A/N – This was written with Placebo Song to Say Goodbye on repeat.

Last Stop at the End of the World

Postmortem

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Pain.

The first thing to register is pain, and it snaps him awake.

The boy sits up, coughing, hands going to his chest. They rest there, skeletal fingers wrapped in tissue-thin flesh upon against bands of black and white. His chest rises and falls shakily with stuttering breaths, heart hammering under his ribs. The skin is bruised, broken, bleeding, crimson flowers blooming on a field of black and white. Agony stabs with tongues of fire along his torso, arms, legs, even his head. It is spikes driven into his skull. Eyes close as something that burns like acid and smells of rust creeps into them, and when he chokes from the misery of breathing, the world explodes into stars; the pain is so great.

A whistle sounds faintly in the distance, the shriek dulled by distance to a roar.

He has fallen to the side, face pressed to the cold cement beneath him. One hand reaches to wipe at his eye, the sleeve soaking up the blood and clearing his vision for a moment.

The ground is smooth, gray, featureless but for the drop-off a few feet in front of him. Smears of green and brown in the distance suggest trees, a hillside, but it's far away.

The thunder building in the distance becomes a familiar sound as the whistle sounds again. He pushes off the cold ground, sitting up again, his head turning to watch the train coming for him.

It's neither a bullet train nor a freight train, just a long, silvery tube, like something out of his sci-fi movies. It slows to a halt in front of him, as if its coming here was for him alone.

He looks around and finds that he is truly alone. The roof of the train station is far overhead, the platform extending behind him into darkness. Columns of metal and concrete stretch into the interminable distance on either side, but there is not another soul…

At the thought, the darkness in his mind lifts. The pain starts to fade as he blinks, as if coming awake after a hundred-year sleep. It becomes easier to breathe even as he realizes that he doesn't need to, for oxygen is only a memory here.

He lost.

Who 'he' is, the boy has no idea, but the knowledge makes him terribly sad. He gathers his strength enough to brace himself and stand. The flowers no longer bloom, the bruises of a hundred fists punching into his chest as dim as a memory.

The train stops, gears grinding to a halt with a scream like the damned howling, and the doors open with a rush of air.

He is standing only a few feet away, and the space beyond beckons with its pristine whiteness, the sterility characteristic of a utopian vision of the future. He knows that he is supposed to board, and that it will take him somewhere better than this, but something stops him.

He lingers, itching for something to hold in his hands. Empty hands are not something he's accustomed to having, and he is aware of wanting something very badly.

"You should go."

He jumps at the sound, for he hadn't even heard the speaker approach. The dark-haired man was just there, only a few feet to his side.

"I can't," the boy answers without thinking. He looks to the vehicle before him. "Not yet."

"You're waiting for someone." The other man sighs as the boy realizes that he is right.

"Yes," he answers, hands going to his pockets as he feels strangely shy for being so easy to read. The familiar motion conjures memories, and unthinking, he withdraws the lighter and cigarettes. There is smoke tickling at his lungs and a lazily exhaled cloud drifts upward, like fingers reaching for the sky, before he even realizes what he has done.

"Last chance," the man says, leaning against one of the columns as he bites down on one thumb. The train's whistle echoes the sentiment.

"I can't leave." The boy sighs not with regret, but only in anticipation of waiting indefinitely. He looks over at the man, and the name surfaces like a beacon, a symbol rising from the murky depths of his subconscious. "L."

L glances at him for a long moment in affirmation, then looks back ahead.

"How long have you been here?" With the name, memories and questions come back, and he finds himself astonished to find him here. L shrugs, his action suffused with boredom.

"Years, I imagine. You look to be in your 20's now, at least."

"I'm 20."

"So five years."

"What happened to you?" L looks fine. There is no blood, no bruises, but then again, his own have now faded to nothing. There aren't even stains on his clothing.

"A shinigami wrote my name in the Death Note." L says it without feeling, any emotion tied to the knowledge long gone, or long-buried.

"We always wondered, you know." He looks down, wishing that he felt sorrier at the admission, but he had never been very close to L. He hadn't even wanted to be an heir.

A hiss brings him back to the present as the doors close and the train pulls away, picking up speed as it departs and vanishes into an encroaching fog.

He looks in the direction it went for some time, seeing the landscape grow featureless as the clouds creep up the tracks. He shivers, taking a long drag off the cigarette that he almost forgot about. The motion is comforting, but he feels nothing anymore from it. It is a habit, a memory of actions that he took while alive, like breathing.

"Where did the fog come from?" It is all he can think to ask. The moisture is making the air colder, the sunlight dimmer.

"It's always been here," L replies. "I've been here longer, so it looks more like my vision."

"What did you see?"

"The ferryman sitting in his boat, lantern lighting the way across the River Styx."

"Strangely romantic, coming from you." He glances over at L to see if the other man is joking with him, but L looks very serious. He has no secrets in death; there is no longer any point. "So we wait?"

L nods. The time for conversation has passed.

The boy sits cross-legged at the edge of the platform, eyes looking over the landscape in front of him before it vanishes. The air is wet, heavy, and it grows harder to breathe. His lighter still works despite the humidity, and he never seems to run out of cigarettes. It seems wrong somehow to play video games while waiting, so he doesn't attempt to look for any. Somehow, he knows that if he looks for them, he will find them, like the cigarettes and the goggles he conjured from memory.

L chooses not to indulge himself either, simply curled into his typical thinking position at the base of one column with only his thumb between his teeth. He doesn't look at the boy, his eyes unseeing, staring into the distance.

Has L been doing this for the entire five years? Gods, what an empty existence.

