Nada, y pues nada, y nada, y pues nada...
Who: L [open] Where: Near Asgard in the forest When: After Light leaves him and he's posted a fragmented journal entry. This takes place just after L's conversation with Frank. Rating:PG-13, subject to change. Warnings: none, for the moment. Summary: With brief flashes of lucidity and longer lapses of uneasy hallucinations, L struggles with some dissociative amnesia as he recalls bits and pieces of what's happened to him. He looks over his last journal entry and is troubled by the disorganized and random content, as well as his sudden inability to coherently express numbers and words through writing. Hoping that Frank comes through, he sees but is not up to the task of reading the recent discussion concerning his plight.
L did not know how long he'd been sleeping; just that the sun was beginning to rise and that he was alone. He shivered, wrapping the blanket closer as if that would keep him from disappearing, and curled his bare toes until they gripped the carpet of pine needles beneath him.
He should be dead. He knew that much, even if the world was taunting his addled mind with sounds and visions that were too awful to exist in any universe but his own. Cruel, sneering laughter, and eyes the color of wine, or roses, or blood. The last, most of all. A sharp, heart-stopping almost-execution, like Dostoevsky and the firing squad. The cold clink of metal against metal, and the icy hopelessness of metal against skin. The desperate struggle, of skin against skin... of... no. If he admitted that happened, then it must have. And he wasn't ready to realize that yet. Knowing innately how to protect itself, L's mind gently steered him away from that derailed and dangerously accelerating train of thought.
L touched his face, feeling gauze, band-aids, and the sting of antiseptic on the torn skin they covered. Who had cleaned and bandaged him? The one who had broken his spirit...or, if it still survived, at least rattled it enough to put it into a coma? Light cared that much, about his conquests, that he would repair what he'd damaged? Despite the invasiveness of their encounter, L realized that he was no closer to understanding Light Yagami... except... except that he knew he would have done things differently, if he were in Light's position. He had approached Light in secret, intending to kill him, intending for it to be painful... but he had respected Light enough to see that it would be quick, and that Light would die with some semblance of manhood, of dignity, with his self-respect deserved and intact. Light had stripped L of those things and torn them to shreds before his very eyes, one at a time, and slowly.
He felt numb, and chilled to the core. He had tried to take his own life tonight... and still, his heart labored on, keeping him alive despite what he'd attempted, what Light Yagami had attempted. Was Light so possessive that he could violate and hurt L, hold a gun to his head... and then prevent L from pulling the trigger?
Forget bad things... learn ignorance, and you can be free of nightmares, clean as the morning. It's what Sophie would have wanted... you've done it before, you can do it again now...
L shook his head. He'd been thinking about something... but he couldn't recall what. Something... something had happened. He was outdoors, and in pain, and he felt sick. He stared at his journal, his latest entry... strange allusions to literature, and science, and math, and language... incoherent and disjointed. Had he really written this? And coded it so poorly that it was available to anyone who wanted to read it? He quickly brought up his conversation with Frank, who was coming to get him... wasn't he? He had recorded his own quavery, frightened voice because his keyboarding in an attempted written response made his journal entry look like a field guide to logic. It was complete nonsense... it hadn't seemed that way when he wrote it, but it was.
While on his journal, he accessed Jazz's entry, and after a few minutes of very hard concentration, managed to link together the letters until they formed words. After reading a few sentences, however, he hastily snapped the device shut and tossed it, watching it land several feet away from him in a cushion of pine needles. Besides the fact that his ability to comprehend the written word was rapidly deteriorating, L didn't have the heart or stomach to read Niflheim's speculations about him. Or about Light... especially not about Light, even though, from what he was able to pick out at a glance, they seemed ashamed of him rather than supportive of... of what he'd done.
Slowly lowering himself to the ground, L closed his eyes, feeling the new day's morning cool against his cheek. It was a terrible idea, to sleep during a concussion without someone nearby to watch, but after saying the name "God" out loud and in earnest on his journal, he wondered if he truly was alone.