Disclaimer: L and Light aren't playing chess like buddies anymore, Mello and Matt aren't busy plotting on how to rule the world, and Near…well Near's still L. So…Death Note does not belong to me.
And thanks to sKyhe for the lovely title!!
Chocolate Cigarettes
I never had an exact goal in life, not like all the other kids at Wammy's.
I never gave thought to becoming the world's greatest detective, never gave thought to what I wanted to be when I left Wammy's. To me, life was just…life. In the end, we all die, we all just…disappear, like we never existed in the first place. And if that was going to happen…well.
I had always lived just for the sake of it, not to do something with my life. I lived to play my video games, to hack feeble little programs, to eat, sleep, smoke, and…
And for him.
Once upon a time, when those twenty-something bullets pierced my skin, I wouldn't have felt a tremendous tremor of sadness, of regret.
Once upon a time, I would have smiled ruefully and accepted it.
And maybe, just maybe…once upon a time, I would have felt smoke in my lunges as I took my last breath.
But now is not once upon a time.
Now, in that fraction of a second before my heart stopped beating, before my thoughts gave way…a million different scenes ran through my mind. These million scenes were ones filled with joy and sadness, pain and pleasure, happiness and anger, and love and hate. And in each of these scenes, there was…him.
Him, with his beautiful, over-pampered blond hair.
My sun.
Him, with his careful, calculating, mischievous blue eyes.
My sky.
Him, with his charm, and guile, and lively quick temper.
My life.
He was me, my world, my life. Now, as I lost my life, I wasn't losing something all humans would someday come to lose…I was losing him.
Sometimes, life was a plain sheet of paper. Sometimes it was a thorn. But for all those years that I've been alive…it took meeting him to show me that life could also be a Botticelli painting, or a beautiful, fully-blossomed rose.
My paper was burnt, my thorn was dull. But my paintbrush still glistened with unfading color, and my rose refused to whither away.
And even though my broken skin, my broken bones, even though they hurt beyond anything I've physically felt before…even as I died, what I felt was so much worse.
It was the realization that I would never be able to touch his face again that trampled my broken body, not the cold, hard bullets.
What would stop my heart would not be the failure of my organs, it would be the lingering image of his breathtaking smile.
And…what I felt fill my lungs was not the smoke of my cigarette…
…It was the taste of chocolate.