He looks back ahead, and the swirling fog is absolute, only occasionally parting to reveal water so deep that it looks like black glass. Light flickers across the surface every now and then, but it has no source.

He shivers, the wetness and the chill in the air making him unusually cold. The platform he is waiting on is vanishing as well, his version of 'limbo', for lack of a better word, disintegrating as L's vision overwhelms his own. He looks away from the older man whose dead eyes look for someone who is even later than his own companion in coming.

He kicks feet off the edge of the platform, and the toes of his boots strike the water's surface. Pulling them back up, he curls his knees up into his chest, huddling against the dampness, the cold, the nothingness around him.

There is no sound except the occasional lap of water.

The world has gone, wrapped in a cocoon of white and eddies of gray throughout it, like smoke in a glass. The air is so wet that his hair sticks to his forehead, his goggles so fogged that he has to pull them off his eyes because he's gone blind. His striped shirt sticks to him, which would bother him if he wasn't only moving to occasionally light another cigarette. The cold is so penetrating that he can't even shiver; he would only have done it out of a memory, anyway. There is no blood in him to feel the cold, but his mind toys with him.

How did L wait so long? He turns to ask the other man, but he can't see anyone. There is only fog and the sound of water. Even the ground beneath seems insubstantial.

He hugs his knees, closing his eyes to the sight and trying to think of nothing.

Gradually, he feels warmth along his skin, caressing like a kiss of sunlight. It hurts, so accustomed has he become to the cold, and it drags him from his reverie.

The platform is there again, and the fog is being burned away by the sun. A chirp of birdsong makes him jump, for there has been no sound for centuries, it seems. Trees appear from the receding haze, shreds of tattered mist wrapping around the leafy branches before burning into mere vapor.

He stands, turning. The place grows familiar as the columns space out and the cold, gray cement under his feet becomes a sidewalk.

"L?" he asks, for the other man has vanished, but movement around one of the columns catches his eye.

"Matt?"

His heart stops at the sound. Matt's heart stops, then starts again with a jerk. He's standing there, so close, close enough that he can see that the scars are gone.

"Mello?" Matt asks, the noise coming out strangled as he realizes that this was who he was waiting for. He has no more time to think, for Mello has covered the scant space between them, a flurry of blond hair and black leather that crashes into him, arms flung around him as though Mello is drowning.

"Matt, I'm so sorry," he chokes, hugging Matt so hard that it's a good thing that he doesn't need to breathe anymore. "God, I'm so sorry! I didn't know, I didn't know they would—They were supposed to…" He's babbling, but that's alright. Matt isn't going to chastise him for getting emotional this time. It doesn't matter.

Nothing really matters anymore. Not as long as he's here.

"I missed you, Mello." He cringes at the sappy words, but it's true. He has never felt so alone while waiting here, not even aware of whom he is waiting for or how long it will take. The smell of black leather is in his nostrils, the faintly sweet shampoo he always accused of Mello of buying from the women's section, the ever-present underlying scent of chocolate… How he has missed this. He hugs back, trying to hide his own tears against Mello's shoulder and not caring that much if he is found out. As long as his best friend is here, he's fine, he's alright, it doesn't matter that the world is gone and they're both dead and…

"What happened?" he asks suddenly, pulling back from Mello. The other's tear-stained face turns away so he can wipe away the evidence of his perceived weakness. The outcome of the chase and Takada's kidnapping and the Kira case don't matter to Matt; they never did. He only took part in the whole mad scheme because it was important to Mello. That's the only reason he's asking, since he wants to know that both of their deaths were not in vain. The failure would have hurt Mello.

"He'll win." Mello answers vaguely before looking back, his glassy eyes still betraying the tears. "I gave Near what he needed to win this battle. It's over." He inhales. "I died the same day you did. It was only fair."

"I'm sorry," Matt says, feeling actually sad at the knowledge. He knows that Mello anticipated getting killed during this attempt to force Light Yagami's hand; that was another reason he had gone along, to try to avert that.

"Idiot," Mello scoffs, the reminder of his usual attitude coming back as he regains his composure. "Like I'd want to stay there after getting you killed."

"Thanks," Matt says, surprising himself. It's not what he meant to say, but Mello seems to understand. He reaches out and grasps Matt's hand.

"Let's get out of here." There is a limo behind them; Matt sees it as he turns. It looks like the ones Mello rode around in during his days in the mob. He had sent Matt pictures while he remained at Wammy House, waiting for his best friend to ask for him and knowing that someday he would.

Mello slides into the back seat, looking at home in the luxury as he reaches to pull Matt inside, mischievously beaming at him with a familiar light in his eyes.

"Wait," Matt says, the answering grin disappearing off his own face as he looks around. "L?"

As if summoned by the name, L appears, still seated at the base of a column nearby. This time, he has a smile on his face, and he looks pleased.

"Do you want to come?" There's no reason he can't; he knows them both, and Mello certainly looks up to him still. L shakes his head, that smile still in place. It is the only expression that has ever looked genuine on the older man's face.

"If Near has won, he won't be long in coming." L's voice is low, and Matt can't read all the undercurrents of emotion in the statement. There are too many.

The expression on his face must be crystal clear, for L nods in response to the question that Matt can't ask. Five years of nothingness, waiting for him?

"Goodbye, Matt." L doesn't want to discuss it, perhaps because he doesn't understand it either.

"Bye, L. Good luck." He doesn't know why he says the last, since he doesn't believe in luck or anything else. It seems appropriate.

As the limo pulls away and Mello pulls him closer, the last coherent thought to flicker through his head is that he hopes L will be happy.

For once.

A/N – Something sad I had to get out of my system as I experimented with tense and description.