Chapter Text
L watched through the camera as Misa screamed at Chief Yagami, who had told her and Light they were being led to their executions, and overall creating a very convincing performance that may have fooled even L if he didn't know better. Light had pleaded and pointed out how insane that was for a moment before his eyes widened a little, and he leaned back in his seat, panting. L almost thought he heard a soft whimper of pain, his eyes slowly falling closed. His head fell limp, his hair falling in his face and curtaining off his eyes.
L's brow furrowed. What was Light pulling now? He must have seen through the whole charade and was now trying something to get himself and Misa out of this. But what was he trying to do? He could be having a panic attack, but whether that was fake or not, L couldn't tell through the poor quality cameras.
But he knew five minutes later that whatever had happened fooled the Superintendent. Soichiro hesitated with the gun, pulling it back only a moment later. Whatever he had seen, it had his voice trembling, and his hand reaching out for his son. "...Light? Hey, Light, it's okay..." his hand made contact with Light's shoulder, but Light didn't move. "...Light?!"
L leaned in closer to the camera and saw Light seemed to have passed out, and his eyes widened as he realized he couldn't tell if Light was breathing or not.
"LIGHT?!"
Soichiro's terrified scream of his son's name told him well enough he couldn't be sure of that either. The Superintendent jumped from the car, throwing the car door almost off its hinges to pull Light out as well, unlocking the cuffs to free his hands and place him on the ground just barely out of L's line of sight. Misa was leaning forward, demanding to know what was going on and what had happened to Light.
L's blood ran cold when he heard a despaired plea from Soichiro, looking around wildly and shouting to the empty air for someone to call an ambulance. What had Light done? But L did call an ambulance, not because he was necessarily worried about Light, rather because he was curious about what the young man was faking to scare his father so badly.
Part of his brain asked him that what if Light wasn't faking. A couple other options also popped up, and L felt genuine dread seep into his being when Soichiro's pleas changed. No longer to wake up or open his eyes, but to stay alive.
He couldn't wait in silence anymore. The mock execution wasn't happening, and he had to understand the situation. L pressed the button to communicate, "Yagami-San, I've called an ambulance as you requested. What has happened?"
"Light's not breathing! I've been trying CPR, but he won't wake up!"
Trying CPR didn't work... L's stomach dropped. Light wouldn't be able to remain in this state if he was faking—CPR would be far too painful to continue feigning unconsciousness. There was a genuine chance he may have broken ribs from this, and that would be impossible to ignore. Whatever had caused Light to collapse, this was real.
"Chief Yagami, please calm down." He needed to remind himself of that as well, only thankful nobody else on the task force had been willing to watch this, and had been situated into another room. Watari had locked the door so Aizawa and Matsuda couldn't yell at him again. "Panicking will do nothing to help Light. Does he have a heartbeat?"
"A—A faint one. He didn't before, I keep losing it—"
Keep losing... this was real. "Make sure his heart keeps beating, and see if anything is blocking his airway." He couldn't think of what that could possibly be, and he was sure that Light hadn't had access to anything. He hadn't bitten into a cyanide pill or something along those lines. Anyway, that theory was insane. If Light was willing to die, he would have done nothing against execution.
L heard when the ambulance arrived to take Light, and the detective ran out the door to head to the hospital, needing to know what had happened, and as his heart painfully clenched in fear, he pleaded to any God out there, for Light to survive.
But a mere half-hour later, he knew he was an atheist.
"I'm sorry," the doctor said softly to the task force gathered in the waiting room, "We were too late to save him. We tried everything we could, but our attempts were futile."
L heard those words, but while everyone else instantly knew what that meant, he was stubborn and refused to accept the idea it was implying. "What—What happened?" He rasped out, "One minute he was fine..."
He couldn't process the doctor's face, but he could sense the pity radiating off him, like he had seen this reaction many times before. "It's hard to say for certain until the autopsy report comes in, but all signs at the moment suggest the cause of death was a heart attack."
Those two words made L's eyes widen, echoing in his head. Heart attack, heart attack, Light had a heart attack...
Kira.
Just the idea made L nauseous. No... there was no way... unless Kira was a member of the task force, nobody could have known about Light being in confinement, right? If that was true... No. That wasn't right. Every member of the task force adored Light, and even if that were to be a facade, there was no faking the love they had for Soichiro Yagami. He was almost a father to all of them. None of them would do that to him. So there had to be another explanation, but for that to be true would mean L may as well have killed Light with his own hands.
