Trigger Warning: domestic abuse, blood, gore, horror (yes, you're still reading Bean). It's brief, but it's there.
L sat crouched with his knees to his chest and one bare foot overlapping the other. The bed was soft, and tucked beneath warm blankets was a little Bean, sound asleep and curled up beside his Papa. L watched him as he slept, gnawing on his thumb with his other arm wrapped tightly around his legs.
"You're doing your best," a soft Russian voice said, and L's wide eyes rose to meet a slender blue pair.
Anya was lying on her side on the other side of Bean, her upper half propped against the pillows as her fingers carefully played with her baby boy's hair.
L pulled his thumb back from his mouth slowly. "...I see that I'm dreaming," he observed plainly, and then his eyes drifted with a furrowed brow. "When did I fall asleep? I was sitting right here..."
Anya chuckled amusedly. "Well, you had quite a day." She reached over and gently brushed her thumb against the bruises along L's jawline. "Tsk." She smiled, letting her touch turn more affectionate against his face as his eyes met hers. "...you're doing great," she assured him again with feeling.
"I'm not so sure," he said quietly, still meeting her gaze, those blue eyes of hers so mirrored in the boy he loved.
Anya tipped her head with some sympathy, her fingertips lingering against his cheek. "You love him?"
L nodded. "More than anything." There was an ache inside his chest that his waking self rarely allowed himself to feel.
"And you're trying your best?" Her dark brows lifted with a smile and an encouraging prompt.
L didn't look away. He gave a single nod. "I think so."
"Then you're doing great," she whispered, her fingers finding the hair behind his ear.
L's own eyes softened. He remembered that smile... The same way he remembered a certain night several years ago now. It had been Christmas Eve. It had been snowing. Watari had gone to Wammy's House to deliver Christmas presents, and the fireplace had been snapping warmly to the sound of Silent Night being sung with a pretty Russian accent. She'd kissed him first. And he had kissed back.
Anya's hand returned to tenderly playing with Bean's soft, black hair, his back curled against her as he slept. Was he dreaming of her too?
"I just... don't want him to feel neglected..." L said quietly.
Anya's blue gaze lifted to meet his.
But L shut his eyes tightly, bringing his hands to his ears.
In his head, he could hear the smashing of glass and the drunken slurs of a brutish man. He heard the seething tone of a woman, laced with bitterness and cigarette smoke.
L's hands were shaking. He'd shut his eyes, but he could see now... a small room with a bed and a little table with some broken crayons. It smelled bad, and the floor was dirty. The angry sounds outside the door were incessant, and in the furthest corner of the room crouched a tiny boy with big, grey eyes, chewing vacantly on the end of his thumb.
"This is what you are afraid he might feel," Anya's voice said gently as she stood beside L now, both of them observing the apparition of his much younger self.
"Yes," L whispered, his hands pocketed as his gaze clung to the nameless, unwanted child in the corner.
He felt Anya's fingertips against his wrist, and his hand slid from its pocket to curl around hers. Her other hand came to his arm as her head tipped against his shoulder. Her actions weren't out of pity, but understanding. She'd been unwanted too. She'd been hurt too. The back of her right hand had a scar across it from being hit so hard it had broken the skin.
L didn't have any permanent scars. But the little boy in the corner had dark bruises shaped like fingers around his forearm, and another one on his cheek just under his eye. He was filthy, and his clothes were far too big for him. He just stared... until he suddenly looked straight at L.
...but the abused, neglected child was Bean now.
A sharp inhale colored a sound of panic as L quickly stepped back, but he stepped on something small and flat, and he quickly whirled around.
He was in a different room. It was clean and bright and warm. Bean was on the floor playing. L lifted his foot, and beneath it, he saw a puzzle piece. Bending, he slowly picked it up.
"Papa!"
L's gaze met smiling blue eyes as a childish hand reached out for the piece. Numbly, L handed it over.
"You've given him a good life," Anya's voice came again, and this time, she was sitting criss-cross on the rug near their son. She looked up to L with such feeling in her eyes. "Your childhood and his... they can't be compared. I told myself the same when all I could afford was a shoddy apartment in Moscow and used toys with missing pieces that the thrift store couldn't sell. The difference between us and him? ...is that he's loved."
Bean just continued playing with his puzzle happily as L watched.
Yes. My son is loved.
But then a shadow in the shape of a hand began to emerge from one corner of the floor, expanding and growing as it spread closer and closer to little Bean.
L's eyes widened. He tried to move, but he couldn't. He tried to call his son's name, but his voice wouldn't work. Panic began to set in.
