Part Three

"Ryuuzaki…"

It couldn't be him. But it was. L was a shinigami. And he was standing beside Raito in all his shinigami glory.

Holding out Raito's new Death Note with those white, human hands, the reality of L's humanity became startlingly clear to Raito as he took in the entirety of his companion. The hands were all that remained of the young man he had known. That and the eyes. Large and black and sunken, the eyes were L's, the nose as well, but his smile had been stretched obscenely, like Ryuuku's, lips painted dark blue and mouth filled with fangs. There were also markings, like Raito's markings, a different blue of little arrows beneath each of L's eyes. His hair was his hair, black and scraggly, but there was more of it, stretching down his back and over his shoulders to his waist.

L's hands were human but his feet, Raito saw now, were like a Raptor's in a museum or a movie, taloned and twisted and not at all human. They were bare, as L always kept his feet, but the dexterous toes were gone. Like Raito, L's arms and legs had been stretched, but the hunch to L was far more extreme than Raito's own, fitting considering how the young man had hunched in life. L's clothing was a mock of the clothing he had worn in life as well, like a tattered white shroud to emulate the white shirt, and torn jeans. His wings were out as if he had just recently stopped flying before meeting up with Raito. They reminded Raito of Rem's, white and bony.

L had become a shinigami fitting of him, but for him to be one at all, for him to be standing before Raito made no sense. L had never written in one of the Death Notes. There was no reason for L to be punished. There was no reason for L to be here of his own accord. And therefore Raito couldn't help but assume that L was there for his accord.

Revenge.

"Stay…stay away from me!" he shouted, scrambling to his feet and fumbling over his new limbs to escape L's close contact. He held out his claws in defense. "You're dead! You're not a shinigami. You shouldn't be here."

L cocked his head to the side, his large mouth forever in a smile that might never be real, and held the Death Note out further towards Raito. "Yet here I am, therefore, what can I be but a shinigami? The logic isn't all that advanced on this one, Raito-kun. And please, do take your book. You're going to need it. All those people to kill for spoiling your plans. You can see all of their faces now, all of their names. Isn't that what you've wanted?"

Raito felt sick to his stomach. L's eyes were the most familiar and human about him other than his hands, and yet they tore the deepest into Raito's skin and clung like claws.

What he wanted? What did it matter what he wanted now?

"I don't want anything. It's over."

"Over?" L pushed, taking an awkward, animalistic step towards Raito that rocked him on his monstrous feet. "But you can have it all now. You can make the world in your image and destroy every last criminal in a matter of months, maybe days. Shinigami do not need sleep, much as they sleep anyway. Think of how easy it would be, Raito-kun. Kira acting from the grave."

"Stop it!"

L had begun to take small halted steps closer to Raito after his initial advance, and with Raito frozen in place, hands still up to protect himself, L stopped an arms reach from touching Raito with the outstretched Death Note.

"Stop," Raito said again, "Stop mocking me. You think I don't know I'm finished? That worthless twerp that could never fill your shoes beat me and now I'm here. I should have seen clearer but I didn't. I failed. You probably enjoyed watching at the end, didn't you? But it wasn't you who finished me."

"No," L said, and if his mouth could pout Raito was certain it would have. L's arm dropped finally, the Death Note hanging at his shrouded side. "I did so want to catch Kira myself. I was terribly depressed for quite some time. But you are wrong, Raito-kun. I did not enjoy your death at all."

"Why, because you didn't get to cause it yourself?" The words spit from Raito unthinkingly, but the raised eyebrow from L in response was enough to remind Raito of how foolish he was thinking. "You're a shinigami," Raito said, breathless now, "You could have killed me."

"And I didn't. One would think that means I do not intend you harm, Raito-kun, despite your defensiveness towards me," L indicated Raito's held-up claws, "And besides, we are both shinigami. If revenge was what I wanted, what could I do to you? We couldn't hurt each other even if we tried."

Clearly, death had robbed Raito of his quick thinking. He shook his head to get himself to focus. What was L saying to him? He wasn't there for revenge? He had been a shinigami since his death but he hadn't tried to kill Raito? There were too many pieces missing for Raito to come to any plausible conclusions.

He had to admit defeat.

"I don't understand," he said. And he waited for L, who would surely enjoy getting the chance to monologue his great wits, to answer him.

"What don't you understand, Raito-kun? Why I am here or why I didn't kill you?"

"Either. Both."

L inched forward and Raito flinched. L couldn't hurt him, he knew that, but that didn't put him at ease. He had killed the man. Surely there was resentment on L's part. Who wouldn't feel resentment towards their killer?

Technically, Raito hadn't been the one to kill L, not actively, but he had led the circumstances in that direction. If not the act, the plot was his, and therefore the guilt was his as well. L had to blame Raito.

