an: a guest reviewer reviewed my death note one-shot "sleepless" with the suggestion that i do a similar character piece for Light before he finds the death note, and i was intrigued by the idea, depressed, tipsy, freaking out about shit, and unable to sleep despite wanting to do nothing but (in other words, perfectly primed for writing a random one-shot) and so i was like "yeah okay let's try writing this one-shot and see if it works" - and uh, yeah, this is what happened.
and since i wrote it i thought i might as well post it, short as it is - and hey, maybe it's actually interesting, i dunno.
(in any case uh yeah i'm not dead, and i do still plan on returning to that death note chapter fic at some point... though probably not for the foreseeable future still, cuz life. life is a thing. yeah.)
listless
Light felt like he could scream, sometimes.
Day in and day out, always the same things, over and over again. It was like being stuck on a carousel, going around and around and around, circles upon circles, the metal horses on their poles sliding up and down, up and down. It made him dizzy, made him nauseous, gave him a sense of vertigo the way he looked down at the ground, stationary around that metal pole, felt the movement of time and yet saw that he wasn't going anywhere. Looked up and saw that nobody around him, no one in the entire world, was going anywhere.
They were all simply going around and around around, and they thought—all these people around him—they thought they were going in a straight line. Thought they were making progress, actually getting somewhere. That humanity was progressing, advancing. That humanity was somehow more evolved than it had been a hundred and more years ago.
Humanity hadn't evolved in a million years, if not more. They were the same as they'd always been. New technology, maybe, but humanity itself was the same; killing each other senselessly, driven only by greed, by selfishness, by hatred.
There was this English children's song he'd heard, once, these two young blond girls holding hands and twirling in circles in the park—dragged to Japan by their parents? Tourists? Diplomats? He didn't know, didn't care, it didn't matter—
'All around the merry-go-round, the monkey chased the weasel—'
It got stuck in his head, sometimes, that damn song. Or rather, that one line of the song—he knew there had been more, but he couldn't remember what came after. It was just that one line, over and over and over again, never going anywhere, and one day it had driven him so crazy that he'd had to look up what a weasel was (a mammal like the their Nihon Ititachi).
Looking up the definition of 'weasel' didn't make the song leave his head.
'All around the merry-go-round, the monkey chased the weasel—'
Day in and day out, always the same things, over and over again; waking up and putting on his school uniform, just the same as everyone else's; his mom at the door, seeing him off and wishing him a good day; his sister scrambling to get her school things together, rushing to not be late; the news on the TV and the billboards, another murder, another killer; the people in the streets, the way they didn't notice, didn't care, hardly betrayed any signs of brain activity whatsoever.
'All around the merry-go-round, the monkey chased the weasel—'
Day in and day out, always the same things, over and over again; the teachers, the way they droned on, explaining concepts that Light had understood years ago; the tests that he could have aced back in middle school, if not even before that; the way none of the other students paid attention, talking quietly amongst themselves; all the female students and the way they gossiped about each other, talked about hair and boys; the male students and the way they competed with one another, talked about sports and girls; the way they would all later complain about not understanding the material and despair.
'All around the merry-go-round, the monkey chased the weasel—'
Day in and day out, always the same things, over and over again; the other students heading off to sports or karaoke, talking and walking without looking where they were going; the people on the bus and the train who knocked into him when they could have easily avoided having done so, if they'd only been paying attention; the news on the TV and the billboards, another murder, another killer; his mother at the door, greeting him and asking for the latest test score, as if it would ever be anything different than it always was, a hundred percent without even trying; his sister bounding around the house, complaining about her day and giggling about idols; his father coming home tired and weary, another criminal case remaining unsolved and unclosed.
'All around the merry-go-round, the monkey chased the weasel—'
Day in and day out, always the same things, over and over again; the same carousel he was riding now was the same carousel he'd been riding for his entire life, the same carousel he'd be riding into the future, could see it stretched out in front of him, already on either side of him, already closed in on him.
He was strapped in place, strapped onto this carousel going around and around and around, up and down and up and down, feeling nauseous and dizzy while everyone else believed they were riding straight.
Light would scream, if he thought it would actually change anything.
But it wouldn't, and so he didn't scream. He stared out the window, the same as he always did; watched the light spill honey-gold through the glass, sticky and slow, the same way it always did; listened to the teachers drone on like cicadas, the same as they always did, the sound like like listless summers and the onset of insanity.
'All around the merry-go-round, the monkey chased the weasel—'
It was difficult to keep track of days and time, when everything was the same; today, tomorrow, yesterday, next week, two weeks ago, a month in the future, six months in the past, dreams that he'd had—it was all the same.
The classes was taking, had taken, would be taking; the tests he was acing, had aced, would be acing; the conversations he was hearing, had heard, would be hearing; the small-talk was making, had made, would be making—the same the same the same the same the same.
He'd cross another day off on his calendar that morning, so supposedly time was moving, but he did that everyday; only the numbers changed.
(Sometimes Light thought that he could go insane—but that would be a change, and so he knew it would never happen, because everything stayed the same.)
He walked and his feet were lead; he smiled and the expression was dead; the same, the same as he'd always been, and nobody noticed that there was anything wrong because nothing had changed.
To be sane was to be normal, to be normal was to be the same—and this was the same, the same as it had always been. And so he was normal and so he was sane.
Humanity was chasing itself in circles, and he was sane. The people around him droned like cicadas and bumped blindly into him, and he was sane. On the billboards another person had died, another killer suspected but unverified, and he was still sane. He lay on his bed in his room and stared at the ceiling with nothing better to do, and he was always and would always be sane.
'All around the merry-go-round, the monkey chased the weasel—'
Day in and day out, always the same things, over and over again.
This world is rotten, Light thought, sitting in class with his head in his hand and staring out the window, the same as he always did. It was not the first time he'd had that thought, and he knew it would not be the last, knew the world's rottenness would never change.
He looked at buildings full of students who would be Japan's future, weren't learning anything and wouldn't change anything, just like nobody ever did. And he thought, just as he always did and knew that he always would: This world is rotten.
'All around the merry-go-round, the monkey chased the weasel—'
(Sometimes he dreamed of making a change, of doing something that would forcibly knock humanity right off its carousel, blow the entire thing up so they all had no choice but to actually, actually walk straight for once—but he always pushed that thought away, buried it beneath all the school material he'd accidentally memorized just by looking at, because to make such a radical change would require a complete overthrow of the very nature of humanity, and he was far, far too sane to actually attempt something impossible. He was no madman.)
'All around the merry-go-round, the monkey chased the weasel—'
He was sitting in class with his head in his hand and staring out the window, the same as he always did, and the afternoon sunlight was honey-gold and glutinous, as it always was, and sticking to the hands of the clock, as it always did, that line from that English song was playing over and over in his head, as it was wont to do, when from the sky something suddenly dropped.
The object, whatever it was, plummeted to the ground like a dead bird, but it hadn't looked like a bird, and as Light blinked at the courtyard where it had fallen, his eyes widened slightly—this was something new, something curious, something different—the rest of the English song suddenly disinterred itself from its hiding place in the bookshelves of his memory, like a slip of paper falling out from between the pages of a novel as it was opened.
'The monkey thought it was all for fun—'
'—POP! goes the Weasel.'
Ah, Light thought, still staring out the window with widened eyes. He was aware of his heartbeat pounding in his chest, for the first time in months, if not in years. So that's how it goes.
Realizing that his lips were chapped and dry, and that they had been so for an extended period of time without his noticing, Light flicked out his tongue to wet them.
end.