The shadowy hand moved steadily closer and closer, its jagged, skeletal fingers opening as it neared the unsuspecting child.
The room was darkening. Anya was nowhere to be seen.
No-!
The hand was looming now, rising up from the floor like a wraithy cobra, its claws like teeth ready to snatch up the little boy who was still playing with his toys and humming.
BENNETT!
A sharp pain suddenly gripped L's chest, and he gasped as he dropped to his knees. His breaths were ragged as his chest constricted, his hand coming to clutch his shirt over his heart. His eyes moved desperately to his boy, but only in time for him to see Bean turn his curious gaze towards the monstrous hand and be violently devoured.
"NO!"
L's hand grasped out and then jolted to a stop. His heart throbbed once, and then he fell to his side, the floor opening up into a black abyss.
The wind felt cold on L's hair and clothes. He was lying on his side as his eyes slowly opened. As his vision came into focus, he saw that he was somewhere bleak and vast, like a desert made of purplish grey stone. The sky was thickly overcast and dim, swirling with intermittent energy shrouded by nebulous clouds.
L's head slowly came up, his hands bent up by his face, and the corners of pages fluttered in the same dry wind that tugged at his hair. The whole ground was covered with files and documents, thousands upon thousands of them, completely concealing the ground beneath him and then thinning to a light scatter as the radius expanded outward towards the jagged mountains that distantly surrounded him.
"Bennett..." L murmured his son's name before he pushed himself to stand with a soft grunt, looking around through windswept hair as his clothing rippled against his tall and gangly frame. Papers fluttered at his bare feet, and he looked down. Scanning the documents that carpeted the ground all around him, he took a step back and then another, his eyes darting from one heading to the next.
Case files. All of them.
And each one stamped with finality in red ink: CLOSED.
L exhaled as he looked up and then turned, pushing his hair back with his hand as stray pieces continued to dance around his troubled countenance. "Bennett?" he called out again, but a sudden gust of wind silenced him, nearly stumbling him as the papers at his feet began to flap and rise and swirl. The wind rose in power, whistling into a mournful howl as L found himself at the center of a paper cyclone, both arms held up before his face. His teeth grit as he squinted between his arms, the whooshing documents only a blur.
And then as quickly as it had picked up, the wind died down, leaving only paper dust in its wake. It swirled and then dissipated like smoke from a snuffed-out candle, and L found himself standing on cold, grey stone now. The files were gone...
All but one.
L lowered his bent arms slowly, his eyes on the lonely file lying on the ground only a few feet away. The wind was gone now. His hair was blown back, soft and voluminous but settling now that the air was still. He let out a breath before stuffing his hands into his pockets and walking quickly over to what the whirlwind had left behind. Reaching it, he crouched down and picked it up gingerly by pinching one corner, holding it up to inspect it as a thumb came to his lips. Then he slowly stood, and his hand moved from his mouth to open the folder.
This one wasn't stamped. It was an open case. The Kira Case.
L flipped through the files, finding them all too familiar until he reached the final page.
An autopsy report.
...his.
A hollow sound resonated, like an industrial sort of switch had been thrown, and L looked up.
He was in a dark room. Before him was a single light hanging from a ceiling over a metal autopsy table where a white sheet covered a corpse.
Still holding the file, L turned slowly and walked over. He let his eyes travel the lumpy sheet, noticing that the petite pair of feet sticking out wore blue and lavender nail polish. Then he reached for the other end, pinching the edges of the fabric and pulling it down to a thin collarbone flanked by bare shoulders. A pair of dulled and sunken blue eyes opened and moved to look at him.
"You shouldn't be here," Anya said softly. Her skin was grey, her lips were pale, and her hair was wet and combed back. Only her facial muscles seemed able to move.
L swallowed the hard lump in his throat as he looked down at her, the memory of her brightness and warmth so alive in his mind as one hand slowly came to rest on the edge of the cold, metal table. "...neither should you," he practically choked.
She smiled gently. "Well, that's debatable. Though you never really were an advocate for fate, were you?"
Hollow footsteps echoed on approach, and Anya's smile instantly vanished.
"You shouldn't be here," she repeated, more desperately. "He needs you, you shouldn't be here-"
L's brow furrowed, and he looked down...
He was on the autopsy table now, a sheet covering his unclothed body from the waist down. A shadowy figure in a scrub cap and mask was walking steadily towards him. L tried to move, but he could only lift his neck.
"Hnng-!"
Nothing else budged as he struggled in vain. He began to hear his own heartbeat as his wide eyes settled on the coroner, whose tapping footsteps stopped beside him. L's chest rose and fell with his breathing. It was getting louder.