"No," L said, and for a moment Raito wondered if he was talking out loud again. "No," L said again, "I never wrote in one of the Death Notes. I am not here for punishment."

Raito, feeling too close-quartered with L, shifted his weight back, leaving a good few feet between them. He stayed on guard, not sure what to expect from all this. The day certainly wasn't run-of-the-mill in any sense. He listened and waited for L to continue.

"When I died, because my death had been caused by a shinigami I was given the choice to become one myself. Heaven or this. Apparently, no one has ever chosen to become a shinigami before, unless the choice is between this and Hell, of course. So you see my transformation was different from yours."

"Different how?" Raito asked.

L tilted his head further and it seemed to lull half-attached as he thought. He brought his human thumb up to his lips as he was wont to do in life, but when the thumb reached his fangs he flinched, unable to continue the act as he once would have.

There was something pitying in the inability.

"I suppose the only noticeable thing," L said finally, "Was that they didn't make me watch. I hear they brought in a mirror for you."

Raito's shoulders hunched and for a moment he was as rolled over as L. "Does every shinigami here know my circumstances?" The question was poised, but meant more as an angry statement.

L didn't answer. Instead he asked, "Raito-kun, do you want to know the rest? Why I chose this and yet didn't choose to kill you?"

Raito wanted those answers very much. He was still on guard but he nodded for L to speak on.

"Don't you know the answer to those questions?" L said.

Confused, Raito could only shake his head. How would he know the answer? He couldn't fathom any reason for L to become a shinigami other than with the intent to kill him. What other reason could there be?

"You don't…do you." L's words were not a question at all, but there was a deeper tone to them, filled with something Raito could only recognize as the same defeat and guilt he felt himself. L's eyes turned down at their corners like a frown, making up for his clown-smile mouth. "I became a shinigami to wait for you, Raito-kun," he said, "Heaven would have been rather boring without you, I think. Who would I have talked to? And if I killed you I wouldn't have been able to see how the story ended. I was more angry with being beaten than at you specifically for the part you played in my death. Though it was disheartening. I wanted so badly for you not to be Kira, Raito-kun. I don't know what I would have done if I had won before dying. I suppose we'll never know…will we?"

Raito didn't know how to reply. L became a shinigami for the…company? He waited for Raito? He sat back and watched, keeping his own hand out of the machine to see what would happen to the story by Raito's power alone?

The whole thing sounded suspiciously like something a friend would do.

Raito wanted to retch, but he didn't think shinigami could do that. "You really…meant it. Didn't you? All that talk of being friends…it wasn't a gag, it wasn't a trick to get me to slip up as Kira. You really…always thought of me as a friend."

L righted his head, holding it straight, and his overly stooped figure seemed to curve into itself all the more. "Had I ever lied to you before?"

"But…but we were playing each other all the time. Tricks, hints, everything."

"I told you I was L. I told you I thought you were Kira. I always told you the truth, even with all the games we played to catch each other. In the end, I didn't know for certain until my death that you really were Kira, and you still don't know my name."

"There!" Raito jumped, pointing one of his talons at L's chest, "Your name. You never told me your real name. That's the same as a lie."

"Raito-kun," L said, and his tone dripped with disappointment, "The truth of that was that I could not tell you my real name out of necessity, for my own safety. I never gave you a false name without you knowing it was false. It is not the same as lying. An outright lie never once left me towards you. I did not want you to be Kira, though I believed it even when the evidence suggested otherwise. And I did consider you my friend, my first-ever friend, Raito-kun. That feeling has not once changed, even after death. Otherwise," he crooked his neck again, "You would have died years ago."

There was no logic for this. "You…still think of me as a…friend? But…I killed you."

L raised one of his human fingers like a teacher about to correct. "Actually—"

"Rem killed you," Raito interrupted, shaking his head in dismissal, "But it was still me. I caused it. I forced her into it. Her character made it impossible for her to let you live. It was my fault. When you died I…" A flash of his own expression looking down in evil triumph, as he knew it must have, and of L's expression as he died, shocked and devastated, passed through Raito's vision. "God," Raito choked, "How can you call me your friend after…what I did, after everything I did? I…I deserve this, don't I…"

Staring down at the gnarled claws of his hands, Raito felt himself shaking, trembling beneath every layer of leather. He was dead, he had failed, and he was being punished for it in the most fitting, awful way, proving he had been in the wrong. He could deny it, but the gods would be against him, the gods of death and whatever others existed. This was what he deserved.

He did not deserve L's friendship.

