98 Steel

A/N: this continues on from drabble #80 Forget. You can follow it anyway but it's better as part of the overall piece.

Kira's world fell in a haze of blood and mud. His temples were crushed and his followers slain without mercy in the march of the children of Wammy's house. Orphans who were once taught pacifism and nurtured into a gentle nature were destroyed by necessity, replaced by young men and women willing to do whatever it took to bring justice about for their fallen brothers and sisters.

When the last Kira supporter fell, the last notebook burned, the last shinigami banished from the realm of the humans, the children of wammy's house cheered. Watari's army had won. The sacrifice had been worth it, as they chanted L's name and sang and danced like they would never stop, as if the world was still the same as it once had been, as if they hadn't all killed people with their bare hands.

L hated that his precious orphans had their innocence stolen like that. He hated that Kira had made it necessary for him to make these poor children warriors. It had been necessary, though, and he had responded and made them that, for the generations yet unborn, he made his children into killers.

They began to rebuild the world. Most of Tokyo had fallen under Kira, it was only appropriate that it rose again by the long-gone hands of Watari. Under L's watchful gaze, the children of wammy's house began to build the world again.

Every day, as they worked, l would help, and then slowly, he would drift away to some quiet place where he could be alone and think. He'd think about Near, and how clingy the once-cold child was now, after his treatment at the hands of Takada, she'd turned him from a confidant young detective into an infant, desperate for any love.

He thought of Matt and Mello, their lives pushed so close to the brink, right over in Matt's case. How the two now couldn't be apart. In some ways it was sweet, that their misery had only made their love for one another iron-clad, and that now nothing would break it.

In other ways, it made L sad to see that even spending a few seconds apart so clearly pained the two. They'd gone from independent young men who allowed themselves love for one another not because they needed to, but wanted to, into boys who were so afraid of the other disappearing that if their hands weren't linked, they felt alone.

Mostly, he thought about Light. He thought about the young man who had once been, bright and handsome and a hope for the future all on his own. And then that damn notebook and its damn shinigami had found him and-

That was dangerous thinking and L squashed it. He knew that to think of Light and Kira as separate people was to absolve Light of any of the atrocities that he had committed. To care about Light was to forgive Kira.

It was hard, to forget the times when he and Light had been friends, rivals, lovers, but L had always been the strongest creation of Wammy's house. He turned his face to the sunset, watching the children work at their efforts to rebuild their lives.

He steeled himself once more against any thought of Light, and stepped towards the future.