Autopsy... They would need to send his body for an autopsy. Light is actually... L's mind froze, forcing him not to finish that sentence. It was like his entire body had been paralyzed to force him not to finish that sentence, but doing nothing to stop him from replaying those horrific words in his head over and over until the end of that sentence wanted to come out as a scream. That wasn't possible. It wasn't.
Light was supposed to be Kira. He wasn't supposed to die to Kira. He certainly wasn't supposed to die from a heart attack, Kira's trademark kill. The amount of cruel irony necessary to kill him in that way...
The entire world disappeared from L's mind as he stared at nothing. He only dully noticed when a nurse carefully draped a blanket over his shoulders, a motion she must have been far too used to. He couldn't acknowledge the tears blurring his vision and spilling down his cheeks or the lamenting looks thrown his way from the people who didn't know the truth. He didn't hear the wretched, heartbroken scream from Soichiro Yagami as he broke down in a fit of hysterical sobs, where not even the rest of the desolate task force could ever hope to reach him.
He didn't hear Aizawa weakly say he would call for Arakawa, one of his friends in forensics, to expedite the autopsy results.
L couldn't process any of that. Nothing except the hollow void in his chest as he was forced to consider the possibility that... it happened again. He had lost someone he had been close to, but this time had been different. Light had been different. To have lost the first person in his life he would ever consider a true friend and equal, and for it to be like this...
The constant talk of the hospital never died down. Maybe L said something himself to contribute. He must have, because he could feel his lips moving. He couldn't be sure what it was, but the nurse complied with his unknown request and guided him into a room. He remembered glancing just behind him and seeing the other nurses trying desperately to calm Soichiro as his screams echoed through the hallway...
Nothing about this was real. Watari had told him time and time again to get more sleep, so there was no way this could be real. If it was real, he would have told the nurse to stop touching him, or he would have made a remark about this being the second time in under a year he was in this place. He could be complaining about the noise or the smell or the stale gummy bears in the vending machine they really should restock. But he wasn't saying anything about any of it, so it must not be real.
Or maybe he was simply too exhausted to consider the world around him.
But the shock began to subside as it always did, and it happened the moment he was left alone. Alone, in a hospital room, with someone laying underneath the white cloth already draped over him.
He didn't want to look at it. He couldn't. He wanted to turn away, go in another direction and have Watari take care of it just like he had before.
The world rarely let him have what he truly wanted. He forced himself to take the first step over to the body on the bed. Because he owed it to Light, to not leave him here dead and alone.
Sucking in a choked breath, L forced himself to pull back the white cloth, and though his expression remained perfectly impassive, inside he may have screamed as Soichiro had. It wasn't supposed to be like this. This wasn't part of the plan. If this was real... that meant he had made a terrible mistake. He didn't make mistakes, let alone terrible ones, so by deduction, this wasn't reality. So why, then... was his friend's face so frighteningly like a doll, beautiful as he had always been but with no signs of life at all?
Perhaps this was simply a hyper-realistic doll. It had to be that, or Light was a brilliant actor, and this was all an elaborate trick. But as he poked the cold doll, he realized with sinking dread as the last bit of denial and hope was snuffed out that this was undoubtedly a real corpse. This really was Light... or what was left of him.
Would it be Aizawa who made the remark of "I hope you're happy," or would Matsuda beat him to it? The two detectives who so rarely agreed on anything, working together to argue against him day in and day out. Had they known this would happen? Was that why they so tirelessly accosted him with accusations of wishing only for Light's suffering and death out of an inability to accept he was wrong?
They weren't wrong though, were they? That was the worst thing of all. Tonight had proven everything they accused him of was right.
This was what L had claimed to want for months. For Light to die. He had been insistent that Light was Kira, and Kira would be sentenced to death. Even if his resolve to go through with the act had dissipated into nothing the moment he realized long ago that it was Light, he never voiced his change of heart, so to the rest of the world, this was what he had wanted. Light was gone... forever, and it was all L's fault.
He didn't know what his face was doing anymore, as he remembered everything he had done to Light. From the day they met in April to the final two months of his life that pushed him to this point. Lying to him... imprisoning him... traumatizing him... He should have known this was possible, like with his father before him. How could he do this? How didn't he see this coming?
