DN AU ficlet (L gen)
L has had a dream: he owns a notebook that, with just a name written in its pages, can kill. The idea is so far out of the scope of possible realities that it doesn't disturb him intellectually, as much as he finds it superstitiously disquieting; what does disturb him is the vision of himself in the dream. His face is not unrecognisable, twisted as it is in an ugly sort of grin--and that's the part that worries him: he can see it in himself, that callous, homicidal insanity, and he has always done his best to make sure that it touches him only from safely on the other side of the law.
Assume shinigami exist, he writes in a notebook--a different notebook--when he wakes from this dream. He pauses here. He can't figure out how to model this world so that it provides a useful template with which he can project his likely moral behaviour; the first step, usually, is to be certain that the model is not ridiculous--at least, that it makes some intuitive sense.
The only thing L's intuition provides is a sense that he is forgetting something vitally important: something without which he will never understand, will never even be able to dig back to first principles.
Assume shinigami exist, he writes again. His pen--dangling between forefinger and thumb--hovers above the page, but it's as though his mind is unwilling to entertain this one supposition.
He can't figure it out.
Assume shinigami exist, he writes in a notebook--a different notebook--when he wakes from this dream. He pauses here. He can't figure out how to model this world so that it provides a useful template with which he can project his likely moral behaviour; the first step, usually, is to be certain that the model is not ridiculous--at least, that it makes some intuitive sense.
The only thing L's intuition provides is a sense that he is forgetting something vitally important: something without which he will never understand, will never even be able to dig back to first principles.
Assume shinigami exist, he writes again. His pen--dangling between forefinger and thumb--hovers above the page, but it's as though his mind is unwilling to entertain this one supposition.
He can't figure it out.