Hi everyone!

I may be a bit on the morbid side on that one, but have you ever wondered about the last rule of the Death Note? Personally, the "user goes to Mu/nothingness" part had me a little bit bothered. I mean, nothingness? What the hell did Ohba and Obata think about when they wrote this? How did they picture it, this strange space where there would be nothing? How did they imagine it would be? What would it look like? Feel like?

I wanted to know, and since they didn't give us any clue about it, I jumped on the occasion and decided to try and write something about it.

So here it is, my own vision of Mu and what it would be like for Light in the afterlife.

I hope you'll enjoy this ! Oh, and since English isn't my native language, please feel free to point out any mistake you can find. I'd be very grateful for any opportunity to improve my English =)

The sky was dark as a pit. Not one star, not one stroke of moonlight were to be seen. Just a dark, endless plain of ink, a gaping hole which seemed about to swallow him. It could have been a mouth, huge and toothless, some dark cavern he would not be able to escape once trapped in.

He sure felt trapped.

Incased, suffocated.

As if some walls were closing in on him, attempting to suffocate him to death. He could almost feel his bones crushing under the pressure.

He shook his head.

There were no walls. No mouth, no stars, no clouds. They weren't there, couldn't be there.

He closed his eyes.

The scenery didn't change. Black. Endless darkness. Sometimes he just didn't know if his eyes were open or closed anymore. More than once did he raise his hand and touch his face, looking for a clue, something that would tell him which one it was. The scenery didn't change. It never did.

He was never cold. He wasn't warm either. He couldn't feel much, truly. He was strangely numb, as if someone had switched his nerves off. Whenever he moved, he couldn't feel it. Whenever he touched, he knew what was under his palm but didn't really feel it. It was as if his brain registered the information without going through his nervous system. It was… weird. He felt hollow.

"Felt."

Feelings… He remembered them. Vaguely so. He still had some, he knew, but they were muffled. He could recognize them, he knew they were flashing sometimes in his mind, yet he couldn't feel their full brunt. The superior part of his intellect knew they were there, it could identify each and every one of them. Fear, anger, sorrow… Yet he didn't feel afraid. He wasn't fed up, nor was he sad. He just was. He was… detached. It was a strange thing.

There was no ground under his feet. He would have thought he was floating had he not felt so grounded. His soles were hanging over nothingness, yet he felt as if he could take a step forth and still be upright. He wouldn't fall. There was nowhere to fall into. Still he didn't move, didn't try to walk. Darkness was everywhere. The scenery didn't change, whatever he did.

He couldn't hear anything. He was breathing, or at least he suspected he did. There wasn't any air to breath, he knew for there was no light breeze to crash upon his skin whenever he moved briskly. Yet his chest was moving up and down, rising then falling rhythmically, like clockwork. His heart was beating in his chest. He couldn't feel its pulse, but he knew it was there. Useless, but still there. It made no sound, no comforting ba-bump to cling to. Blood was still pumping through his veins. He tried to cut himself once, he bit down on his arm and tore through the flesh he couldn't feel anymore. Tiny tooth-shaped wounds appeared, eight thin openings which strangely refused to bleed. Whenever he touched them, he felt the flesh part and the blood calmly following its usual path, as if his veins had never been torn open. It wouldn't come out, wouldn't strain his skin with its crimson taint. He couldn't have seen it anyway.

He screamed once, but didn't recognize his voice. Somewhere in his mind he knew it was his, yet it wouldn't sink in. It was so distant, so… estranged. Once again, he couldn't feel his vocal cords vibrating in his throat. Couldn't feel the rush of air that filled his lungs then stormed out as he howled to the night. Night? No, that was no night. It was Mu, the land of nothingness.

Slowly, oh so slowly, he was forgetting what his own face looked like. It occurred to him when he first tried to touch his eyelids, just to be sure that his eyes really were opened. He felt his cheeks, which he knew would forever be soft. Then came his nose, which he remembered straight and proud. Yet for the life of him he couldn't picture it in his mind. It was as if he had lost the actual meaning of the words. He knew what his nose was, but couldn't associate any picture with the description. His hairs, his eyes… brown. They were brown. Yet what was brown? What did it look like? He knew he was handsome. Somehow, it seemed to be ingrained in his mind that he was. But even that was emptied, as if he couldn't know what to make of it. It was a good thing, he knew, something many would strive for. But here, he just didn't know why anymore. An ocean of darkness had swallowed him whole and these words, straight, brown, handsome, those noises didn't hold any meaning anymore. They had been gutted, deprived of their essence – just like he had been – and tossed in this forsaken place, trapped in his tormented mind.

His mind.

The only thing that seemed to work correctly. The only thing he wished he could turn off and discard somewhere far, far away in the darkness. His mind was as aware as ever, even deprived of the constant flowing of feelings and sensations. It received cold information, emptied words and foreign data. It processed it all, elaborated thousands of systems, thousands of plans, all incredibly brilliant yet unable to be realized for there was nothing there. Nothing, except nothingness. He was painfully aware of every tiny change, every tiny movement he could make. His own mind had turned into his worst enemy, for it had nothing to focus on except himself. He couldn't move, couldn't think without the damn thing focusing right on it, over-analyzing it and pointing how lacking it was. How he had been deprived of a huge part of himself, something he couldn't identify yet cruelly missed.

He couldn't remember what he looked like, couldn't know what had been robbed from him.

The scenery didn't change; it never did.

Trapped, enclosed, yet there couldn't be any space vaster than that around him.

Trapped in his own mind. Deprived of what had once made him human. He didn't, couldn't know what it was.

Time didn't exist. He didn't change, his body worked yet had stopped aging. He might as well have been frozen. He didn't need to shave. He didn't sweat, didn't smell. Not once had he felt the need to relieve himself. He was dead and alive, broken yet still working. He was what couldn't be. He was nothing.

Nothingness.

There was nothing but his own mind, this constant torture that even time couldn't stop anymore.

He was dead, he knew, and this was his afterlife.