that little mark he’s made out of the rain; something of Light for L to take with him. A souvenir. A memento.
He’s in the process of shrugging off his jacket before he realizes what it is he’s really doing, what he’s done.
There is no gift here, no parting remembrance. This isn't flowers, or notes, or a drink poured out over the burial ground. This is cum on a headstone.
And then he’s scrambling back from the grave, moving like the stone might chase after him.
—
Light walks to the parking lot. He shakes and is too tired to hide it. It’s really raining now, water falling in great irregular bursts like the sky is unwilling to let go of its contents all at once.
His hair is wind-blown, bangs plastered to his forehead.
He hasn’t yet thought of how he plans to get home yet. He hasn’t thought about home at all. Really, he hasn’t thought since he turned his back on the grave and began the slow, muddy walk back to the rest of civilization.
He does, now, think for a moment about how he’ll likely scare off any taxi driver in this state. He’s not stupid he knows what he looks like.
His mother is waiting to greet him at home.
Light doubles over again and retches. Saliva escapes his lips in a long clear line. And then there is bile. And then nothing. And nothing. And nothing. And then Light’s body lets him stand again and continue to walk on numb feet toward the parking lot.
The street lamps are lit now. The lot is empty save for a single car idling and letting go a faint rumble.
Were it not for a voice shouting after him, Light might have followed through with his original plan of sleeping in the public restroom.
“Hey, Light, Light, hey .” Matsuda is opening the door of the car and running toward him holding his umbrella out in front of him. He’s not even covering himself, just running with his arm straight out, trying to get the shield over Light’s head just a second faster if he can.
“Hey, hey” he’s talking in what Light imagines is Matsuda’s most soothing tone.
“The chief left you money, I know, but… but I just thought it wouldn’t be right for you to be alone. Not today.”
Light still hasn’t said a word.
It’s dark enough now and the street lamps are so dim that Matsuda can’t really see Light, the mess he’s made of himself.
He ushers him toward the car, an arm over Light’s shoulders. He opens the door on the passenger side for Light too. He holds the umbrella to shade the doorway, shuttling Light into the vehicle perfectly safe from the rain.
Light wants him dead.
Matsuda gets in the driver's seat and looks toward Light. He can see him now.
”What—“ Matsuda clears his throat, “what happened to you?”
“I can’t—“ Light starts and then Matsuda is shaking his head.
“Oh, I’m sorry I shouldn’t have… everyone has their own…” He looks at Light a little lost.
”I know you and he—“ Matsuda opens and shuts his mouth a few times but nothing comes out.
Light shakes his head. He still can’t look at Matsuda’s face.
”I mean that…” He sighs, “I also had a friend one time. A long time ago but… you know. I also had a friend.” He exhales in a rush and then clears his throat.
Light is unmoving for a long time. He looks at the bridge of Matsuda’s nose.
“To your house or..?”
Light says nothing, does not nod or shake his head, just turns to look out the window. Matsuda intuits.
They drive in silence. Light knows he is crying because his throat gets tight and he can’t breathe right.
”usic?” Matsuda asks, his voice wire thin, straining. He turns on talk radio.
Light reaches forward and twists the black dial to turn up the volume. He leans back and closes his eyes.
“I miss L, I miss him a lot.” Light whispers, looking blankly ahead. He’s not sure Matsuda has heard him. He never says those words again.