Time slowed as the image before Jubilee overlapped with one from deep within her subconscious—a familiar, recurring vision of a man falling from his chair...falling, falling—and a sudden feeling of dread seized her even before her brain could catch up to what was happening. All around her red lights flashed, the siren continued to blare, and there were shouts and gasps. She couldn't feel Hellenos' presence at all. Only an overpowering, unavoidable sense of dread.
She started to take a helpless step forward, towards the falling man, when out of the corner of her eye she saw a figure dash past her. It was Light.
He rushed forward and, almost too late, caught the detective before he hit the floor.
"Ryuzaki!" he cried.
L didn't answer. He hung limp in Light's arms, his eyes still wide but growing slowly vacant as they stared up into Light's face. Around him the gray haze was starting to fade. Jubilee felt the ember within him grow dim.
She stood frozen mid-step, paralyzed with horror. Light's back was to her as he kneeled over the fallen detective and cradled him in his arms. She could hear nothing; no hint of anyone's thoughts, no word from Hellenos, no sound of Dad's voice. There was only a long, loud stillness. Even the blaring siren grew distant and dim in her consciousness. Then, she heard one, final thought sound from the detective's mind.
I was right.
L's head fell back, his eyes closing, and the haze around him dissipated. The ember within him went out.
Time sped back up. With a cry, Jubilee flung herself forward.
"L!" she screamed, falling to the floor beside him and Light. "L!" She grabbed the detective's shoulder and shook it frantically.
"Julie," said Light softly, not looking at her. He continued to stare down at L's still face. "I think he's gone."
"No!" she shouted. She threw herself onto L's chest and balled the white material of his shirt between her fists, shaking him. "L, come back," she demanded. "You've got to come back!" I never got to tell you...
Around her there were gasps and cries of, "Ryuzaki!" She heard none of it, only stared down at L's face, now even paler than it had been before. In sudden desperation, she clasped her hands together over the dead man's chest, burying her face into his shirt.
"Dad," she whispered. "Please. Please, bring him back."
Nothing happened. Beneath her, the body was cold. She could feel no heartbeat.
"Please!" she cried, more loudly this time. "I'll do anything, just, please—" Please don't take him from me. Not another person that I love. Not again.
"Hey." It was Aizawa's voice next to her. He placed a hand gently on her shoulder. "You have to let go of him. Come on." He tried to help her up, but she shook him off. "Julie," he said, grabbing ahold of her arm and taking a more firm tone. "I know this is hard, but we need to get up and look for that shinigami. We can mourn for Ryuzaki later."
"Yeah," piped up Matsuda in a trembling voice. He had come to kneel beside her as well, and now cast L's body a sorrowful look. "I—I'm sorry, Julie. But, at least—at least he's in a better place now."
Jubilee froze at those last words.
"It's okay, guys," Light was saying. "Leave her alone. We can go and look for the shinigami in a little bit. Let her have a minute."
Jubilee had raised herself back up onto her knees and now turned to stare at the men. "A better place?" she repeated softly. Her eyes were still glazed over with shock, but suddenly they went wide with fear. "But...how do we know that?"
All three men stared at her.
"Uh—" began Matsuda uncomfortably.
Jubilee paled then as memories of a cold, black void, its dreadful jaws open wide to swallow her as her soul rushed up to meet it, hit her full force.
"Oh God," she breathed. What if—what if he was headed for...
Jerking her arm out of Aizawa's grasp, she flung herself towards L again, kneeling over him and frantically bringing her hands together over his chest.
"Dad," she began shakily, staring down at L's still body. "You can—you can have him. Okay?" Tears pricked at her eyes then, but she forced herself to go on, "Just...make a way for him to not go where I almost went. Like you did for me. Please." Her hands shook where they were clasped over L's chest. It suddenly occurred to her that Aizawa was right, even if he didn't know it. She did need to let go.
Glancing skywards, she whispered, "You know what it is that I want. But..." Gritting her teeth, she closed her eyes and lowered her head. "Not my will...but yours be done," she finished softly.
Silence met her plea, and she could go on speaking no longer. Breaking down into sobs, she fisted L's shirt between her clenched hands and continued to pray—this time not with words, but only with tears.
L's first thought, as he attained conscious awareness again, was that heart attacks really hurt. His second thought was that Light Yagami having shinigamis on his side was really unfair. And his third, resounding thought was: I was right. I was right. I was right.
The satisfaction of this thought was quickly overridden, however, by the strange feeling of empty darkness all around him, along with an uncomfortable sense of windless motion. It seemed that he was being projected at an accelerated rate towards some distant destination in infinite space. Every now and then the darkness around him grew a tad more colorless, a shade dimmer, in an inexplicable way that made him feel as though he was traveling down some kind of colorless color wheel. He tried to turn his head around, to look behind himself and better assess his travel route thus far, but realized that he couldn't—for he was no longer corporeal.