As before, though Raito sobbed, no tears came. His stretched and deformed body shook and nothing came of it. L was right. Raito could take his new Death Note and continue his work as Kira without any hindrance. Surely, that is what the shinigami of this world expected. That is what L expected as he tried to shove the Death Note back into Raito's hands. But the lure of that was gone. Not only because Raito could no longer rule as a god over the world he might create, but because he saw, finally, what his mission had done to him, and it crashed on him like a wave.

When his memories came back to him in the helicopter that day, he did not lose the memories of his time without memories. He remembered not remembering and it was that he had to fight against to continue his work. He had to forget that he had hoped he wasn't Kira, that he had started to like L and think of L as his friend. He had to forget that he thought differently because circumstances were different. With his memories back he had to fight to think like Kira again, but his plan ensured that would happen. If, with his memories, he had decided to back out, to give up being Kira, he never would have been able to live with himself. His only choice was to become Kira fully again and forget forcibly all that had happened between.

Raito wished he had dropped the Death Note that day. God, how he wished it. More than he could ever wish to have never picked the Death Note up in the first place, he wished he had dropped the Death Note when his memories flooded back in the helicopter. If he had he would have freed himself from Kira forever and been able to remain L's honest friend.

Now that chance was beyond gone. He had forfeited his chances long ago. He mourned them now and sobbed on tearlessly because of it, but there was nothing he could do about it but live as a shinigami in retribution.

More than ever, Raito longed to retch, to purge himself of his own filth, but even that was denied him.

When a pale white hand appeared in Raito's vision to cover the black claws he was staring at as he shook, Raito's first instinct was to flinch, to jump, anything. But he couldn't move. He looked up and the few feet that had separated him and L were gone. The black-eyed shinigami was right there, close enough for Raito to count teeth, and his human hand was warm against the hard black of Raito's claws.

"This is all I wanted from you, Raito-kun. Not revenge. I hoped you would find yourself again before your aspirations resulted in your death, but you were too stubborn for that. I am happy, however, that you have found yourself now. I…" The twitch of L's stretched lips made Raito believe the smile, at least in part. "I missed you," L said.

Something swelled inside of Raito and he almost embraced the shinigami before him, but he knew better. The touch of L's hand on his was probably more active physical contact than the reclusive genius had displayed in years, outside of the pair's brawls. In a way that simple touch of skin was L's form of a hug. Raito could feel it as if the other's arms were actually around him. It made him long even more for tears.

He was dead after all; there was no more room for regrets or feeling foolish. He couldn't have Heaven, but he could have something more than a lonely shinigami's life. He could have companionship. L was offering it to him without asking anything else, even after everything Raito had done.

"What do we do now?" Raito asked, and though he had thought he was done with feeling foolish, those words sounded so young and pitiful, he felt it anyway.

L removed his hand and replaced it with the other, holding the Death Note over Raito's claws for him to take. "You'll want this."

Raito was hesitant. His trembling was subsiding and he stared at L in confusion. "Why? After all this you want me to use that thing? Isn't that hypocritical?"

"Of course not. We're shinigami." The answer came out so matter-of-factly, Raito actually felt foolish again for asking it. But he was still hesitant.

"But…a hundred years is enough. More than enough. Even if all that waits after those years is…nothing. I don't want to continue Kira's work."

"Is that what you think I want?" L's eyes were wide, more like Raito remembered, and if he stared only at them, he could forget, if only a little bit, that L wasn't the same youthful-faced man with a penchant for nibbling his thumb. "Now, now, Raito-kun, your logic really is failing you. What could we gain by taking lives other than more life for ourselves? I agree that continuing a living as a shinigami would not be desirable, even in your company, so shouldn't we instead be combining our minds to think of a way…out?"

Raito wondered if several years of being a shinigami had driven L mad. "But…there is no out. Either we kill someone to extend their life and die instantly, we kill to extend our own, or we wait for what time we have to run out. What else is there?"

Again, for a moment or maybe more, L's smile was not just a detail of his new form. It was real. "You are lucky, Raito-kun, that I have had these years to experiment."

Raito didn't know what L was talking about but he was more than willing to listen. Even after death he could feel how much he was clinging to life and he didn't want to give that up. If there was a chance, more than wanting to make things right with L, Raito wanted to save them both from this existence. There had to be another way.

L's smile seemed to grow, and even so large it still seemed genuine. He handed Raito the Death Note and finally Raito accepted it. Then, displaying his very human hands for Raito to look at more closely, he leaned in towards Raito and said, "What if years isn't the only thing a shinigami can trade for with the names they write?"

Raito's new, red eyes, glowed in the semi-darkness of the shinigami world. He and L were both shinigami but one thing had not changed.

L was a genius.

tbc...

A/N: Still good? Hope so. I'm thinking two, maybe three more chapters. Yep, I said it would be short. Considering how this is going to end, I will definetely continue with little one shots, however. ;-) Thanks for the reviews, minna.

Crim