Chapter Three: Burned

"Oh my fucking God," was all L could say when Light asked him later what he thought. He had no idea how literal that statement was until a week later, when he was lying in Light's arms once more, this time never to rise again. A fire burned brightly in Light's eyes, blindingly, a fire of self-appointed omnipotence, coupled with a smile of hatred. Of course he knew what this meant, in spite of the false screams with which Light screamed his false name. "Yagami Light. So, I wasn't wrong. But . . . I . . ." Calm, low light, smoldering with afternoon glow. It had been streaming brightly through the window before, and now it was dimming out as the connection between his brain and his eyes died at a rapid rate, just like the rest of him, until he was left in only darkness, silence, and stillness. "I . . . wish I had been," he gasped regretfully, just like anyone who has gotten too close to the fires of the sun wishes it only lit a path, and didn't burn.

He sat hunched up, just as he had in life, in a place with a floor but little else. It didn't really have a sky, just blackness, rising up into infinity. The only anomaly in this persistent blackness was L himself, his pale skin indeed looking like it glowed by comparison. It didn't matter if he was dead; at least this would enable Light to be caught. Surely the people who remained on his team wouldn't be so stupid as to not realize it was Light. It had to be. But then again, people believe what they want to. L certainly had. In spite of the knowledge that he might very well be doing this, he had kept allowing himself to be biased, until, in the end, it killed him. When he and Light had kissed. Did he seem to have any ulterior motive then? L wondered. No, he genuinely didn't. Later on, he seemed distraught by something. Had it been then? Was that when Kira returned to him? The directions of up and down tilted sideways, but L was still stuck to the floor, so his mind was still stuck to its thoughts. No, he didn't know about that. It had been after the suspected Kira died . . . after Light touched the book . . .

L's eyes went wide. What if touching the book is a mechanism through which the user is controlled? No, that wouldn't make sense. If that was the case, then he would have found himself controlled, as would anyone else on the team who had touched it. What if . . . what if in touching the book, a user's memories of its prior use return? And in its absence, they go away? Yes, that was it. That explained why Light had been so obviously innocent while in custody, while handcuffed to him, in spite of the overwhelming evidence: because he didn't know he wasn't.

A voice whispered in the dark and was joined by other voices still, at different frequencies; a choir barely audible and impossible to understand. L's eyes went wider than normal. He froze, the thousand ideas drained from his mind like the blood was drained from his face.

"Who's . . . there?" he wanted to know. The sky began to develop patches of light, flowing into his retinas upside-down, then righting itself to reveal clouds, in a soft, early morning sun–dove gray, tossed by the wind. There was nobody here, but the air felt alive and tingled with invisible sparks and what felt like droplets of cool rain. He turned around, and found himself faced with . . . a person on fire. L screamed, and threw the person to the ground, rolling him around in an effort to put him out.

"What are you doing?!" the being complained. "Get off me!"

"But, you're on fire!"

"Stop rolling me! I am God!" he cried in outrage. L suddenly realized that, in spite of currently touching the flames, he wasn't getting burned.

"This is all too weird for me!" he screamed, and threw his arms up weirdly, then fell to the ground and curled into a fetal position–but the thing was on its feet now, and was closing in on him. A flaming, beefy fist grabbed the front of his shirt and held him aloft while L screamed, wondering if he was about to go to Hell.

"Steven, stop bullying the new arrivals," another flaming being chastised, walking up slowly from below a hill L had never really noticed they were on.

"He was rolling me!"

"I don't care. If you want to fight someone," the being smiled, and clicked his sword open from its scabbard. "I'll be happy to oblige."

". . . Right. Well. I'm going to go get lunch," Steven complained, and dropped L to the ground, scraping his knees and tearing the jeans he had died in. He really hoped he wasn't going to have to wear a pair of torn jeans for all eternity . . . Wait, what was this? Blood? How could a person without a body have blood, and be injured? Steven walked off, muttering to himself about not having any fun around here.

