Death of The Tyrants
Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note.
Warning: Character death, some crude vocabulary.
AN: For novembermond and all my LJ friends.
Voices cease, words forgotten...
What is to live forever?
No new words are left to define.
Immortality is to die, to die is to live...
To live is to die,
To die
Is a dreaded memento of once existing.
Even L Lawliet would think about death once in a while. Though others thought of him as a pair of bottomless eyes, a monotone distorted voice and a brain which was never silenced, L Lawliet knew that he too had a heart and that heart would cease beating someday, too...
There was only one thing for his brilliant mind couldn't shed a light on and that was death. His mind, which was envied and admired by many, would not comprehend the phenomenon that was called death and the afterlife. For him death was a biological thing which happened when the heart gave up on beating, when the lungs got somehow tired of breathing and when the braincells didn't get any oxygen to continue to work, thus stop thinking.
He would never lose time on contemplating what would happen after the death. He already knew how to find it, by dying... But what bothered him most about this grand narrative that was called death was not if there was something to find beyond death, but the possibility of there being nothing left to find it with it.
Flesh was not something precious for L Lawliet. Skin and bones were fragile and weak in his opinion. Flesh was bound to rot without leaving a trace of existence -without even managing to be an evidence of once being existed- and it deserted the mind when the mind emigrated to the unknown. For him, skin was nothing but the sheath of the mind and soul -if it even existed- in this world and a face was just an aging reflection upon the mirror. Thus, in this world of flesh and bones, L Lawliet chose to not have a face, a body. He chose to express himself through a distorted voice and a gothic letter instead of gestures and mimics.
So how could a person die if he had no body to be buried, no face to be remembered with? Could what was discarded upon birth be considered as living; if ones existence was denied upon its first breath how could it be differed from the already rotten and forgotten ones? Thus L Lawliet never had the chance to die in the arms of a mother. In his half willing half forced upon solitariness, when he was leaving his flesh and bones behind like a doomed butterfly, he didn't have his nameless, faceless mother near him, caressing his unruly hair just like soothing the wrinkles on the wings of the miraculous insect.
He didn't age either. His shoulders never knew the weight of harvested calendar pages. He never faced with the incapacity and the regrets that the old age brought. He closed his eyes while both his body and mind were young. He neither had a family behind to mourn after him unlike an ordinary man, nor he had time to envy that ordinariness. He lived fast and died young, but didn't mind if his corpse was handsome or not.
He didn't die of a terminal illness, either. Even though everyday he would swallow dozens of cupcakes, fondants, chocolate bars, candies of different sorts with cups after cups of caffeine, though sometimes he would look at the bottom of the ice-cream boxes as if he was looking for a clue, he was not ill. He never fell asleep because of a sickness and he was sure that an illness would not be the cause of his eternal sleep. He wouldn't fantasize about dying because of something like that, imagine his burial and how would people feel about the demise of a letter. He was sure that his body -though he didn't take care of it like others- would not give up on him in this world... Wouldn't it leave his mind naked in the emptiness called afterlife, anyhow...
And he didn't even die while saving another's life. His job, that he practiced every single moment of his life, was seemingly for saving others' lives or making the world a more secure place to live for them; but though L Lawliet never admitted it openly, he never deluded himself on his motives upon taking this job on his shoulders. He wasn't after the sublime feeling of working for serving to the society, or the idealism of saving the lives of the millions... He was a detective, for he liked being a detective and the job satisfied his hunger for adventure and his challenge seeking mind. He knew that he would never boast on sacrificing his life for the greater good of humanity when he died.
He wasn't in the arms of his beloved, either as he gave his final breath. He spent wakeful nights in those arms -this time not because of the sugar or the caffeine- yet he knew that people wouldn't be lovers just by having sex. Kissing was good, trying to reach the recesses of mind using the skin, trying to uncover the mind with touches, fake embraces, licks, with teeth and nails -just like uncovering the skin from the clothes- was exhilarating. But he knew what they did was not love making, just mere fucking. Also he knew that neither he himself, nor his nemesis who was holding him as he descended into darkness weren't the kind of creatures that were capable of genuine love.
Yet, despite all these, were he knew that this half insane half child-like man were reciting these lines upon his grave with the air of a conqueror he would laugh.
"Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of
earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he
was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?"
He would find it darkly humorous to be likened to the conqueror who claimed nearly all of the known world, for Alexander never died. The Great Tyrant engraved his name on the pages of history just like the other tyrants before and after him. L Lawliet also deemed himself as a tyrant of sorts, so was Yagami Light... In their clash of minds and egos, to see that even Kira chose to hide behind his name, his gothic letter, showed him that L was greater than Kira, even Kira was envious of the man behind that letter... And to know this was more than enough for a man who had the ego of the tyrants. Even though some day someone with the clay left behind of him "should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw..."
AN: The italicized parts are taken from Hamlet. They were Hamlet's lines.
This was written for novembermond's challenge: "Write about five deaths that L never died."
Review?