Archive of Our Own ^beta

We didn’t know about the home movies until after L died, and we very much doubt that L knew. If he had, he would have destroyed them. This wasn’t the legacy L wanted to leave. He wasn’t a person, he was a position. The world’s three greatest detectives rolled into one. A mind without flesh. A letter. A God. 

We bought into it. We had to. How could we think of him as human when we were supposed to transcend our own humanity to become him? 

But L did have a body, one that needed sleep and nutritious food and exercise. One that might even have wanted (and oh how some of us prayed he wanted it with us) sex. One that spent nine months hooked up to a placenta. One that once cried while somebody grown-up rocked him to sleep. His hands, which before his death were used primarily for typing and balancing sugar cubes, were once used to beat one alphabet block against another, and his voice, so eloquent and deadpan before it was cut off altogether, must once have consisted solely of words like “mommy”, “kitty”, and “cookie”.

What should have been obvious becomes profoundly jarring. Of course - L couldn’t have been anything other than human. But we were supposed to worship him. If we didn’t, we’d lose our momentum. If we realized he needed to sleep, we’d sleep too. If we saw in his existence anything mundane or relatable, we’d stop chasing it. And if we weren’t clamoring to become him, what meaning was there in L discarding his humanity?

And so, when we decide to watch these tapes that should have been destroyed years ago, some of us feel guilty. We’re invested in the L-God, and we won’t replace him in our minds with an inferior human version. 

Besides, L trusted us to dig up his demons and destroy them. These tapes could easily have been used against him. Kira could have found them, anybody could have. Some of us who want to know L’s human side don’t necessarily feel like we’ve earned it. 

Those of us gathered here today, curled on the floor around a plastic bowl of popcorn, or crouching on folding chairs, never bought the myth. Either that or it was shattered when L died. Now more than ever before, we crave L’s humanity. Each one of us (even Near) is far more human than we will ever admit. Our hearts thud in our chests, most of them steadily, and our stomachs growl with hunger. Our cells multiply and divide. When his hayfever is acting up Parker can’t stop sneezing long enough to do his homework. Last winter I lost two weeks of work to the flu. Two days ago, Linda broke her wrist playing volleyball, and now the art that proved her brilliance is gone. And Near, our brand new L, has sprouted a fresh crop of acne on his too-serious face. All of us are as human as could be, and none of us except Near have any hope of ever becoming L. These tapes are all we have of him. Our common bodies are our only connection until we comb through his memories and find shreds of common experience, too.

Using her unwounded hand, Linda presses the first tape into the VCR. At first, we are greeted with fuzz and crackling, prompting Parker to curse and grumble about how hard it was for him to get a hold of the old-fashioned machine, and what a pain it is that it doesn’t even work. 

Mirette, a willowy redhead who rarely complains, doesn’t mention the fact that she went to thrice the trouble finding the tapes themselves. 

A light beating from Parker gets them to work. Half of us pretend we’re Vyvian from The Young Ones and yell “yes, we’ve got a video!” before we settle in to watch. I hug my knees to my chest, keeping half an eye on Linda and pretending that I don’t care that she’d rather sit with Near than with me.

On the screen, grainy and staticky and occasionally broken up by scrolling grey bars, is L. It is not an L that any of us have ever seen, and if we had not spent hours memorizing the details of his holy features, we might not have recognized him. He’s a toddler with a disposable diaper poking out of the back of his jeans. A smiling woman with silky brown hair and a pink sweatshirt is attempting to coax him onto a plastic tricycle. She isn’t having much luck. 

“Come on sweetie, don’t you want to ride on the nice bike  that Auntie bought for you? It’s safe, Auntie promises it’s safe, and Mommy does too, right Mommy?” The screen is suddenly obscured by a large, blurry thumb’s up from the camerawoman, Mommy. She agrees that the bike is safe.

“You won’t fall off, and if you do, we’ll be right here to catch you, okay?” Mommy’s voice is soft and gentle, though something about it’s pitch that I find grating. For some reason, the scene is making Linda shake with unshed tears. I almost ask her if she’s okay. But I don’t, because Near is still sitting beside her, staring straight ahead.

The scene changes while I’m not paying attention. The camera is being shakily held by a preteen who repeatedly turns the camera towards his freckled face, pulling his eyelids and sticking his tongue out at the lens. After several minutes of this, someone off-screen (I think it’s Auntie) tells him to quit fooling around and bring the camera into the living room. He obeys, and after a blurry trip through the hallway, the camera settles on L again. 

This time we know for sure how old he is - a rectangular cake proclaims in blue icing that he’s just turned three years old. A dark-haired man with bad posture and a Sex Pistols T-shirt is trying to figure out how to hold him close enough to the cake so that he can blow the candles out, but not close enough so that he can pick at the frosting.

We had hoped that the birthday song, warbled off-key by a roomful of people, would reveal a name that wasn’t a letter.