He wiped roughly at the tear tracks staining his cheeks, biting down hard on his thumb as he intertwined the fingers of his other hand with Light's, a chill going up his back like ice pressed directly on his spine as he felt no warmth... his body was already growing cold... "I'm sorry, Light." He whispered softly so nobody else could hear, brushing some of Light's hair out of his face. His hair had grown out in confinement... "You're not Kira, but even if you were... that wouldn't have changed how I felt about you."
A choked sob broke free. He gritted his teeth, trying to block out everything about Light's final day alive, or his last words to Light before doing something unforgivable. No matter how many times he had wished throughout his life, he could never change the past. Light died believing his own father would kill him—that he would be remembered as a murderer when it was clear now that he was nothing of the sort.
His hand moved to the back of Light's head and then down, sitting him up so his back leaned against L's arms. He didn't move as L pulled him close. He didn't know that even if only for a moment, he wasn't alone anymore. He couldn't feel the soft kiss L pressed against his forehead, holding his hand close to his chest and hoping for any sign of life. That miracles weren't as impossible as they seemed.
"I'm so sorry, Light..." His shoulders trembled as his sobs became unbearable. Light would never hear him, but maybe if he held him close, his regrets could somehow reach him, so Light would know that L never wanted this. He would forever be L's greatest mistake. "I would do anything to take it all back."
OoOoO
L wouldn't get out of bed for days after the autopsy report came in, and he wasn't sure how to feel as foreign emotions tore through his mind. He could barely wrap his head around what he had read, and the fact that Light was dead. He was gone. It seemed all of L's worst fears or morbid hopes had been realized. Light's heart attack had been in no way related to Kira, or if it had been, Kira had picked the person most likely to have a heart attack naturally.
Much like Light's father, his heart attack had been caused by chronic stress, only Light's was much more severe to the point the spike of adrenaline when being told he was being taken to the gallows had been the final straw before his heart gave out. His condition had only been worsened by how he had been severely malnourished, somewhat feverish, and exhausted far beyond what was healthy or normal.
L remembered noticing all those things in Light, and never once questioning if what he was doing was worthy of stopping. He had known it was wrong, that it was in some ways evil, but he was so sure that Light was Kira that it shouldn't matter, right? But it did matter because if he had listened to the task force, Light might have still been alive.
It was because of this that he knew the task force wondered, not for the first time—the first time had been when there were dozens of people on the case and not just a handful—if L himself was Kira, and had killed Light. But L had pointed out that if he was going to be throwing Light under the bus, he would have killed the Superintendent to frame Light in absolute. That had seemed to satisfy their doubts about him being the mass murderer, and meanwhile, L had become increasingly suspicious of the task force. If one of them was Kira, and they had killed Light to divide the team and lower L's deductive abilities, it had been a brilliant plan.
Even if he knew that idea was ridiculous. He had dismissed it for a reason. But the human mind was a fickle thing, and some weak part of him needed someone to blame that wasn't himself.
Soichiro had left the task force, and L didn't blame him. Having watched his son die had been unbearable for him, and the hand L had played in it, whether Kira was the culprit or not. The rest of the task force was still there, but it was clear they didn't trust L and would never follow his orders again. Misa was on her own floor, and she had tried to kill herself four times from his estimate, saying living without Light was too unbearable. Seeing the girl was unstable and Light had been the only thing keeping her grounded, L had brought in a therapist to handle her issues. He couldn't have her dying too.
L looked to the bed he and Light would have been sharing if everything had gone according to plan. If he had just told Light the truth about criminals still dying, maybe then he wouldn't have had as much strain on his heart, and he wouldn't be gone.
He heard footsteps and assumed it was Watari. His adopted father had only seen him like this once, years ago when A died, and L learned he was the indirect cause of his suicide. He had cried for a day, been catatonic for a couple more days, and then went back to his regular routine as though nothing had happened, even though he remembered, and the guilt still weighed on him.
L knew, give it a couple more days, he would be able to lock up his grief and focus on the investigation. He sighed from his place curled on the bed. He had been telling himself that for the last two days, would try to work, be reminded of Light, and find himself wallowing and eating on the bed with zero motivation to do anything. What if the next suspect was wrong too and would pay the price for L's mistakes, just as Light had?
"Ryuzaki, what are you doing? Don't you plan to catch Kira?"
That voice...
L looked up and found himself face to face with Light Yagami.