Disclaimer: We do not own Death Note or any of the songs in this fic.
A/N: Hello! This fic is coauthored with Dlvvanzor. The way it works is this: The rule and ending were her ideas. I guess I write dark images better than she could ever hope to. An idea like this needed dark images that I guess she would never be able to supply, but that I can whip off in my sleep (if either of us ever slept XD). Thus, a partnership. I write the chapter, send it to her, and she beefs it up, adding details and length, and we end up with what is (we hope) a good fic!
This is going to be really, really dark. Take this statement seriously. As most of you know, I write serious macabre. You have been warned- it's under 'horror' for a reason. It's LxLight, but it's not going to be anything like what you've seen from just Dlvvanzor on her own.
Have fun, loves
ON WITH THE FIC!
Death Note: How to Use it
The Human who uses the Death Note will feel the blood on their hands at midnight for twenty-seven minutes. During this time, they may not relinquish ownership of the Note.
Light POV
I stared at my hands in horror. I could feel it; it was sticky, dripping through the spaces between my fingers, coagulating grotesquely beneath my fingernails. I could even smell it, the metallic tang stinging at my nostrils and the back of my throat like needles. I gagged slightly on the scent, trying to keep down a dinner I had only picked at, in dread of this.
Frantically and, I knew, futilely, I scraped my hands against the fabric of my pants. Anything to get off the blood that would never really be gone. I felt like Lady Macbeth. Maybe she had had a Death Note.
I hated it. I hated what I had become, what I was forever going to be. But I couldn't stop, even with this torture every night. Something inside wouldn't let me. Even if it tore me apart, even if this guilt was agony, what I was doing was right. It was worth this price. I was God, and God didn't give up on his people. Justice would be served, no matter how much pain I had to go through to do it. No matter how many times I had to wake up in the middle of the night for twenty-seven minutes of Hell.
It was worth it. I couldn't let the innocence of this world be marred by the existence of evil. Those who chose the rocky path less traveled; those who would eventually reach the edge of a cliff and have no choice but to jump. The people who couldn't be saved- they had to die.
I squeezed my eyes shut as I felt the ghost liquid drip impossibly slowly down my forearms, pooling in the creases of my elbows. It was sickening, and my stomach churned in agreement. I should have read those damn rules more carefully. If I had known that this type of pain, torture, terror would...
That was a lie, one that I had been telling myself since I had picked up the little innocent-looking, black notebook. I still would have done it, and for no better reason than that I was bored. It had nothing to do with some ideal of 'Justice.' That was a retroactive justification. I am living (living? Was I really?) proof that boredom leads people to do extreme things. Half of the reason I am what I have become is because of it. The reason, the real reason I killed so many people wasn't because of justice... I'd merely been bored, and watching people die had been... fun.
And this is my punishment, of course.
In the end we're all the same. On the inside, every man, woman, and child is the same. We're all sadists. Monsters who enjoy other people's pain, simply because it isn't happening to us. Selfish, dirty, sinful, disgusting, sniveling creatures.
Then again, some people fear the harm they can do to other people; there are those that are so innocent that even deaths by natural causes make them cringe. It is those people- those people who are nothing like me- that I gave everything to protect. Everything. My mind. My soul. My sanity.
But I thought that wasn't my reason...?
...Have you ever lied so much that even you don't remember the truth?
I have, and I know someone else who has. Ryuuzaki. Widely known as L. The man that I would someday bring to an end, the man who was the cause of all my problems.
I hated him almost as much as I hated myself every midnight. That "Ryuuzaki" (whose real name, by the way, he never cared to tell us). I hated literally everything about that man.
Especially, though, I despised his supernaturally calm eyes, his ice-cold logic. The fact that he could just shed his humanity and make impossible decisions without any apparent guilt or hesitation. I hated that he could be all that- the perfect detective, the mad genius, the untarnished ideal, tranquil as a forest- and still be on fire inside with a drive that was second only to Kira's.
A shudder slid down my spine and I closed my eyes. For whatever reason, thinking of him always seemed to ease the drowning sensation. (Drowning in a pool of the blood of my victims.) It was twisted; the type of thing you'd expect from a horror novel, something that Stephen King would write. Something that even my sick, twisted mind couldn't understand or accept. I was only sure of one thing. One fact made crystal clear by the notebook that placed the idea in the center of my brain and of which I was absolutely certain: This was punishment. This was torture, intended to make me stop. It was designed so that I would fear the Death Note and its powers.
