Author's Note: A look at Mu, and how souls move and interact. If people have soul mates while alive, imagine how it is while being dead.
I like this one. A lot.
Nothing was right. Nothing was wrong. It was all just in between here. That's what it was, wasn't it? Nothing. Nothingness.
Damn, L hated being dead.
It was all so boring. He had always thought that when he died, he would simply stop existing. He had not believed in an afterlife. Death was death. He would end.
Figures that the one time he was wrong, it was for eternity.
This place wasn't black or white or any color or shade. It didn't conform to that cliché of the afterlife, the romanticized refuge for souls who have left their bodies. There was no pure white of Heaven. There were no blazing, blood red fires of Hell.
There was no way to explain it, really. Nothingness was nothing. And yet L lived in it, as others surely did.
He couldn't talk to anyone else, or look upon the mortal world as he once looked into others' lives with his cameras. Sometimes he thought he felt a spark, though, as his soul brushed against something—another soul, maybe.
Were they all just in a giant fish bowl? A bunch of dead fish, floating around and bumping against each other and off of the glass walls. L might have laughed if he still had vocal chords.
He had no idea how long it had been since his death. Maybe it had been centuries. Maybe no time had passed at all. (If that was the case, then eternity was going to take a long time.)
He sure had a lot of time for thinking. No doubt one day his brain—or whatever made him think—would just stop, seeing no point to working any longer, and he would just float, mindless, blank. The dead fish would finally stop twitching. Most likely this would take longer for him than it did for most, as L had the brain power to sustain his sanity and thinking processes longer. But it would happen, and L was surprised to find he did not fear it.
In fact, he found himself thinking that it might be nice to not have to think anymore.
That train of thought stopped. He began wondering about other things. He tried to remember songs he had heard in his lifetime, to try and see if listening to the songs in his head would help alleviate the boredom.
When the only songs he could remember were the annoying jingles that were always annoying him while he was living, he turned to composition, writing a masterpiece in his head as time went on. The instruments of his mind had that voice of thought that accompanied everything, even music. They held that hum, that buzz of something electric and chemical that you could have sworn was a sound but you knew you weren't actually hearing. With the delightfully simple and slightly odd melody, the high and low notes coming together and flowing like waves in an ocean, the hum of L's brain made a nice effect. Too bad no one would ever hear it.
Just then, L felt a spark somewhere on his form. He must have bumped into someone.
He dismissed it and went back to his symphony.
But then the spark was back. And it was not only in that one spot now. It seemed to be spreading over him, all over his body.
His body.
He could feel a body!
Whatever the spark was, it was giving him shape, it was giving him life. L had arms, he had legs, and he could move them as he wanted, as much as he wanted, every which way, wriggling like a squid. He didn't do this, but he knew that he could, and the spark wasn't finished.
The spark was spreading to his mind and lighting up his brain, and yes, oh yes, he could feel it now, he had a brain, a brain and a shape and a body and he was alive!
At last he moved his limbs, his limbs that felt so flexible and strong and new, and the very first thing he did was grab onto the thing that was lighting him.
At the embrace of the thing (a soul? another soul? could they do this?) his body was engulfed in a flame of pure ecstasy, the rapture spreading from his toes to the very tips of every black strand of his hair.
A great convulsion racked his body, but this ecstasy was not sexual. This was joy, absolute joy, and L had never felt anything like this before and he feared he might never feel it again if he ever let go of this other thing, this other soul. (Because it had to be a soul, this was nothingness and nothing else could be there.) This soul was his, he could feel it, and he was theirs and he knew that even if they somehow broke apart they would spend eternity trying to find each other again.
L lifted his head (a head, a head even, and eyes as well) to look at the soul the he held tight to his chest. The soul that continued to light him, that began to wrap its arms around him in return.
He stared at the soul with his black eyes, the eyes that had never shone so before now.
Two radiant amber eyes shone back.