#jeeeeezus

so this one is kind of an undignified wrestle with mortality and legacy. no big dramatic strides made in that struggle, because i think getting satisfying closure about the acceptance of your own death is sort of gauche. i prefer a running stream of consciousness where you kinda flop around in the ring and kind of come to terms with things but in a really damp and hollow and itchy way.

throughout this fic i tried to use L's narration to contrast the source of his panic with the source of light's. both of them are acting sort of out of character in the sense that neither's behaviour is really aligned with the way they act in canon, and the reason i did that is sort of as a response to their own impending deaths. nobody's going to act like themselves in that circumstance. i even have them say it outright:

“I’m not really a nihilist,” says Light. “I wonder what you’d think of me if you’d met me on a normal day.” ... [L:] “I’m not ordinarily apathetic, either, by the way.”

one very simple detail showing that contrast is this:

L closes the door without locking it. He picks a direction at random and starts walking.

...

And it’d turned out they were nearby, so now they’re at Light’s apartment. “I didn’t think I’d be back here today,” he tells L, sticking his key in the lock. “Sorry if it’s messy.”

basically, light is in flight and L is in freeze. L doesn't bother locking his door when he leaves the house in the morning, but light does. L knows/accepts/has resolved that he won't be returning home that day. part of light still refuses to accept that, even though he leaves the house with the intention of ending his life.

i don't think it's fair to say that L's acceptance is more mature or that he's more at peace with his fate. it's more like...

so, L approaches situations with the perspective of looking at what is. he's truth-oriented. he accepts the facts of a given matter and then uses them to extrapolate what comes next. that extrapolation is really key to his character so it honestly bugs me a lot when people try to say that L is a purely logical character. he's not! he's running on intuition like 99% of the time and a lot of his extrapolations are wild and not evidence-based at all, but the reason for that is that he has an incredibly strong intuition based on how effectively he processes information. so L understands based on the phone call that he's going to die today, and there's really no point arguing around that fact. however, he can't actually figure out what his next steps are, because there are no next steps. he's going to die today.

throughout the story he struggles immensely with the fact that there is a piece of information he can't attain using the information he already has: he doesn't know when he's going to die, only that it's going to happen before midnight, and so he is completely unable to plan what he should do next, because he can't see any course of action through to its conclusion:

Two. Three. Two. Three. Four. Three. Two. L shakes his head. Can’t count up. Can’t count down. The numbers keep changing, but he can’t find zero. “No,” he says. Deductive reasoning, by its nature, requires premises—in order to find a fact, you must have a fact to begin with. You cannot begin with a baseline of nothing. With no reference, there can be no inference. L keeps counting, but there is no zero, or rather, there is a zero and he doesn’t know where it is. The next second could be his last, or the next, or the next, and all he can know is that at some point the ticking will stop and there is no way to orient himself to it because that point keeps moving .

this drives L crazy. that uncertainty is being represented by this incessant ticking in L's head which won't fade. ok so have you ever used a metronome? say you're counting in 4/4, so the click would play like ONE two three four ONE two three four. the rhythm is steady, but there's one emphasised beat to orient you to where you are in the measure. or, say, a ticking clock, where you can glance at it to see where you are in the 60 seconds that make up a minute. you can count down to when the next minute begins. or a timer, where you can see it counting down to zero. in L's head, he knows the ticking is counting down to the moment of his death, but he doesn't know what it's counting down to because he can't see it. he doesn't know where zero is, there's no emphasis to orient him, and he doesn't know which second he's at in the minute. he could start doing something and then die in the next three seconds, and it would be abrupt and jarring and unsatisfying, like the feeling you get when you take a breath and get winded. so he's in freeze. L accepts that he's going to die today, but he doesn't know when, and the whole time he's thinking about all the things he's never gotten to experience in his life because he's always sort of taken the concept of existence for granted. but he can't figure out how to take steps to try and check things off, because he's never actually made that list. and why make it now? because he might not get to finish them, and that's really unsatisfying. and how do you prioritise when you know you're not going to get to the end of your list and your list is infinity items long? he can't plan. he can't move. he's stuck. he panics, frozen.

light on the other hand has always had a plan for his future, and he's just watched that timeline rapidly shrink and cut all the opportunities off that he'd always been counting down towards. suddenly everything he's done up until now feels like a huge waste, because it was all a run-up to something that now doesn't exist. and he can't bear the fact that the control he'd always taken care to maintain over his life has suddenly been wrested away from him. that's why he starts the story out trying to kill himself - at the very least, he can control the when and cut the fear off.

