Abstraction

A Death Note Fan-fiction

Disclaimers: Nothing has changed since chapter one. However, I would like to add that there will be nothing even remotely resembling romance in any of these pages. I'm also working on the assumption that Misa committed suicide for the time being, as that was what I gathered from the ending of Death Note. If that's not right, I would appreciate someone telling me ASAP! Thanks!

And yes. L is out of character. There is a reason, I swear to God. And I'm using an old Death Note cliché in this chapter, so don't yell at me, because I warned you!

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Page Two: Lies in Darkness

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"L…"

The detective didn't so much as blink as Light stared at him, dumbstruck. "What…"

"Don't try to talk," L interrupted, licking icing off of his fork without taking his eyes off the other male. "You've been dead for three days. That sort of takes a toll on your vocal chords."

"… you… dead…" Light managed to say, his voice hoarse and cracking painfully.

L smiled at him. It was a cold, emotionless smile, but a smile none-the-less. "My, my, haven't we become eloquent in the past years?" he asked, his smile revealing the hint of a grin. He slowly stood and placed his now empty plate on the floor, walking over to where Light was laying.

"I'm sure you're hungry, Yagami-kun," he remarked idly, quirking an eyebrow. "Well… perhaps I will see what I can do to assist you. It does, however, depend. After all, I know what you did, Kira."

Light stared up at him, completely unable to move or protest. He was physically unable to move, and the protest wasn't feasible as he had all but admitted that he was Kira to L with that smile. That smile right before L had died.

Nevertheless, Light gathered his strength painfully and parted his lips to speak. The words were stopped this time, not by L's voice, but by L's hand firmly covering his mouth. "I told you not to talk, didn't I?" he asked quietly, not moving his hand.

Light blinked a few times as an overwhelming smell of powder filled his nose. They stared at each other for a few moments before L moved his hand and shuffled away a bit. As he did, Light realizes exactly how strong the smell of decay was in the room and he felt himself gag painfully.

"Do you not like the smell, Yagami-kun?" L asked quietly as he poured sugar into a mug, adding tea afterwards. "There is nothing you need to fear. The smell of the dead is truly nothing to fear. After all, some of it is in fact coming from you."

"Some…?" Light began weakly. L didn't seem inclined to turn around, and continued as though he hadn't heard him.

"I suppose," L began a little reluctantly, raising the cup to his lips as he paused, "…I suppose you're wondering how exactly it is that both of us are alive. Well, while it is cliché, I suppose I should tell you," he said, turning around slowly and grabbing the back of the chair he'd been sitting in. He pulled it over towards the bed Light was laying on and sat, the image of L looking down at him in the familiar position enough to send chills down Light's spine.

"After the discovery of the Death Note, at least on our part, I began to wonder if it had a counterpart of sorts. I suppose… a Life Note would be the most appropriate name for it."

A Life Note? To tell the truth, Light had actually wondered the same thing. Misa and, indirectly, Mikami had asked him about the existence of one as well. However, Light had long ago dismissed the possibility of such a thing as asinine. There was no way to bring people back to life.

Then again… a notebook with the power to kill would have struck him as stupid at age sixteen.

"It turns out that they do exist," L said as he sipped at his tea, "though… not in the sense that one would think. When you think of bringing someone back to life, what do you usually think of?"

Light wasn't sure if he was actually looking for a response with that question. Honestly, what he figured probably happened was, somehow, the person just… appeared. He hadn't really put too much thought into it, having tossed the idea out the proverbial window nearly as soon as he thought it.

L reached over to the table beside Light's bed and produced a thin white notebook, like an inverted Death Note. The cover bore no words, and the pages were black, but it looked pretty damn close.

"The Life Note," L said quietly, looking at it as he held it up, "is actually quite a complicated tool, far more complicated than the Death Note. All you need to use the Death Note is the person's face and name; a fact you are undoubtedly already well acquainted with. But with the Life Note, you must have the person's real name, face, and their corpse.

"I would like to think, after your demonstration of intellect in the past, that you wouldn't have to think too hard on that. But as you were obviously outsmarted by Near, I no longer have faith in your mind," L said, the undertone of mocking laughter in his voice making Light stare. What was wrong with him?

"It's only natural that you should have the corpse of the person you desire to revive," L said as he opened the Life Note in his hand, thumbing through it idly as he spoke. "All the Life Note does is bring the person's soul back into their body. If you leave that body buried in the ground, they will just suffocate in their coffin again, or die of terror, as taphophobia is quite a common ailment among humans. However, it's quite simple to merely remove the body from either the ground, an above-ground coffin, or otherwise.

"However, the Life Note is not something you would want to use on the people you like," L said quietly as he directed his attentions back to Light. "As a matter of fact, it's really only something you would use in two circumstances – one, if you absolutely have to, for information or something like that… two, if you absolutely despise the person you're bringing back."

"… why… bring back… one… you ha… ate…" Light rasped, his face screwing up into a pained wince at the feeling in his throat.

L smiled again down at Light. "Well, you should know the answer to that right now, Yagami-kun. After all, I brought you back with the Life Note. Thankfully, you hadn't been buried yet, so that saved me the trouble of digging you out of the ground. Then again, as Kira, I wouldn't be surprised if you would have had a huge state burial, or something… honestly, I didn't pay much attention…

"Forgive me. I digress. The point is that you would want to bring back someone you hate for no other reason than to make them suffer in as many ways as you possibly can. You're experiencing the Life Note right now. The Life Note causes whoever is coming back to life to experience all the pain and suffering of their death again, just in reverse. All wounds, broken bones, burns, slashes, and other symptoms of your death hurt as badly as they did the moment you died, and slowly work their way back until you are no longer in danger of death. It's that simple.

