Funerals were always about putting things behind you: the person, the memories. They were a boundary, that let you look back and see the past with a fresh perspective. On one side, the history you shared with the deceased - on the other, your life after it.
Light had listened as his father spoke, and then he'd mounted the stage himself, voiced the image he was presenting of a bruised young man, the picture-perfect portrait of someone in deep mourning, shut down, respectful, repressed. Remembering. And artful, practised, not even truly lying - for in the moment of his performance he almost believed every word - he'd spoken the piece they expected him to say. And they'd fallen for it, every one, just as they always did.
And then the others had left - all but one - as he'd been waiting for them to do since the moment they arrived: to leave him alone, tucked away with his grief, to speak the words he couldn't say before an audience.
And he had.
Light had barely heard Ryuk's whining and complaining. He'd wondered if he'd feel different, with L locked away in the ground forever. Whether he'd be different, now that it was all firmly concluded. And in that one perfect moment, standing over the grave, what he'd felt more than anything else - like a bursting dam, liberated, scouring everything in its path to bedrock - had been relief. Relief, yes, and freedom, like the pure landscape left behind after the churning waters had passed. And there had only been one possible response - a laugh, clotted and mad, that had bubbled up out of him like air dissolved in the floodwaters, clinging to the debris and the dead. The laughter that had lifted him right up to the clouds, so he could see—
He could see it, in front of him in the sunset, burning red and pink - his new world, spinning like a top. Not so much like a pearl, that he'd been building up layer by layer - more like a sculpture, with the dross rubbed away slowly, in fractions and fragments. A pinch of sand at a time, a lifetime's work, wearing away everything - everyone - worthless, until he'd uncovered perfection. Finally, his vision - so close he could almost, almost touch it. For there was nobody between him and it, any longer - nothing but a few handfuls of sand.
And that realisation had thrown him right into the grave, on his hands and knees: he'd screamed the sweetness of his victory and triumph right into the tombstone. He'd wanted to dig down with his bare hands, rip L's lifeless body right out of the earth and beat it until it was unrecognisable, until the dead flesh squelched and split beneath his fists: he'd wanted to claw out those blank eyes and crush them, shred the face from the skull and then shatter its delicate bones right into the brain - knifing through it with birdlike splinters and shards, smashing it, destroying it, the place where once all those suspicions and visions and stories had sat - but failing that, he could, at least, scream the truth of it all loud enough to sound right down into L's ears, where the tiny bones should still be vibrating, conveying Light's words right into the bastard's dead mind - even if it was already rotting to pulp.
At that moment, screaming and barking and clawing at the grave like a rabid animal, he hadn't even been thinking about Kira, or about his apotheosis, or the new world, or any of the rest of it. In fact, in retrospect, he hadn't been thinking at all: just reacting, feeling: a blinding tempest of rage and vitriol the likes of which he'd never known. A vortex, swallowing him right down into all his deepest fears and anxieties, the sorts of thing that he never even admitted to himself, that he couldn't possibly allow himself to think. Because there had been something about L, something unique, something Light had never encountered: there'd been a very real possibility that L might have turned out to be better than him.
And that had been intolerable: impossible. Right at the end of the first week, tricked and deceived and - temporarily, always temporarily - defeated, Light had known L had to go. And he'd put everything on the line to make it happen - his pride, his life, his ambitions: nothing had been more important than defeating and destroying L. I will definitely find and finish you. He'd sworn it: it had been his promise, his vow.
And now it was done. He'd won: the only person who could threaten him - who'd threatened Light on every level conceivable - was somewhere beneath him, under two metres of dirt. All of it over: he'd crossed the battlefield and stepped safely onto friendly territory, come home from the war and taken out all the frustrations and sacrifices and losses on his wife. It had almost been like waking up from a dream - not a nightmare at all, but some bright promise that he could barely see in the day. Something that drove him on and on, yet which he could almost never reach: a shrieking, raw pleasure in his power and his abilities which he simply couldn't touch, most of the time.
But it had left him ready to move on into the future.
A breath, two, and he'd drawn himself back in: almost his old self, his old nature - but more certain, more determined than he had been. Better than he had been, he knew. L was past. Exorcised. Replaced with a new certainty and determination and knowledge, things that ran deeper than they did before. As if some of the fury and fire of his madness had settled in his blood. There had been soil ground into his trousers, and he'd screamed his throat to burning, and his fingernails had been dirty and split, yet when Light had got up from that grave and told Ryuk what he was going to show him, he'd known himself to be a god.
And he'd known nobody could get in his way - ever, ever again.