L: The Last Dream

Garden, Whammy's House.

We are quiet observers, allowed to see through the eyes of L as he opens his eyes slowly. Blue sky. A cloud in the shape of a rabbit is pasted on the massive blue canopy. This serene painting is only disturbed by puffs of dandelions floating above him, like a flock of seagulls roaming over the sea.

The ground feels cold and damp. We know, because we feel what L feels. His back lays flat on the ground, and each bump and irregularity is assessed and mapped out in his mind. We feel L's hands on his sides. Slowly, they contract. Blades of grass, cut with precision, feel like soft, sharp spikes. They gently poke his palms as he grasps them. It seems like an attempt to confirm that these bits of sensory information are indeed part of reality.

He turns his head slowly. The blades of grass do not rustle as expected. As he turns, we see the change of perspective, like a camera slowly turning upside down. Located about a hundred meters away is the house itself. Recognition. This is the patch of garden located at the right side of the house, where children's birthday parties are held. Specifically, the tree where they hang the piñata should be located somewhere on his left.

He moves his left hand. There is something hard and coarse there, like a tree root. This is it. The tree. It is odd, but suddenly, an overwhelming desire to climb this tree overcomes him. He looks up, and suddenly we seelight, in the shape of the spaces between clumps of leaves. And candy, wrapped in strawberry-pink cellophane. They fall suddenly from the branches above.

"Candy for L! Candy for L!" The first sound he hears in this alternate world is the chanting of children. Anonymous to his ears. The voices are cheerful, but the sound seemed suppressed and rather lonely.

The voices come from up the tree. The camera turns slightly downward, shifting its focus from the leaf-shaped bits of light to the branches of the tree. While it seemed before that around twenty children chanted his name, we see that there are only three children who come out of hiding. They are holding hardback books and tea-cups in their hands. They seem to be engaged in a silent philosophical debate.

He recognizes the three of them, despite the rabbit ears that seemed to be biologically attached on their heads. Of course, in dreams, we recognize people we know in real life, but sometimes we do not bother associating their names with their figures. They simply happened to be there, and that is all that matters to us. For L, the twitching, uneasy rabbit ears on these particular children are perfectly natural.

We feel L's right arm raise. It feels heavy and immovable, and it takes him a long time to do the simple task of waving to these children.

The one perched on the highest branch of the tree has blond hair. His rabbit ears are pink. He is wearing a black shirt with long sleeves and grey jeans. He has no shoes. We are reminded of L's manner of dress, except for the difference in the shirt. He is the one that speaks to L first. "Don't eat the candy," he commands. His voice sounds so deep that L does not recognize it as the boy's own. But we, the observers, do not mind this discrepancy between size, age, and tone of voice.

"You don't understand, M," says the boy directly to his right. We cannot determine his hair colour – as light passes through the leaves above, the colour shifts. Now it is red, then purple, then green, then red, then black. We cannot see his eyes, either. He is wearing violet and pink stripes over a pair of black pinstriped slacks. His rabbit ears are black, and they droop lazily, each end pointing to the ground. This last detail serves as the crucial difference between him and a Cheshire Cat. "He's gotta eat the candy. The party won't start, if he doesn't eat the candy. W------ will be mad at us if he doesn't eat the candy." However, as he says this, we observe that he has his hands behind his head, and he is lying on this branch as if it were a couch. He does not even look at L.

We turn to the last boy in curiosity. He is seated on the branch below M. We notice that his ears are not that of a rabbit's, as we previously thought, but that of a kitten's. They are folded outwards, as if the boy is annoyed. However, he looks passively upon L. One foot hangs freely, and we see his toes wiggling from inside his white socks. His finger calmly twirls a white curl above his right human ear.

"Well, say something, N, he can't possibly eat the candy!" The boy called M kicks the kitten boy carelessly at the back of his head. "Do you know what will happen if L swallows one? The world will end, that's what! It would explode!"

N, upon being kicked, falls from his branch. He is like a mannequin dropped from a 2nd-storey window. We feel a surge of panic in L, but it is a brief discomfort, like a needle piercing through skin. L remembers that the boy is a cat. And cats never let themselves be limited by gravity.

Sure enough, N makes an easy turn, and he floats on the ground momentarily. He uses this suspension to arrange his feet on the grass. He is unscathed as he stands on the ground and silently looks up at the other boys still sitting on the tree.

"…" L hears the dots in this boy's mind. "…?"

L comprehends this sentence. "I'm sorry, but he's right." He gestures to the Cheshire Rabbit. "You do want to start the party, right? W--- will be mad at us if we don't. And what will happen to the clocks he made for us?"

"…" The cat ears twitch slightly.

We hear a gritting. White teeth fall from the branches of the tree. The camera turns. M seems to have lost all his teeth from biting into a bar of chocolate. "Not fair!" He growls. His lack of teeth does not mar the power of this sentence. Rapidly, he ricochets from branch to branch, downward, until he lands like a bullet on the ground next to L.

"Don't eat the candy!" M repeats. There is desperation in his voice. "I don't care what W---- says. He's far away from us now."

