"Lochinvar"
by Acey
Disclaimer and Author's Note: I'm not smart enough to have come up with Death Note. The title and quotes both came from a poem by Sir Walter Scott. Major, major spoilers for chapter fifty-eight.
—
There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.
He keeps on with the recordings even when everyone around him is telling him to shut them off. L is keenly aware that he has lost face with the ex-policemen, for making them aware that behind the bag-lined eyes was a man after all—that L could be fallible—that L could be wrong.
L doesn't have the ego to say that is impossible, only that he was so sure in his calculations, in his percentages. Only that he never would have locked anyone up at all if he believed he hadn't had the proof necessary.
They will forgive him this one mistake. They will likely not allow him another.
"Let them have their privacy, L."
L obeys, but the minute everyone leaves his hotel room the cameras quietly return.
-
He keeps searching the computer when everyone else is too thrilled by who Kira's notto look again just yet for who Kira is. No one quite finds reason to fret over this more than usual—L has been an insomniac since the age of ten. He has never taken medication for it and does not plan to start now that the death note has seemed to prove everything he thought wrong.
"Come on, Ryuuzaki, won't you give it a rest for a minute? If I didn't know you were like this all the time I'd worry about you."
Light, relaxed, stepping almost absently into L's hotel room—not unnoticed.
"I still intend on solving this case, Yagami," he replies, forcing one hand from the keyboard long enough to peel the paper wrapper from a cupcake he doesn't feel like eating. He pauses, considers the old percentage points made null and void. "But I couldn't blame you... if perhaps you and Misa... would rather put this behind you."
"Well, actually... we'd planned on moving in together. Our relationship's only been strengthened by this. Misa..."
L pushes the rest of the cupcake aside, keeps his suspicions to himself.
"I'm glad for you," he lies, and he turns the chair toward Light. "But now that Misa has been proven innocent there is no place for her here. If you continued the investigation you wouldn't be able to spend much time with her."
"I'm aware of that. But protecting her is more important. Kira's insane, always speaking of a perfect world..."
"But Misa admired Kira."
"For something he did unwittingly." Light nods his head. "I know. Before she—when we first started to go out, she told me herself. She believed for awhile that Kira had helped her live again after her parents were murdered. Poor Misa—she's like a child, you know, so believing. But she knows what Kira really is now."
The very naturalness of Light's tone unnerves L.
"We're very lucky to have kept you on the team, then," and as Light, smiling, leaves, L thinks of horror movie victims learning too little too late.
—
He has the cameras still in place the day he dies.
He is pointing out an oddity—it seems that the reaper has vanished—when his chest suddenly feels as though it is splitting, exploding. His breaths are not coming. His breaths are not coming.
He falls with a crash from his chair to the floor, and the ex-policemen run to him, shouting "L, L, what's happened, what's wrong!" His eyes are wide and unblinking and he sees them all rush toward him in a blur of suits and bodies and faces, desperate.
He only sees one face in crystal clarity. And his voice has all the half-frenzied concern of the others, his face is as white as the others—he is fooling everyone even now. What irony, he manages somehow to think.
Every word is a laborious whisper. He fights harder than he's ever fought for anything to direct his last words to the man that is killing him. To reveal to the world in his final gasps that in death at last L can bring justice.
In the end, he barely manages more than his adversary's name.
But even as his mouth closes and heart stops, his eyes stay open, steadfastly accusing, though all others are shut.
—
Have ye e're heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?
finis