"Ah, so you're the famous detective known as L," the being mentioned, after a single glance at his name, and a lifespan which read 0. "Well um, welcome to Heaven," it chuckled nervously. A pair of winged horses flew past behind him, pulling a brightly polished cart. A wheel on their side got stuck in a cloud and revved, spraying them with water before breaking loose and continuing its trek through the sky.

"I'm thrilled," L said wetly.

"What? I've never known someone to find themselves in Heaven, and be so despondent!"

"Can I go back now?" he asked, hopelessly. The being only stared at him, quietly blooming fire.

". . . L, you're dead. I mean, just to clarify things, dead people stay dead."

He sighed heavily. "Well, do you guys have a police force I can work with?"

"You don't have to keep doing that, you're dead now–"

"But I'm bored."

"You're . . . bored?"

"Yes."

"In Heaven? When you just got here?"

"Yes." Indeed, his mind had nothing to occupy itself with, which was, for L, a state of painful, heart-breaking boredom. "I have a pretty good resume," he added.

The being agreed to take him to the closest they had to a police force, a large building looking like an enormous and elaborate sand castle, with huge gold onion domes atop each tower. It had already begun to rain very heavily, augmented by small, annoying children with wings, who kept shooting him full of arrows.

"You know, for Heaven the weather here isn't very good," he noted glumly, as the flaming man held open a door.

"What?! But water is the source of life!"

"Pretty useless when we're all dead," L sighed, and pulled an arrow out of his butt.

Inside there were a variety of strange people, for example people with two necks and a head with two merged faces, or people with wings for instance, or people whose bodies were turning wispy at the edges, as if they were being dissolved by some acidic compound in the air. L reached through one of the wispy ones to take a number, and sat around on a love seat, waiting to be called. He tucked his knees up under his chin, and, eventually, fell asleep.

Instead of dreams, L had memories; memories of Light mostly; painful memories of the look in his eyes when he was so concerned about him, followed by a flash of his eyes as he held him, dying. You couldn't even think they were the eyes of the same person, and yet they were. Light's cold eyes faded into fog, and from that fog swirled up a horrible conjured image of him, standing before an enormous painting of God, so that it looked like the huge man's wings sprouted from his shoulders. His arms were outstretched, just slightly, gracefully, as if filled with a sense of delicate power, his eyes alight with that same mad, hateful gleam.

A hand came down on his shoulder; he could feel it this time. Was this a memory of Light again? But then the hand began shaking him, and he woke up screaming into the face of a very timid-looking ghost. The startled eyes reminded him a lot of himself and of his nephew, and of course, of his dead father, and his dead aunt.

"S-sorry," the ghost said timidly. He was a little guy, probably a teenager. You were inclined to forget that these people got here in death, but somehow this person made him realize it again. He'd obviously died so young. "But, sir. Is your last name . . . it's not . . . Lawliet, is it?" He looked blank, and lost.

"Let me guess, family reunion?"

"Yeah, we heard you died. We always throw big parties when a family member dies."

". . ." This naturally sounded very strange to a person who had grown accustomed to living among the, well, living. ". . . Tell them I've got business to attend to right now," he said, quietly.

"But we're upset enough hearing how your life ended so soon! Don't make us wait to meet you as well!"

"Unless you want to follow that family reunion with another one, very soon, for someone even younger than I am, I recommend you let me do what I have to do." The kid looked pretty dejected. "Look . . . younger . . . me-person–"

"I'm you're great uncle!" the kid smiled, broadly.

"That's very nice. But I still have business with the living. I'll meet up with you all soon."

"Number 42, please come to window 5!"

"I gotta go."

"Okay. Bye." Window 5 was occupied by a ditzy-looking blond girl who reminded L way too much of Misa-Misa, a pair of small, overly-cute wings growing from her back.

"L, the director will see you now," she smiled, and ushered him to a large, poorly-lit office.

