L in reality might be quite different from the L we are acquainted.
Picture L if you had known him personally. Now picture someone who knew him only from watching Death Note, or reading it on the printed page. Would there not be great disparity?
That said, enjoy this meager offering, and please remember to review.
You may think that you know Ryuuzaki, but you do not.
For instance: you may believe that his shirts, those baggy, wrinkly, white things, never had stains on them. You're wrong. Ryuuzaki was the messiest eater I ever knew. His shirts were mosaics of desserts gone wrong and inopportune cups of coffee.
The bags under his eyes, too, while existent, have been grossly over-exaggerated in people's minds. He did sleep on occasion, and not just when it leapt on him unawares in whatever chair he happened to be crouching in.
He was not always quiet and not always tactless and abrupt and not always right. These are myths, part of his legend. Little by little, the man himself fades away, replaced by his initial, by the high drama he never had the time to analyze or to care for.
But you do know some things about him. You know of his little habits, his tone of voice, his brilliant mind. You know of his clarity and his shrewd eye for detail and how he slurped his soup and held his teacups. You can remember and know all that.
Not all of it is true, anymore. Probably none of it is useful, either. Ryuuzaki is dead. Kira is a memory. Even L is fading away over time, reduced to what it always was – another blank entry in the alphabet, a name without a face. No memory, no matter how true or false, can change that. L would not have wished it so.
But still, you can recall that much. For a time – for a brief while – his memory will be preserved in these small traces of him which linger in the mind's eyes and ears.
And perhaps one day, when you lie awake at night and listen to the far-off bells, a man will appear to you, slouched and pale and shoeless, different from what you thought, but still there. Still himself.
You do not know Ryuuzaki, but perhaps one does not need to know to understand. Perhaps it is enough.