Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note.
Author's Note: "Lawliet" is a transliteration mistake, in my opinion. I daresay it probably stems from the French name Lauriet. A Romanic background for L, then.
I won't say "enjoy" this time, because there's nothing enjoyable about this little scenario.
~*~
Desaparecido
Over the years, Roger Ruvie had lost a number of people to the Kira case. He had mourned children he had raised and a beloved friend. Considering that L was the one he had known least of them all, it didn't seem completely natural that his was the death Roger felt most bitter about and after all this time still pondered over. But with L the legacy of two other people had died. And they would have deserved a different outcome.
It had always struck Roger as odd just how many of Wammy's brightest came straight from the monuments of mankind's never-ending stupidity. L's heirs – differing as they might be in terms of temperament and appearance – had this one thing in common. Where they came from, people at a certain point in history had traded their brains for archaic reflexes and worked themselves into murderous frenzies over causes no reasonable person would try and comprehend.
Their places of birth reflected the tragedies of the dying twentieth century.
Belfast.
Phnom Penh.
Sarajevo.
Apparently, sometimes the greatest slaughterhouses of the world produced the finest minds. As by a miracle, the children of the victims managed to crawl out of the hellholes that wouldn't release their parents. It seemed almost fitting that all of his heirs came from conflict regions, considering that L himself had risen from a particular nightmare that featured blindfolds, machine guns, underground torture cells and in the end, most probably a helicopter flight out to the Atlantic Ocean by night.
Of course, they could never fully ascertain the circumstances of L's birth or what had really become of his parents. Roger himself had never been to Argentina; he only knew the tales of the survivors of the dirty war that shook the country during 1976 and 1983. Even as early as then, there were rumors about what had happened to the children of those who hadn't been as lucky to survive torture and incarceration.
Most onlookers would never have guessed that there was something wrong with the picture. At the age of nine, L lived in a big house with a well-groomed garden under the care of a variety of servants with the two people he knew as his parents. He was a frail child, never really went to school because of his delicate condition. He read a lot. He loved sweets. He picked up German from the Jewish family who lived across the street. He created the most complicated multiplication tables. Then Quillsh Wammy came, discovered his genius – and stole him away. Because he discovered something else and decidedly less pleasant while he was at it.
In retrospect, it was easy of course, to read more than there really was into L's peculiarities. His way of sitting, for example – knees drawn to his chest – as if he meant to protect himself against something. Or the way he seemed to draw his head between his shoulders as if expecting a blow. Or those wide eyes that seemed constantly stunned about everything that happened around him. Who can actually realize the extent to which babies are influenced by what is happening with them during the first days or even hours of their existence?
You see, L was a foundling. That's what he called himself anyway. Found in Buenos Aires, in late 1979. And to be found – you have to be lost first. This is where the machine guns and the blindfolds came in. Even if L hadn't grown up to be the best detective in the world, this would have become a matter of interest to him sooner or later. Probably later, though, given the circumstances.
Possibly never if it hadn't been for Quillsh Wammy's photographical memory. Coincidence has played a substantial role in many a great and tragic story. Even before he started that business trip of his during the fall of 1988, Quillsh had made no effort to conceal the disgust he felt at having to deal with "those people" meaning the representatives of the military dictatorship.
On the very day, he had been invited by L's foster father, he had taken a walk in the city of Buenos Aires which in 1988 was still full of photographs. From the walls and houses of the center the eyes of the lost ones stared at the passers-by. Relatives and friends hat put the photos there after the depictured had been abducted from their homes, their schools, their working places or right from the street – and never seen again.
Argentine society had come up with a sort of technical term for these people: los desaparecidos. The ones who disappeared.
A name captured Quillsh's attention that day. Frédéric Lauriet. A French expatriate maybe? There was a woman with the same name, too. Probably his wife. Luz Ortega Lauriet. A wisp of a girl with large, black eyes that seemed to burn right through the beholder's forehead.
Quillsh saw those eyes again – mere hours after first encountering them on a photograph – and felt a faint inkling that maybe the rumors were true after all. The parents murdered and the children left in the care of the murderers.
What a thing to do.
After all these years, the sheer outrage still took Roger's breath away.
A few careful questions revealed that L was indeed adopted. Having established this as a fact, Quillsh made inquiries about Luz Lauriet and found out that she had indeed borne a child while incarcerated. Incidentally, the place of said child's birth was a camp for political prisoners in which L's foster father had worked about a decade ago.
The birth certificate was a piece of art in itself. Infant, male. October 31st , 1979. Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, Buenos Aires.
Name: L Lauriet.
And why not. When your birth place is a torture chamber, lapses like this can happen. As Quillsh concluded when he shared the results of his research with Roger, they probably mixed up the first name and surname sections, wrote down the first letter of the last name and were too lazy to correct it afterwards. L was called quite a different name by his foster parents, anyway.
After Quillsh showed him the birth certificate, he insisted on using the single letter. He knew it couldn't have been his mother's choice, but he'd rather be named by coincidence than by his foster father.
The question haunted Quillsh in many years to come: Was it right to steal him away?
Yes. L told his Watari so on a number of occasions. Roger cannot imagine L's real parents answering otherwise. But he sometimes asked himself if they would have been happy with how his life proceeded.
If L was aware of the irony of concealing his found-again identity, he had never spoken about it. While his parents had been forced to disappear, he had vanished willingly, retreated behind a letter on a computer screen. Maybe even that was a complex way of compensating his own trauma: to hide his once stolen and restored identity from the world. Nobody ever knew that a child of Luz and Frédéric Lauriet had been born. And when he died, nobody took notice either.
Their legacy was no longer. Kira had seen to it.
When news of L's death reached him, Roger – who considered himself a devout Catholic – had been tempted to rage against god for the first time in many, many years. Why him – why the child of these two? Why save him from being slaughtered and lead him such a crooked path only to let him stumble and fall in the end?
In the beginning, he had been the child with the made-up name, made-up parents, made-up identity. All his life, he had worked on creating a shield for himself, an identity that everyone knew of and nobody knew about. After his death, the nimbus lived on. There were his heirs. And there was hint that one the people he had been last working with had taken the title of L so that he was gone without really being.
Or so Roger perceived it: a mocking of L's parents by God or the one who proclaimed himself to be one. It simply hadn't been enough to kill him. He had to vanish while people believed him to be still around. It was so petty, so mean and sadistic in Roger's eyes that he was almost inclined to believe that Kira somehow must have known about the origins of his most powerful opponent and twisted them to his amusement. L, too, was never seen again; never seen in the first place.
Did Kira know that he had committed the perfect crime, laden with such a strong symbolism? If so, certainly no hell was deep enough for him to land in.
Behind the letter – or in between his own dying and the usurpation by the other, L had completely and utterly disappeared.
~*~
Author's Note: This idea has stuck with me for a while and then all of a sudden demanded to be written down. I think it fitting, but I'm not really confident about it and would appreciate your feedback. Also, it would be interesting to read whether you understood everything since I'm still without a beta reader.