L had died in his arms that afternoon, throwing away any chance of his being captured: his plan was complete, keeping him, and the world, safe from the destruction of their God. What had transpired between them had been odd, yet effective; L had let himself gaze into the sun out of his love for it, and in doing so, found himself blind. Still blinded, he wandered in the dark, unable to see the light for what it was, and sought out the only good feeling he could sense anymore–warmth. But warmth meant fire; and so the sun burned off his wings, and he fell, crippled, to his death, so many feet below. He had known that death was going to come, to him or L, and L wasn't going to prevent the loss of so many innocent lives at the hands of criminals. Yes, this was all perfectly justified. It was a situation where you have to kill or be killed. He'd destroyed L in self-defense, and with such a brilliant plan. He'd even kept his promise to L, that he made that night when he was foolish, his plans as God forgotten in the Death Note's absence. L had not died at his hand; he had merely put Rem in a situation where she had to kill him.

Light had actually smiled at his sheer brilliance into the eyes of his dying friend, all his anger at this man for getting in his way boiling and rising to the top of his soul. It was over, he sighed, looking up at a ceiling L once had, laying on one side of a bed L had once occupied with him. He was . . . justified. So then why did it hurt so badly?

If L had figured out who he was, it wouldn't have mattered to L in any way what Light-kun had said or the way he felt about L. He, Light, would have been put on trial anyways, simply because he was a person to be caught, and for no reason more than that; he would have been killed, without any consideration for all he had been trying to do, all that he did do, that so many others could not. He was sacrificing his own life, his own moral code to save the world from a sickness which ran through its veins. But he hadn't expected he would have to sacrifice someone he . . . tears ran down his face and he sobbed. L had moved into his room with him when the handcuffs went on, but hadn't left when they came off. Early this morning, L had been sleeping in his arms; the first sleep he'd ever observed in this strange man, who stayed up late into the night, eyes staring, circled, while he ate desserts. He had looked so peaceful. He probably looked peaceful now, as the morticians sewed his eyelids shut and pumped his veins full of embalming fluid.

Light found himself wailing, clutching the pillow with strangling fingers. It shouldn't have had to be this way. "Ryuuzaki!" he sobbed. "Why? Why did you have to–" but his sentence was cut short with a tap on his door, and it is a good thing it was, because Matsuda was outside, and the sentence would have ran, "Why did you have to get in my way."

"Light-kun, are you alright?" the sad-looking guy asked, carrying a tea tray. "I brought you some dinner."

"I don't want anything," he choked, tears still streaming down his face.

"Light . . . I'm sorry," he said quietly, and turned to go.

"Would you . . . flip that switch, before you go?" Light asked.

"Uh, sure, but why?"

"I . . . can't stand the light," he sobbed. Matsuda looked concerned, but flipped the switch off, and left, closing the door behind him.

It was resplendent in spite of the dim glower, with marble floors and gold statues on pedestals lining the walls. At the back of the room was a shrine, and behind an alter stood a hooded, shrouded figure, lighting candles. Everything about this place felt ancient and important, and L cast his eyes upwards to take in vaulted ceilings, painted like the Sistine Chapel. The hooded man took out a set of golden scales and lit incense in one side, sage in the other, and began wandering around the room chanting, as if he didn't notice that L was there at all. L cleared his throat. The man continued muttering. He cleared his throat again, and the man looked back.

"Hello," L said, and waved his hand in a single stroke.

"What do you want?" the man asked rudely, pulling back his hood. He was probably about L's age, with wild red hair and a slightly evil look; not the sort of man you pictured in Heaven, but evidently he was.

"You're the director?" he asked.

"Yes. Director Richman. So, what do you want?" This man was very to-the-point.

"I wanted to ask about working for you," L began.

"Have you ever worked for the police? Because I don't want anyone with no experience."

"I was, prior to my death, the world's top three detectives."

". . . L," he gasped. "Yeah, you're hired. When can you start?"

"After you help me put an end to Kira," he told him.