So that I would fear the incredible power itgave me.
My skin crawling, I let my mind travel back to Ryuuzaki. He was like some kind of antidote, the only thing that lessened the fear, the constriction in my chest, the churning in my stomach. I had no idea why. I honestly hated the man. With a passion that could best be described as 'fierce' or 'fiery.'
All that aside, though, he did cause the pain to go away, and if thinking about him made me not have to quiver like a heroin addict in withdrawal, then, damn it, I'd think about him. I hugged my knees tighter to my chest, curling up on my side, my teeth digging deeply into my lower lip in an effort to defeat the tears that threatened to escape. My fingers tangled in my hair and gripped my head, which was threatening to split right down the center, in an only vaguely thought-out attempt to hold my skull together.
Trying not to whimper, I pushed my body back against the grimy, spider-infested corner, my breathing raspy and uneven, my thoughts scattered. I curled up tighter until I could barely breathe.
I knew that eventually, if I kept this up (which I would), insanity would catch me in its icy vice grip, wrapping around me, sinking long teeth into me, lovingly sucking away any sanity thought I had left.
For God, I was pretty damned crazy.
I glanced at the clock; twenty-six minutes after midnight. Twenty-six agonizingly slow moments had dragged themselves by, and I only had to make it through one more for the night. I was going to survive tonight, tomorrow night, the night after that. I knew I would, this was all just an illusion. A figment conjured up by shinigami or God or the opposite, meant to guilt you, meant to make you feel the same way each of your victims had just as they became your victims. But every night, after twenty-seven minutes, it set you free again. If it was possible, that was the most terrifying thing. Knowing that the next night I'd be dragged through it again, and the night after that, and the night after that, and after that, and after that, and...
Would it stop when I died?
After I went to Nothingness, Mu, after my existence was wiped away, would this still happen? If Ryuk was wrong and my spirit still lurked in the corners of the Earth, would I still be dragged into this broom closet, a tiny, weeping ball behind the ironing board and next to the mop, familiar as old friends? Would it ever stop? Would I ever be free of the Death Note? Of its brutal symptoms?
So many questions flew through my head, colliding with each other and forming incoherent thoughts that I couldn't decipher. I looked again towards the old clock in the broom closet.
Five...
Four...
Three...
Two...
...One...
My shoulders were the first to relax when, just as quickly as it had started, it stopped. No longer was I drowning in hot, sticky liquid. No longer was I striving to breathe without smelling the scent of the life that I had stolen from the people I had murdered. As usual, I could still faintly feel it- no longer powerful, but always there. I could feel it twisting slowly down my cheeks from the neatly-trimmed ends of my auburn hair, dripping off the tips of my fingernails. I began to chew each of my fingernails off, tearing them until real blood- my blood- leaked out of them. There. No longer could the blood of dead men creep underneath them.
There wasn't much more I could do, though. I most certainly could not peel my skin off layer by layer, (it would be so easy, in theory... stratum corneum, then stratum lucidum, then granulosum, spinosum, basale...) as tempting as it sounded. No matter how badly I wanted this pain to end (and I did. I so badly did), there was no way I could do anything thatharmful, because when it was all said and done I was God. I was still needed. God did not submit to the devil. He didn't let anyone know how much pain He was going through. He didn't allow His mind to be altered by fear: He did what He knew was right and not what a little black notebook told Him. It didn't even matter that what I was doing was illegal. Because God doesn't abide by laws.
In fact, God was above the law. God was the law.
God didn't have to put up with some creepy, freaky-genius detective, so why did I? Why did I let him live, when I could easily have let Rem kill him? Why did I care so much that he was alive? He was the competition, both of us racing against one another, racing for the same prize: 'Justice.' A justice that neither of us truly believed in and pursued only because we were both bored. Justice, after all, was just an illusion that humans made up to feel better about themselves. It was invented to do nothing more than give a sense of safety to whomever 'justice' considered innocent.
In the end, the world itself was nothing but an illusion.
In the end, the only thing that was real was the pain.
I laughed once- an insane bark of sound- because, in the end, what I was really fighting was reality. Because of my boredom, I had decided to be God. Then I had decided that I wanted my people to feel no pain, that I wanted to carry their pain on my shoulders. To do so, they would have to succumb to surrealism, let go of independent thought, give in to a will that was not their own. Let a haze settle over their minds, blocking out what was real in this life (all that was real was pain, pain).