"Do you want to know why I brought you back?" L asked as he stood, placing his tea and the Life Note on the table beside Light's head. He then reached down out of Light's line of sight. After a moment, a clicking sound filled the room, and L began to lift the bed by the head, straightening it until Light was completely vertical. He hadn't realized until that point that he was actually strapped to the bed.

L moved so he was standing in front of Light and placed both hands on either side of Light's face, staring into his eyes. "I want you to suffer," he said simply. "You can bring people back an infinite amount of times with the Life Note, whether they died by the Death Note or any other means. Using that logic, I can kill you in one of the most painful ways I can imagine and then bring you back, forcing you to experience it twice, once as you die and once as you heal. Then, once you're completely better, I can just kill you again and bring you back once more…"

He laughed a little and backed away. "Dreadful chain of events, isn't it? And you don't have any way to escape, because you have no way to defend yourself against me. Even if I unstrapped you, you wouldn't have the capacity to run away. But you can't deny that you brought this upon yourself, Yagami-kun. All you've done to everyone, and all you did to me… you ruined not only my life, but the lives of millions around the world. It doesn't just count all those that you killed, but their families and friends as well. So now, I'm taking it upon myself to punish you."

L stepped away before turning and walking a few steps towards a table that held the teapot he had presumably used earlier, a half-eaten cake, an urn, and a small palm-pilot. Light had the opportunity to look around the room and immediately wished he hadn't.

Back in the corner was a metal gurney with a large, thin serrated knife lying across it. Beside that was a table that was covered in metal objects of all kinds – fishhook-type claws, different sizes and shapes of knives, a length of piano wire, a bottle of oil and a can of gasoline with several lighters lying beside them, and a multitude of apparatuses that Light couldn't even begin to imagine the uses of. But that wasn't what he regretted seeing.

Attached to the wall beyond the metal gurney and hanging by its hands was a full skeleton. A pile of burial clothes was lying in a heap on the ground beside it. Beside the skeleton was a wooden table.

On the wooden table was a corpse.

It was no one Light had ever met. He wasn't wearing burial clothes – though Light had never heard of anyone being buried in their normal clothes. His striped shirt, vest, and jeans were filled with bullet holes that had gone black around the edges, as though blood had been there for quite some time. His skin was still mostly intact, though it was beginning to fall off of his body in a few places. Most of his hair remained in his head, though some of it had fallen out onto the table. Mostly around his mouth, eyes, ears, and the places where his skin was falling off, his flesh was beginning to turn strange, rotten colors.

"Are you feeling… disturbed, Yagami-kun?" L asked quietly as he watched Light's reaction to the skeleton and the corpse. "Both of these people died either directly or indirectly due to your… escapades with the Death Note," he said simply, shrugging a bit as he walked over to the wooden table.

"Mail Jeevas," he said quietly, placing his hand on the corpse's chest gently. "He was gunned down after aiding Mihael Keehl to kidnap Takada. I trust that, though you didn't actually meet him, you are quite familiar with the incident. Apparently, he was killed for crimes against Kira-sama – therefore, his death was indirectly your fault. And him…"

Sighing a little, L walked over to the skeleton. "I doubt you're familiar with the intricacies of the Los Angeles BB Murder Cases, so I won't go into the details about this man. But this man was killed by the Death Note. Again, your fault."

Walking away again, L went over to the table with the urn and lifted it up. "Now, the one thing I've been wanting to test is how the Life Note would deal with someone who has been burned to death," he said thoughtfully as he carried the urn over to the metal gurney and opened the lid. "Since there technically is no more body, it would be hard to bring a soul back to it. But the rules say you can bring back absolutely anyone. So I think it's worth a try, don't you?"

Light just stared at L in complete shock, unsure of what to say. L smiled, picking up a feather and a small knife from the table beside the gurney. From his expression, it was obvious he was… excited, to say the least.

--

"I want to know what's going on, and I want to know now."

"We don't know. We honestly don't. No one knew anything about it until you brought it up, so we have nothing to go on."

Near closed his eyes, irritation showing plainly on his face. Sometimes, these people could truly be useless. "You did at least search the room, didn't you?" he asked dryly, quirking an eyebrow at the men in his employ, whom he had summoned immediately to look into the little problem regarding the missing bodies of his idol, rival, and rival's… servant, he supposed.

"Of course we searched it!" one of the men said a little heatedly. "We didn't find anything, I told you that!"

"Absolutely nothing?"

"Besides your fingerprints on the keypad, no!"

"Does that not strike you as odd?" Near asked quietly. "That you found absolutely nothing in the room? Absolutely… nothing?"

He stared at them expectantly. When none of them responded, he sighed a little, his annoyance growing ever plainer. "You found my fingerprints on the keypad. Fine. Did you find any other fingerprints?"

"Well… no, sir, but-…"

"And it doesn't strike you as odd that you found no fingerprints in a room in which massive stone slabs had to be lifted by hand in order to uncover the bodies, not to mention cover them in the first place?" the white haired man interrupted, his voice rising.

The men stared at him before looking at each other. Yeah, good point.

Near sighed forcefully through his clenched teeth and hunched a bit, raising his finger to his mouth and biting it irritatedly – an action he only performed when he could think of absolutely nothing to go on. "…go," he said finally, dismissing the men without looking at them. "I need to think. Go."

The men required no further encouragement as they hurriedly left the room. Near pushed his foot against the ground, using the momentum to slide his rolling chair across the room and bump into the desk. He quickly turned around and grabbed the bucket of dice nearby, beginning to build. He had read it before. In a long note that Mello had left. He had read it.

But, for the life of him, he couldn't remember a damn word of it.

All he remembered was that little detail.

All the fingerprints had been wiped away.

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…don't hit me.