Light Yagami could feel.
He could not see, and he could not smell. He didn't know if he could hear or taste, but he could certainly feel. A cold breeze was playing over his skin, which tickled slightly, and his hair was flapping around his ears a little.
There is life after death.
Inwardly, Light rolled his eyes at himself for making quite possibly the most obvious and clichéd assumption that everybody else who happened to be dead made when they got here.
Trouble was, he couldn't exactly determine where 'here' was.
He chuckled in his mind. The great Yagami Light. He'd had so much experience with the supernatural, and yet he couldn't even consider making any remote sense of the afterlife. He tried to think. His mind was still in tact, that was for sure, although much emotion was missing. He couldn't help feeling like he'd forgotten something important.
"Hello, Yagami-kun."
That voice. He recognised that voice.
"I've been waiting here for quite a while now."
With the picture of a pair of almost lidless, black eyes, it all came back. Everything, from realisation of having the ability to move, to the terrifying weight of his complete memory of the Death Note, and being able to recall every detail of the last four years of his life with sickening clarity. He saw himself finding the Death Note. He saw himself nearly throw it back on the ground and leave it alone. He saw himself surrcumb to his own disgustingly human desire for power.
His vision returned.
L had not been speaking through all this, as far as he knew, though it was difficult to tear the present apart from his visions of the past. Light concentrated. He looked at himself. He was wearing plain, all black clothes that hung loosely off him, as if he was in mourning of his own death. This thought sparked off another chain of painful memories. Forcing his own father to his death. Killing the woman who, for a while, he had loved. His own, insignificant, removal from the human world.
Concentrating again, he managed to muffle the visions slightly and observe his surroundings. The sky, if the vague, swirling mass above him could be called such a thing, was a very deep grey, - almost black, but still light enough to show the tangled shades within it, morphing and contracting at an unbearably slow pace in front of his eyes. If tragedy had a design, Light thought, this would surely be it.
The ground was littered with bones; ones of human origin, ones of animal origin, and some that Light didn't even recognise as Earthly. Tall, curved pillars in between the dead and contorted shapes of lightning-struck trees, made of a material Light couldn't name, were leaning towards each other in a vast, snaking line, towards a misty, heartbreakingly black pit which seemed to go on forever in each lateral direction, and of which Light could not see the bottom. A dishevelled and broken staircase appeared to hug the walls of the pit as far as he could tell.
The Shinigami World, Light realised.
L was wearing what Light would have expected him to wear had his mind been on the subject: baggy, plain jeans and a white, long-sleeved t-shirt. Light's view of him was slightly obscured by what appeared to be overly large, black remainders of rotting leaves, jutting out at odd angles from the tree by which he was sitting.
As if he was waiting for Light to overcome all this before he next spoke, L remained completely silent as he walked closer to him. In a small moment of horror, Light realised that the skeletal, lace-like obstructions to his view of L were not leaves. They were wings.
It was like they had been stabbed awkwardly into his back. Blood stained his shirt where they passed through the fabric, and some swelling could be seen at the base of each one. Light felt sick, not unlike how a person would feel if they saw a friend's bones broken at some horrific angle. As he got closer, other new details on L's body came into focus. His fingernails had grown longer by about an inch, and they were black and shattered. Thorn-like black spines emerged from the far side of each of his hands, and the same on his feet. His hair looked thick and oily, and splatters of stale blood were on every section of exposed skin Light could see.
That wasn't the worst of it. He moved closer, enough to be able to sit beside him and talk to him, and saw that the wings and spines and hair weren't just growing out of L. They were growing into the charred tree beside him, and into the earth between the bones. L was growing into this landscape. He was literally attached to it.
Light was ready to either scream, vomit or get up and run, when L spoke.
"I apologise for my current appearence, Yagami-kun. However it seems the longer one stays still in this world, the more one becomes a part of it."