I wanted to cause them more pain.
I considered this thought for a moment. Yes, it was true. I wanted them to be in more agony than they already were. I was just as sadistic as the next person; I wanted to let them believe that the world was safe. Ha. I wanted them to trust me, trust me so much that they'd be my slaves. Alone, I could bring this entire planet to its knees before me.
I, Light Yagami, have done horrible things. I have killed my friends, family, and followers. I killed them for personal enjoyment; I killed them because it was right. They were criminals, out to make this world an unhappy, intensely painful place (but was I any different?). I killed only evil people, and those who opposed me, who were evil themselves for wanting to let evil continue to exist.
Ryuuzaki, for instance. He was completely against me, fighting me with every fiber of his considerable ability. It showed quite simply that he was just as evil as every other member of the opposition who I have killed, if not more so. So I didn't understand why I hadn't killed him when the opportunity arose.
There was something about him. I hated to admit it and never would out loud, but I couldn't imagine a world without the man I loathed so thoroughly. As much as I abhorred the socially awkward detective, I... enjoyed his company. I spent a lot of time wanting it, seeking it out. I would go out of my way to piss him off (try to) just because it meant being around him and making it not hurt, for a while. He was methadone- a substitute for a drug that, in the end, was more addictive than the drug itself. Three times as dangerous, making me revel in his comfort (in his touch ), to satiate the hunger that clawed through my veins, slipping poison into my bloodstream.
So you'd just end up addicted to both.
He hurt me almost as much as I wanted to hurt him. And he spent quite a lot of time making it painfully, agonizingly clear that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I couldn't crush him, but nor could I bring to him the same warmth he brought me. He was hidden perfectly and completely behind a cold-as-ice mask, emotionless, distant, untouchable. It was increasingly apparent that no one could break the mask, because he wouldn't allow it.
He'd kill them first.
Which leads me conveniently back to the whole "evil" thing. Obviously, Ryuuzaki was evil. He'd kill to protect himself from being known. Without a second thought, he'd kill to avoid telling people why fire burned so fiercely in his eyes. He'd murder for personal reasons.
No, that didn't sound familiar, and no, Ryuuzaki and I definitely weren't similar.
Unfortunately, he was as alluring as he was repulsive. Despite my best efforts, I wanted to know him, to know what was going through his head when he tilted it, thumb to his mouth, observing me with those damn endless eyes of his. I wanted to know what he thought of life, the afterlife, how he viewed the world in which we resided.
Even more, I wanted him to trust me. I let out another insane laugh as I unbuttoned my crisp white shirt (no bloodstains). Trust was another one of those illusions. Real trust was rare- it existed, yes, but it wasn't common enough for me to need to worry about. People trusted God, which, as God, was good for me. People didn't trust "L," which was also good for me. To them, L was only a garbled voice and a black letter on a white screen. Nobody trusted the twelfth letter of the English alphabet. He wasn't real; he didn't exist like Kira did- Kira, whose presence you could feel just walking down the least to some people, I had a face, a basic outline. At least they knew that I was- or had been- human.
And really, they weren't very far-off in their assumptions.
L wasn't human, and I was no longer one. There was a secret side of me, one I'd never let them see. Inside of me, deep claw marks scarred my heart, hairline fractures where the monster threw itself against my ribcage in an increasingly desperate attempt to escape. It wanted out. I wanted to let it out. Madness.
The monster was insanity, I knew that. I also knew that I wasn't capable of holding it inside for much longer. Sooner or later it would get out, shattering me into little tiny pieces, irreparable. It would twist me in gruesome ways, contort my mind beyond my own recognition, or that of anyone who knew me. I would no longer be capable of controlling my own mind. A scary thought, when your mind is the best thing you have. Especially knowing exactly what I was capable of.
I'd destroy Ryuuzaki.
I'd destroy the damn world.
And I wouldn't even regret it.
Not that I regretted it now. I mean, yeah, I felt it; I felt what I was doing every night (blood, blood, death, heartbeat, silence) for twenty-seven minutes. But I also loved my victims, in a warped way they meant more to me than my family (and how much has my family ever meant to me?). With each careful stroke of their names I loved them more; in the last second of forty I admitted it to them. I whispered their name, affectionately, feeling it roll off my tongue, coated with the respect I held for them.