Light swallows his mouthful of tuna and says, “If I can’t control my fate, I can at least bring it about myself.” “Does controlling your fate matter to you?” “That’s a stupid question,” says Light. “If you asked me yesterday I’d have had a hundred thousand things to say that mattered more to me than choosing how I’d die. My options have just kind of narrowed today, that’s all.”

L's right, though - light never would have done it. light wants to live more than he ever realised. i think light's had this moment of looking down the tunnel (hehe) and staring down his own impending death and realised he's not finished yet, but that's been taken out of his hands. he's realised that the mark he's left on the world has been so small and insignificant, and that if he dies now, that'll be all that's left of him. he's not willing to accept that. but that's the way things are. so he's in flight: run towards his own death so at least he can control the pace at which he dies? try to outrun the inevitable? try to speedrun a meaningful life to see if he can make some kind of mark before he stops existing for good?

“I don't know what we're walking to,” says Light. “I feel like I'm walking closer to my—to my own—” “We can stop.” “That just means it'll happen here instead. I don't want to die here, either.” “Where do you want to die?” “I don't,” Light says. His face crumples. “I just don’t. I'm not ready to be done.”

this is my favourite part of the fic tbh. it's based on a nightmare i had once that ended up changing my entire worldview. wahoo!

not to be a wanker but to an extent this is kind of what everyone's doing, technically, walking towards what will inevitably be your death, since time only moves in one direction and all that. but unlike everyone in the real world, light can see it. he wants to walk in the other direction, but it's all around him. he can see it growing closer the more he keeps moving, and all he wants to do is stop.

“What do I say?” Light asks desperately. “Hi, Dad. Hi, Mum.” Break. “Sorry I'll never give you grandchildren. Sorry I didn't get to graduate. Sorry you'll have to bury my dreams with me. Sorry for nineteen years that came to nothing in the end. It came to nothing.”

re: light refusing to speak to his family: i think he explains himself in the fic enough, but there's also another level where i think talking to his family about it means he'd have to formulate this fact into words which is difficult when he's not really accepted it himself, and on top of that, he would need to carry his family's grief and he's just not ready to do that. there's like a weird thing about talking to people who are already grieving you. i always felt really weird about that when talking to [friends/relations] who were terminally ill. light's relationship with his mother is kind of unexplored in canon but i wanted to go into it i think because your mother is someone who holds a unique spot in your life, i think, assuming you have a good relationship with her, and there is that reported phenomenon where people who are about to die tend to call out for their mothers. i guess this might be controversial but i think it's textually supported that light really cares about his family. i dont think light is ready to look at them and see them looking at him like he's someone who's already gone, and see all the things he never got to do with/for them. i honestly dont think hed survive it

ultimately it was really important to me that light died for no reason and that he didn't really have any material impact on anything. he dies trying to save a child, but someone else saves the kid first. light didn't have to take action at all. but of course, he did

As L stares, reaching hands scoop the toddler off the street from the other side.

i think in a sense it's up to personal opinion whether light had an impact or whether his friendship with L mattered at all before he died. after all, L died like an hour later, and it's not like he had anyone to pass those memories on to. he didn't even know light's surname. the memories of their last day together only exist with each other, and now they're both gone, so did it really matter? what does it mean to matter anyway? do you have to leave a legacy? is it enough that light managed to be L's only friend in the hours before L stopped existing? probably?

It's dark now. Properly dark. It's a new moon tonight, and though the stars do their best, there's little that can cut through the blackness in its absence.

...

L stares up at the moonless sky.

...

It might have been nice to die with the moon.

ofc light's name is written with the kanji for moon. just a silly joke lol.

L's death is something that's more likely to happen when you're alone, by the way. he gets mugged because he's an easy target sitting alone on a park floor. too bad he didn't have more friends and his only friend is dead.

also, the fact that he's a detective who gets murdered in a random act of crime was sort of another nod to the futility of the whole thing that light struggles with in canon. like, work your ass off, solve crime after crime, bring people to justice, but it never ends. crime continues. so is there a point? (yes, obviously.) but that's just a return to the struggle for legacy and meaning, where it's hard not to wonder whether the thing you're doing matters if it's not permanent / if you didn't solve something for good / if you didn't leave a mark that will never fade. i dunno. i think L did enough good in his lifetime. it wasn't enough to save him, but everyone dies eventually, so maybe it doesn't really matter?

i didn't want to give either of them the dignity of a full final thought. light definitely doesn't realise what's happening in the moment before he dies because he didn't see the truck, so i think he didn't have a chance to formulate one.

L watches a look of relief cross Light's face in the split second before the truck horn blares.

L of course gets cut off mid-sentence, just like he'd implicitly feared he might - trying to check things off the list, tie things off, before he's done:

What might a good final thought be? A final sight? He wonders if he could possibly find a star before