A heavy feeling in L's throat. It is a bullet, as heavy as a boulder. He swallows it painfully, like a piece of hard candy that accidentally slips into your throat before you could suck it. This feeling in his throat remains.

N tugs at his shirt. Your stomach is bleeding, L, he says.

L looks down. There is a gaping hole, pouring strawberry jam and chocolate syrup and candy wrappers. Soundless. The contents of his stomach litter the grass.

"That's what you get, I guess," said M. We see his rabbit ears in detail. It seems that they were originally white, but only look pink because of small, regular squares of blood that dried on the fur. "Now what do we do?"

"The party has to happen, L," says the other boy, still on the brink of snoozing up the tree branch.

"I know that." The camera frantically zooms in and out of the mess of jam, syrup, and garbage on the ground, in an attempt to capture each gruesome detail. It trembles slightly, as if urging the observers to feel the new emptiness that fills L. "I suppose I just want more time."

L mnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk

Date of death 5 November 2004 time after tea time

Cause Remu Remu Remu Neurological illness 1 cup of coffee 1 fit of narcolepsy falls from black chair made in Taiwan and so on and forth an offer he can't refuse diabetes system failure myocardial infarction last words darkness red yellow (blue) green light MADHOUSE drama what's the word a hundred and YA! twenty one thousand MA! gazillion GOO! percent chance prophecy CHEE! prophecy prophecy

ryuuzaki,

Heeeeere's Kira

7 52 31 13 6 2

"What was that?" L asks. There is no fear or confusion in his voice, only a mild curiosity.

"That was a note," the three boys say in unison. All of them were lined up neatly in front of him.

"The tree is gone," says L. It is then that we notice that indeed, the tree that has held the piñata for more than ten years now disappears. There is no sign of the tree's removal, however. It is as if the tree must be removed, and the universe cooperated in its disposal, erasing traces of its existence and its memory from L's mind.

He looks at the boys. They all looked up at him sullenly. They each hold pieces of candy in their small hands.

"We are good kids," says M. Despite his grown up voice, we can tell that a sob is forcing its way up his throat, and he is using all of his power to keep it inside him.

"Yeah. We tried hard, really hard, but I guess we can't do much," said the other boy with droopy black ears. He holds his hardback book up at L's face. We see symbols slowly forming. They are black spots, blurring and bleeding at the edges, but somehow we read the words. It contains secrets. L reads them out loud, and suddenly, all the loose ends that tied him to the world before this are cut. A single, sharp sound of a sword being slid into its hilt is heard. He feels the gaping hole in his stomach close up.

And suddenly, the camera pans down to the ground. We see L's bare feet glowing. The clamminess caused by the air conditioner in the NPA's workplace is erased by a healthy rush of blood under the skin. His toes stretch uneasily, and beams of light sprout from each one. Slowly, we see that L begins to float. It is a natural phenomenon, we conclude passively. By the way things have unfolded thus far, this must be the most logical thing that should happen.

(We will not remember this when we wake up.)

"I have to give you this. I almost forgot," says L suddenly. He is still not far away when he digs deep inside his jeans pockets and grasps something hard and cold, like a lump of glass. He takes it out and we see a ruby.

The boys look at this ruby. M and the boy in stripes stare at it passively. N, without expression, raises his hand and slowly takes it. In that instant, it glows green. It is an emerald, shining under the mute light of the sun.

L leaves them, never looking back.

Again, this is perfectly natural to L: the feeling of nothing under his feet, the warmth of the sun that he catches on each hollow cheek, the silent rustle of his hair as each strand's shadow flows like water on the disappearing ground below. We remove ourselves from the cameras behind L's eyes and see for ourselves this disappearing ground. We see nothing but three rabbit-ear headbands, all of them white, lying lifelessly on the ground.

He floats and floats and floats. Something under the surface of the skin on his shoulders breaks. It slices through L's white shirt. A red cape! A flow of victory! We are convinced now, more than ever: he is Justice.

There are no strings that pull him towards the ground. He is the stray body of a kite, flying without direction into the void. A shinigami, lost over the hubbub of confused humanity. The light of the sun erases him from our field of vision.

As soon as this happens, we feel a great anxiety, looming over us. There is something wrong with this last event. That should not have happened!

We do not catch up to L anymore, as we start feeling the limitations of flight in the dream world. We catch a glimpse of a red glow behind the rabbit cloud's ear. It is Light Yagami, we say, even though the shape is black, formless and purely sinister. We forget for a moment our powerlessness, as we say in unison: this is Kira who wrongfully sits in judgment over L.

Over and over this murderous chant of ours echoes. Hands are raised towards the sky in protest. A massive black shaking of organic matter invades the blue sky, until we see nothing but darkness.

Author's notes: Not smoking anything weird, just an innocent writing exercise. Just to avoid accusations of plagiarism or unfounded unoriginality, there are obvious references to the Disney adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. I am also not sure if it is noticeable or significant, but this was also partly inspired by Haruki Murakami's After Dark.

Comments? Suggestions? Chemical Reactions? Thanks for reading!