We debate this through the first two verses, argue fruitlessly over whether his real first name was L or if it wasn’t, and we never do get an answer. Instead of a name, they call him Elephant . Parker says that this nickname sounds similar enough to L to be the source of the letter. 

We miss the rest of this scene, and the next one, bickering about this. I can’t believe he remembers being called Elephant or that he would choose a name that even vaguely referenced his past, but I appear to be alone in my insistence. I try not to care too much that Linda isn’t backing me up. The argument turns sour, so I gnaw my lip to keep from pouting. I say, “Let’s just watch the video.” 

We tune back in to see L beating the floor with stomping feet. His hands are between his legs and he’s screaming, “Mommy I have to pee !” That makes Linda laugh, and it makes me crack a smile. It doesn’t make Near react in any way at all.

But the final scene quiets us all.

Not everybody at Wammy’s House lost their parents. Some of us were surrendered at birth, some rescued from abusers and brought here. Some were so smart that Wammy’s House paid their parents for custody.

No matter how we lost our parents, we lost them. We might not remember it consciously, but separation like that lives in the body forever. And if we do remember that final moment: the last time we got to hold our father’s hand before the paramedics loaded his broken corpse into an ambulance or when our mother’s eyes rolled back into her head and she had the seizure that would be her last…that moment is what we’re seeing now. 

The final scene is L’s last moment with his mother. We watch in reverence, holding each others’ hands.

She had been small, but now she looks shrunken. She had been pale, but now she looks dusted with flour. 

She is lying in a hospital bed, her body a garden growing needles and machines. Despite being leashed to an oxygen machine, her breath sounds like the crunch of a broken garbage disposal. Her eyes are closed.

L is crouched on the edge of his bed, marching toy Power Rangers across her withered chest. The dark-haired man (his father?) is kneeling behind him, ready to catch him in case he topples backward. Whoever is taping this is crying, attempting in vain to get themselves under control and explain the situation. L’s mother has cancer, and the camerawoman has forgotten which kind.

“It has a really long name,” she sobs. “I should remember the name of the thing that killed my sister, but I just can’t…” 

“Lymphangioleiomyomatosis,” L squeaks, gnawing the blue Power Ranger’s shoulder. “It is not that long a name. I didn’t forget it.” The camera shakes, and the camerawoman tries to articulate why she’s upset by his good memory, but she can’t explain, so she tells him not to break his toys, instead. 

L’s mother is threading shaking fingers through his ink-black hair. 

The camera pans to the wall for a few minutes. We hear a scream. The camera shuts off, then starts again. The scene is the same, but the sun out the window is starting to set. 

L’s father is holding his dying wife’s hand. He’s saying, “Maddie, your sister is filming us right now. It’s for our boy - he probably won’t remember much about you, otherwise.” His chest heaves, and his face is damp. “If you have any last words for him, now’s the time to say them.” 

L’s mother mumbles something nobody can hear - not us, and not the people on screen. 

But she doesn’t repeat herself. She closes her eyes, and we can’t tell whether she’s still alive or if she isn’t, because no one on screen has figured it out yet, either. They’re too busy berating L because he said that he hadn’t been listening because he was too busy trying to bite off his Power Ranger’s head. 

The tape ends, and Near says in a toneless voice, “I talked to him once about this. I told him that the last thing my mother did was beg me to save her from the man who had already shot her in the stomach, ten seconds after she’d insisted I run for cover.” Near blinks. “He said that the last thing his mother ever said was, ‘tell your useless chode of a father that he’s can rot in hell for putting me in this mother fucking hospital. I told him I wanted to die at home with my cats.’ ” There’s still no expression on Near’s face, but his breathing is subtly different than it had been. Rapid and fluttery with unshed tears, until one second later when he gets it under control.

He says, “I believe he told me that to reassure me that my mother was not the only one whose last words were unsatisfactory. It was one of the only things he ever told me about himself that wasn’t case-related, except for the fact that he preferred key lime pie to banana cream.”

None of us respond to this. We quickly busy ourselves with putting away the folding chairs, taking the empty popcorn bowl to the kitchen. We are prepared to face the fact that L had hands that couldn’t resist sneaking icing off of his birthday cake, that he had a skin that could be broken if he fell off a tricycle. We were even prepared to accept his childhood habit of biting the heads off of Power Rangers.

But we were not prepared to accept that at three years old, our coldly logical god tried to spare his family’s feelings. That somehow, at age three, he was both kind enough not to trouble his father, and cruel enough to keep his mother’s last words to himself.

We had not realized that he contained multitudes. We didn’t know him at all. We didn’t hear his last words, and if we had, it wouldn’t have made a difference. We never said one word to him that proved that we knew he existed. We don't know if there was anybody who had ever understood him at all. 

We can remember him, that was all. It would never be enough.