It was all so agonizingly beautiful.
But, when (not if) the monster broke out, it would take away that love that I wanted. The sickness that should have me locked in an asylum. The monster would have me writing innocent names in the Devil's Notebook, the Notebook that God had discovered. That God had turned into something beautiful, and used to make this world livable.
I was the cause of this, I was the reason that crime rate had gone down by a full five percent.
But that wasn't nearly enough. A measly five percent each year. That's what would keep me working, that's what would probably give me carpal tunnel, that was the reason I'd go insane. For five fucking percent! And the worst part?
I was so damn proud.
I was so, so proud that I had lowered it. I was incredibly proud that Ryuuzaki feared for his life. I was proud to the bursting point that I had given him some sort of emotion, even if it was only fear. He would never admit it, of course, he was L, but it was obvious. Every time he read new information ("Kira is attacking police forces, killing anyone who opposes Him.") it was in his eyes. His teeth would bite momentarily, almost unnoticeably harder into his thumb and he'd do that thing with his toes, which annoyed me to no end. He didn't tell anyone, though, and no one but me had ever noticed it. I doubted even Watari knew just how afraid L was of Kira. Or at least how much he hated Him. L was, after all, quite a good actor.
Almost as good as me.
Or was it bad? Because it was terrible, the things we hid. He and I, we pretended every day that we weren't monsters. There was so much about me- and about him, I knew- that we would never tell. Everyone has things like this, things they wouldn't even tell the people they "trusted," who meant more to them than anyone in the world ever could. They wouldn't even tell people they loved.
Ah, another illusion. Only this illusion proved to be more lethal, twisted, dangerous, and horrific than the rest. People did unpredictable, stupid things for the sake of love, or for the sake of a specific person they love. This particular illusion was pain, candy-coated, and wrapped in something better with a pretty red bow. Something that couldn't exist in a world this demented. Still, people fell for it, because they wanted it. Humans have always and will always be fools that wanted so badly to be happy. They will always strive for the impossible; always want to reach an emotion that can never be attained. It was beautiful, in a way, that Man still tries when it is so ineffectual. Man always will try, even if someone showed them irrefutable proof that love exists only in fiction.
Love was invented- a charming idea, but invented- as was the nonsense called a 'soul mate' who was your complete opposite, but who you accepted and even wanted. Someone who was beautiful to you. Someone you couldn't live without.
Someone who had more quirks than perfections.
Someone who was just so damn weird.
...Someone who made the pain go away...
Whoa, no. I had to stop this train of thought; it was making me fall into those delusions. I didn't love raccoons, who wanted to love a raccoon? I certainly didn't. Ryuuzaki was definitely a raccoon. Just look at him. He was either a raccoon or a panda. I could see him rooting through people's garbage before sitting lazily and munching on bamboo with his wide, unblinking eyes.
A adorable, tousled, quiet, brilliant, inexplicable...
No! No, no, no! He was ugly, gross, greasy-haired, etc! Not that I've ever touched his hair. Nope.
...Okay! He was sleeping and I ran my fingers through it. Damn it, give me a break! It was in fact soft. And not greasy, much to my disenchantment.
Trying to shake those thoughts out of my splintered mind, I slid into my bed, still sweaty and shaking slightly. My fingers were in immense pain between clenching them and chewing my nails to the quick, but I didn't care. I needed to sleep. I hadn't slept in almost four days, and hallucinations were threatening. I was scared to try because I knew that if I succeeded I'd have nightmares. I'd wake up clutching the pillow and whimpering like a pathetic, wounded animal. This wasn't speculation; it had happened before. Since the night I wrote the first name in the Death Note, I'd been having nightmares. I wanted them to stop.
But I didn't want to stop to make that happen.
I wasn't going to stop.
No matter what.
"In this farewell
There's no blood, there's no alibi,
'Cause I've drawn regret from the truth
Of a thousand lies.
So let Mercy come
And wash away
What I've done.
I've faced myself
To cross out what I've become
Erase myself
And let go of what I've done
Put to rest
What you thought of me
While I clean this slate
With the hands of uncertainty
For what I've done
I start again
And whatever pain may come
Today this ends
I'm forgiving what I've done
What I've done
Forgiving what I've done."
-What I've Done, Linkin Park