Interesting, he thought to himself. So this was what it was like to be in a non-physical dimension.
Ahead of him stretched a gaping black expanse that writhed like a cold, dark sea of rolling waves. From it echoed an eerie chorus of cruel laughter—one moment sounding like snickering children, another moment like the mocking giggles of a woman, and the next like a crowd of ridiculing spectators. Underneath the sound was a discordant tone that rang like an off-tune organ key. L's sense of unease grew.
It was clear to him where he was going. Apparently even in death he retained his deductive reasoning abilities. Everything that was happening right now matched up with Jubilee Jenkins' descriptions of her after-death experience. Well, with the first part of it at least. He doubted that things were going to end the same way for him as they had for her.
Which was exactly why he was where he was, wasn't it? He'd never been one to have much faith. As such, he decided, he was resigned to his fate.
Even so, his uneasiness grew as he rapidly drew closer and closer to the black expanse. The sound of laughter became mingled with intermittent screams that faded as quickly as he heard them, so that he couldn't be sure whether he had heard them at all. Somehow, the uncertainty of that bothered him even more than it would have if the screams of pain had been loud and clear. The laughter turned into Light's all of a sudden—maniacal sounding and victorious—and then, just as suddenly, it was Misa's—shrill and contemptuous. Abruptly it became a still, dreadful silence. And then, gradually, it morphed into a horrific sound of weeping.
Images flashed through L's mind, sharp and merciless in their vividness of both memory and emotion. Children crying, their traumatized wails echoing down long, narrow corridors. The guttural and drawn out scream of a young girl, the one who had walked into a room at Wammy's House for Gifted Orphans to find Adam—by then known as A—hanging from a noose tied to the rafters. The cackling laughter of a boy who looked just like L—Beyond Birthday—that somehow, eerily, still sounded like crying. Blood, blood, blood. Dead bodies, too many to count, too many that L had been too late to save, piling up over the years like an unremovable weight from his soul. Watari kneeling in the cemetery by the orphanage when he thought no one was watching, tears streaming silently down his face as he visited tiny graves.
Watari. L felt a pang at the thought of the old man—the man who had been the only father figure he had ever known. Kira had gotten Watari, too.
The sudden regret that L felt seemed to call out to something deep within the black void ahead. A loud wave of discordant sound—at once a mixture of weeping, cackling, and screaming, interwoven together by a strange and throbbing low-pitched frequency—rolled forth from the expanse and enveloped him. The feeling of regret within him was suddenly magnified a hundred times over, becoming tangibly, overwhelmingly unbearable, like a thousand tiny insects crawling underneath nonexistent skin.
L's earlier resolve to be resigned to his fate began to crack. He suddenly realized that everything he had thought he was escaping from in life was now only going to be multiplied a thousandfold in death. Slowly, the sense of dread and unease within him sharpened into a pure, unadulterated fear.
Merciless laughter bubbled forth loudly from the void ahead of him, which he was drawing closer and closer to, at a faster and faster rate. He knew without a doubt that it was laughing at him, and laughing at his fear. And there was no escaping it.
Dad... whispered a small, faint voice.
He barely heard the voice through the wave of mocking laughter. As his consciousness drew closer to the black void, he quickly lost any remembrance that he had heard it at all.
Please, the voice came again, dimly. Please don't take him from me.
The voice was female, he noted distantly. And familiar. It sounded like...
Briefly the image of a woman's face flashed through his mind. A face that had hovered over his own, filled with worry after he had been punched by Light, a face that had often looked upon him with anger and resentment, but then, in his final days, with something else. It was Jubilee Jenkins' face.
Not another person that I love. Not again.
The voice became fainter, lost in a roar of sound as the wave around him tried to draw him in like a tide, sucking him towards its source of eternal blackness. Just before the darkness overtook his mind, a grim realization finally dawned on him.
The look in Jubilee's eyes, as she had gazed upon him in his final hours, was love.
Oh, he had known this on some vague intellectual level. But now, freed from the earthly confinement of a body as well as from the physical dimension, he understood the fact like he never had before. Ironic that it should be now, in his last moments before he entered hell. Probably purposeful, too, just to spite him.
He had always said that he would probably die before he understood love.
He had always been right.
Jubilee Jenkins had loved him. A pity he couldn't ever quite understand that while he was on earth. A pity that a girl like her, the only other person besides Watari who had ever had any love for him, should fall in love with someone like him, who was incapable of returning her love.
Those were his last thoughts as the wave of blackness overtook him and drew him into the waiting void.
Somewhere beyond his range of awareness, beyond the dark veil of the void, a final, desperate plea drifted across the universe.
Not my will...but yours be done.
And then, there was only silence.