I was lying in bed last night, and this idea just floated across my mind, so I just HAD to type it out… Also, a – at the beginning of a paragraph represents a flash back. – At the end means the story's back to the current time. And the referance to "L's succesor" is actually Near. He just seems the most mature, even if he's the youngest.

WARNING: Major angst, character death, depressive themes, yada yada yada… Oh, and shounen-ai if you squint.

Burning Up

Kira was dead. Light was dead. And it was about time, too. L was curled up against the headboard of his bed, trying to substitute the lack of a warm body lying next to him. It wasn't working. He curled into an even tighter ball, though it didn't seem possible. Light… Kira had been killed by lethal injection just a week before. How ironic that the one person he wanted dead was also the one person he wanted to protect.

The boy—monster—was finally gone. He was no longer tainting to the world by breathing in and out. And here L was, curled in a miserable ball, while Light rotted six feet underground. But he didn't need Light. He didn't want anything to do with a mass murderer…

-But he kept on remembering the last words his first real friend, and only worthy opponent, had said. It had been just before the drugs finally won out over his heart, which just kept beating, even after he could no longer feel his body due to the anesthetics. Defiant, strong. Just like him.

"Ryuuzaki," he had choked out, no doubt using the last of his breaths. L had watched in a horrified state of shock from the other end of a camera tap over fifty miles away as he took in a huge gulp of air for the last time.

"I'm sorry. I'll miss you."

And his heart gave a little jolting stutter, but whether from the fact it was losing or the fact that Light finally took in he was going to die, L would never know. For in the next ten seconds, his head dropped onto his shoulder, the heart monitor went blank, and a horrible, uninterrupted beep filled the room.

The witnesses, who included all members of the Kira investigation, L's own successor, and even Soichiro Yagami, turned to look at the laptop Watari had taken there for him. It took him second to realize what they were looking for. They wanted praise for a job well done. They wanted a finishing statement. It took him a split-second afterwards to slam his laptop shut, and curl into the fetal position on their bed.

No, not anymore. It was just his bed now. He curled into the blankets on Light's side of the bed, breathing deeply. His scent still clung to the sheets. He tried to hold back tears. When had he become so attached to the Yagami boy? The tears his pride had been holding back spilled over when he glanced at his wrist, and he realized that nobody was there to see him, anyway.

He had always heard loss described as being frozen on the inside, being shut off from the world. On the contrary, he felt like there were flames inside of his stomach, slowly feeding off of his hurt, growing ever bigger until they engulfed his heart. But maybe he was just weird like that.

L closed his eyes. He knew well and good that what he was about to do would probably only hurt him more later, but he didn't want to forget. He replayed every moment he had spent with Light, from the moment they had met, to the moment Light had regained his memories of being Kira and yelled that he needed to die. L spent a lot of time remembering every little detail from the short, two month period where Light had lost all recollections of being the mass-murderer.

He remembered how much Light had complained when he had first been chained to the detective… How he had finally passed out from the lack of sleep—L chuckled through tears—because he had been trying to prove that he was just as good as L… How on one of the very rare occasions where there were no new developments in the case, L had let Light drag him out to town…

Leaning over the edge of the bed, L grabbed a large red box, with an ornate silver L inlaid on the cover. Gently removing the lid, he grabbed the stuffed panda Light had bought for him as a joke. Clutching it to his chest, he grabbed the other box from under the bed, returning his own to it's original place.

This one was gold, with bold red letters spelling out, "Light was here," on the top. Sliding the lid off and setting to the side, he carefully picked up the perfectly groomed fox, his luxurious tail wrapped around his paws and a know-it-all smile on his narrow muzzle. He placed the box back beside his under the bed, sat the fox on the bedside table, and clutched the panda next to his heart. The tears streamed down his face and came to rest on the toy's soft fur.

If anyone had walked into the building at that point, all that would have broken the almost eerie silence would have been the anguished wails, loud enough to bust an eardrum. L had screamed and sobbed until his throat was raw, and even then the tears refused to stop, so he didn't let it stop him either.

He keened until he thought his voice box was going to implode, but at that point he didn't care. His throat tore and bled, but he continued on until he lost his voice, and all that he could force out was an odd choking sound. Still the tears would not stop.—

And that was how Watari found him; curled in the fetal position on the bed, plush panda held tightly to his chest, tears still streaming down his cheeks, eyes clamped shut for fear of losing his memories forever…

And now, as the last of Light's scent was fading from the sheets a full week afterwards, he accepted something; somewhere in between all the arguments, fistfights, and the rare agreements, he had actually become attached to the boy. He didn't know how, or when, and God only knew why, but he had.

And it was killing him. He couldn't eat, not even the sweetest things he had seen in all his life. He never talked, just used sign language when at all possible. And if he couldn't then he just didn't communicate.

But he could sleep now; he had been doing it more and more frequently. He had found out, after that first night, that when he slept, he dreamt of Light. Light, alive, smiling at him. Light, alive, holding out a hand to him, offering his help, and promising to always be there… And when he woke up, he would cry. Not the full out wailing fit he had before; he had never done that again. That was the reason he never wanted to talk.

He had made an oath—an incredibly stupid, impossible oath—that the cries of anguish for Light's death would be the last noise he made in this world.

He also did not try to seclude himself. Sure, he still valued the few hours of privacy he could get, but he understood that he needed to keep the world in check. He still took on cases, even some he would have never looked twice at before: one-time murderers, thieves, stalkers… the world was falling into disarray again, now that Kira was gone. So he took on any case he thought Kira would have handled.

Every day was the same. The flames grew ever higher, eating him up from the inside out. Killing him. He was burning up inside, and there was nothing he could do about it but wait.

Staring at the place where Light had once slept, he buried his face in the plush panda's fur and cried.