When I shall return this sword to the angel, your foul blood will not stain its edge.
It will glimmer with the light of truth, and the strong arm shall rest.
It was cold, colder than she had expected it to be. She had never imagined herself a traitor, hiding behind bars, staring up at the single eye of the camera, shuddering under the intensity of its gaze. A figurehead for the figurehead, a mask to shield the mask. L was made of perhaps even more layers than Light; he defeated the illusionist in his own art. L, Coil, Ryuzaki, Lawliet—they all belonged to him, all bowed to his whims, him, the man with the raven's eyes.
He was a monster; he was not justice. Not the justice she had believed in—an eye for an eye was not true retribution. And even as she curled in on herself, holding the pieces of her life together, she knew that they were both wrong, that they were both demons in their own right. Kira and L—it was hard to decide which was worse: the man who manipulated her so easily, broke her will effortlessly, who looked at her as if she were nothing to him but another piece on his chess board; or the man who stole her freedom, who locked her away from the sunlight because he disagreed with her, because she hurt his pride—who tortured her not for justice but for his own selfish peace of mind. The ends justify the means, an eye for an eye, the lesser of two evils. God have mercy.
There were no church bells in that prison cell—nothing but the cool robotic voice, pestering like a mosquito, buzzing away at her ear. Kira, Kira, Kira. It was the only word it knew, and it made her laugh because that's all L would ever know. He would only know Kira; his disguises were slipping away with his desire to see Kira's face, his true face—not the visage called Light Yagami.
She lost track of the days with ease. It was a relief to lose count, to forget how long she had been lost to the parallel dimension. In the prison, she could pretend she was one of them, that her skin was marked by ink-black lines, that her skin was a clear, single shade of color. The window separated her from the world once again, except this time it was they who looked in, not she who looked out. Still, she almost wept for joy at the sight of it.
She was not Kira. She was merely his shadow—his silent conscience speaking of things that did not exist and ideas that did not matter. She was irrelevancy, she was useless; people died because she could do nothing to stop it. All she could do was watch and wait. And L knew that, yet he asked anyway. Day after day, he asked, his robotic voice commanding. Kira. Kira. Kira.
Kira turned to Kyrie and Kyrie turned to Eleison. But Kira had no mercy for the wicked; he had no mercy for the obstacles that stood in his path. He destroyed all he touched because he believed he had no choice. All opposition must be destroyed, all mountains conquered. No army could stand against him, and certainly no man.
For despite his robotic voice, despite his masks and false names, despite his raven's eyes, L was nothing but a man—a man dressed in the garb of an immortal. And that was a sin that not even Kira could forgive.
God have mercy, because she would not.