Thump thump.
Thump thump.
Thump thump.
His head dropped against cold metal as he stared at a pair of glowing red eyes between cap and mask.
And L knew...
Kira.
"No!" L's head jerked up, but the rest of his body was stiff as stone.
Thump thump.
Thump thump.
"Hnng-! I shouldn't BE here!"
Like a glitch, Kira's gloved hand was now holding up a scalpel as dark and demonic laughter quietly rose up from the depths of his blackened soul, sinister and cruel and ugly. Then he leaned down, and the two were eye-to-eye.
"...I win."
L's expression panicked. "N-!" His eyes widened, his pupils constricting as a violent and gruesome breach was carved right down the middle of him, the desperate plea abandoned in his throat.
THUMP THUMP.
THUMP THUMP.
L's breaths were hitched and broken, his eyes squeezing and blinking towards the ceiling.
A sickening squelch echoed through the chamber as his skin was opened like grisly butterfly wings.
The cracking and snapping of bones resonated against the metal walls of the morgue as the frontal half of his bloody ribcage was lifted away.
As Kira turned towards his instrument tray, L brought his head up again with heightened breath to stare down at his exposed and beating heart.
His head dropped back to the table again, and he shut his eyes in anguish.
I'm scared, Wammy.
The voice inside his head was that of a child, small and helpless.
He heard Kira turn around again, blade prepped in the fingers of blood-slicked gloves to cut out his heart.
But then L heard another voice.
"Papa?"
L's eyes snapped open.
"I'm scared, Papa."
L looked frantically around the room as Kira's scalpel neared his open chest.
"Papa, save me."
Those eyes glowed redder still, that breathy laughter rising up and up, filling the room in a all-encompassing echo.
But L's eyes settled on the hidden face of his enemy, and like a drop of water evaporating against a hot surface, his fear left him completely, replaced by a fervidly protective passion. With the blade a hair's width from his heart, L's hand suddenly grabbed Kira's wrist, his eyes wildly flashing.
"Not my heart, you bastard!" he gritted darkly, beginning to stiffly sit up.
The scalpel fell with a metallic clang, the gloved hand open and rigid like a claw. The form of Kira vanished, scrub clothes dropping limply to the floor as L released his grip.
Throwing back the sheet, L hopped off the table, inexplicably whole and clothed again as his bare feet touched the concrete floor.
"Bennett?" he called out, turning in a circle until he was standing before his small son, his surroundings having changed again. "Bennett," he breathed out, falling to his knees as his steps met with Bean's, their arms encircling one another and holding on tight.
Bean's face was buried in the crook of his father's neck, and when they pulled apart just enough to meet each other's eyes, he was smiling.
L's hands smoothed down messy black hair, coming down to hold the little face that was so, so precious to him. "Are you alright?"
Bean nodded with enthusiasm. "Can I go play now?"
L found himself nodding, watching as his son left his arms and ran towards a swing set on a sunny playground. Slowly and dazedly, L stood.
"Sometimes, our biggest enemy is in our own head," came a voice, and L looked over as Anya stepped up beside him. She wore a simple white dress with little blue flowers.
As their hands slid together again, L looked back to where Bean was playing with some other children. Wammy's House stood off to the left, the sunshine glinting off of stained glass.
Anya looked up at him, a breeze pulling at her unevenly-cut hair as her fingers intertwined with his. "You can win against Kira," she told him. "But first, you have to win here." With her other hand, she poked the side of his head.
The sideways tilt of L's head in response to her poke was a bit exaggerated. "I have to face my own fears," he murmured as he righted his neck again. His chest rose and fell in a weighted sigh. His hand closed a little tighter.
The sunlight shone through the branches of a sprawling tree above, flaring into white light for only a second.
L stood beneath another tree now. One on a grassy hill overlooking Moscow. Before him was a grave, and around him were many others.
"Thank you for the flowers, by the way," Anya's said, beside him still.
L's eyes moved to the vase stuck in the ground beside the headstone. To this day, and as long as he lived, fresh flowers would be delivered here every week. Even in the cold months, evergreens and holly adorned Anya's final resting place. He'd seen to it since adopting Bean.
"It's the least I could do," L said quietly.
Anya smiled, her eyes on the current bouquet of summer blooms before turning to face him more. "Oh, Detective. You are raising our son. You are doing more than you know."
L smiled just a little, and his eyes fell shut as a gentle kiss touched his cheek.
And when he opened them again with a soft inhale, he had awoken. Bean was sound asleep beside him, and Light was too, in another bed. Anya was gone, but her ghostly presence lingered in a soft and sweet sensation on the side of his face.