Ten days.

It was the screaming that was worst, Teru thought.

They'd had to lift him from his knees and carry him out of the warehouse. It had been a relief when they blindfolded him: it meant he couldn't see the body on the floor.

He doesn't know how long ago the room they've kept him in was prepared. It has no windows, no doors. The walls are white. There is a sink, a bed and a toilet. Nothing he could write with; nothing he could use to improvise his death. And it's such a joke, that he'd been the hand of God, polishing scum from the face of the earth, one name at a time. So careful about his routine, 132 names a day written on the notebook's pages. Six columns, all judged unworthy, deleted, dead. Dust under God's carpet, wished away with the stroke of a pen, neat and clean and clinical. And now that he really needs someone dead, he'd give anything to improvise, and can't.

What is there left to him? Just the walls, and the bed. It's comfortable enough: far more than what he deserves, after what he's done. A meal comes through an anonymous slot in the wall: Teru ignores it. He doesn't see or hear anyone. He hasn't even been charged, and the part of him that's still a prosecutor knows this is wrong, that it's against procedure - but then, Kira and his lackeys would never have been dealt with by the courts. What is there they could be charged with, after all?

He's cold: he wraps himself in blankets - there's nowhere to attach a rope in his cell, if he could weave one - and he sits, and rocks, and whispers to himself that Yagami wasn't God, he wasn't. He was just a man; just a boy, really. Teru hasn't killed God, hasn't denied justice - he's just denounced a murderer, a seducer of innocence. Evil.

All day and all night he tells himself this.

Eventually, he can't whisper any longer: his mouth is parched and blistered, his body won't stay upright, his eyes won't stare into the darkness - or rather, into the glaring electric light that's all he's allowed. He knows it's a form of torture, and that someone, somewhere, must be watching him, yet there are no signs of cameras. He closes his eyes, and dreams of shooting, and God, so much blood, and begging, and helplessness, and loss.

When he opens his eyes again, someone is in the cell with him.

It's a young man, curled in the corner, against the white wall. Teru recognises him at once: tall and thin, with odd, pale hair, drawn up into himself, hugging his knees as if he's protecting some rare treasure, and shaking as if he's two degrees from hypothermia. Except his hair isn't pale any longer, but clotted black, and his face is cut and streaked. The dark suit he's wearing is stiff with old blood. Holes are blasted through it - and through him: the hand resting gingerly against one arm hangs limp.

It's him.

God. Kira. Yagami, that was his name. And the razor stare he gave Teru in the warehouse is nothing compared to the hate he's offering him now, those mad, manic eyes staring over his arms. But what he eventually rasps out, teeth chattering, isn't what Teru expects.

"C-cold. I'm so cold, Mikami. Help me."

"B-but..." You can't be real. You're dead. I killed you. I saw you die.

"Do something, damn you!"

Teru gives him the blanket. What else can he do? Yagami clings to it as if it's the only thing in the world, and fixates on Teru as if he'd like to eat him.

Yagami doesn't emerge from the corner he's made his own, and after his claim on the blankets, he doesn't speak, or sleep, or move. All he does is sit there, arms wrapped around his knees, holding himself; holding himself together, as if he might just fall apart. And he watches Teru constantly, with an unblinking focus that can't be human, or sane.

Teru huddles on the bed, terrified, rocking and frantic, and tries to pretend the other man isn't there at all. Because he can't be, can he? Surely this must be what insanity feels like? Screwing up his eyes, Teru begs for solace, for deliverance. He whispers and whimpers under his breath, and prays to himself for calm and comfort - because there's no God, any longer, to cry out to for justice, and there never will be again.

Eventually, Yagami does fall asleep beneath his stolen blankets, and sleeps in fitful starts before waking with a scream of "No, no, please don't!". Teru quails from it; the other man is broken and begging, and it's his fault. What is there Teru can do? What will Yagami allow? Crawling from the cot, he makes a tentative approach; maybe he'll be blessed with words. Seeing him coming, Yagami's response is nothing but a hissing snarl of rage, a scuttle backwards into his corner: Don't dare to come near me, or touch me. You're the one who's pathetic, not me. Never me.

Teru knows it well enough. He retreats back to the bed, where he's safe; please, please let him be safe.

The walls in the corner are always white when Teru wakes in the morning. Over the course of the day, they smear and shift afresh in dull reds and rotting browns, as Yagami shifts and curls, leans and twists, and tries to find a way to sit that's comfortable. It's become clear over the last day or two that he can't remove his clothes, or even move them: that the fabric's melded right into him, into the uncertain scabs that are thinking about forming, here and there. Sometimes, as he shifts on his lonely spot, he'll rip one free; the snatched whimper of frustrated agony sounds very human.

Teru can't help wondering when infection will set in; when sickly yellows and greens will add themselves to the traces of decay on the paintwork. A whole palette of stinking, angry colour leaking from his god, who turned out not to be a god at all.

"What are you staring at?"

Teru hadn't realised he was staring; hadn't even known his eyes were open. But Yagami is there, of course, beneath his borrowed blanket: knees pulled up, arms around them, resting on his side on the floor, with eyes that almost glow, febrile and congested.

"I - nothing. I apologise." The language is still so formal, as if Yagami is Teru's distant superior.

"No need to talk to me like I'm a god, Mikami. You decided otherwise."

"B-but your clothes. You should remove them, at least clean the wounds somehow. They'll get infected and then -" Teru breaks off. What is there that could happen to a dead man? To a ghost? He's seen enough, by now, to realise Yagami probably isn't a good person to use the word "pain" to.

It could be dangerous, he supposes. How is he to know?

Teru takes the towel from the steel sink - another thing he could use to kill himself, in a pinch, to swallow or smother - and soaks it thoroughly: warm water, not hot, and certainly not cold. Like a baby bath.

Yagami does nothing to slow Teru's approach, as he rests the wet towel on the jacket and lets it soak through. They'd been expensive once, these clothes - the fabric is fine, the tailoring exquisite, the tie and the lining are heavy silk - but they're ruined now, like the reanimated corpse inside them. It sits there, leaning forward into its legs, and permits Mikami to cleanse the ruined cloth out of its skin.

The approach is clinical, like a doctor - or at least, that's what Teru is aiming for. Something about it is distracting - the narrow row of bumps beneath the skin, and the way Yagami grunts as Teru's fingers trace over them.

Teru never means to sleep, but eventually he always does, and that night he's woken with a start. Yagami is crouching over him, mad eyes glaring, lifting him by his overall with awkward, shattered shoulders and smashing him back down into the bed. He spits involuntarily, hissing as he speaks. "You did it all, Mikami - I trusted you. How could I have been so stupid? Putting it all in someone else's hands - but there was nothing else I could do, they left me no choice -"

Teru quails. Each impact is knocking the breath right out of him, and he never is sure why he does it. Maybe to stop Yagami's eyes tumbling out of the sockets, right down onto him? Maybe to stop the endless ramble of reenaction and repetitions and might-have-beens? Maybe to stop the spray of red saliva, so he doesn't have to cringe from it? But what he does is grab the younger man by the shoulders, by the blackened hair - the clots crumble into dust at Teru's touch, red dust falling, dirty, filthy - and he pulls him down, and kisses him. He's grey, and cold, and Teru shivers far more than he ought to.

The little noise from his ex-god's throat is startled, surprised, frozen. An odd pressure as Yagami leans into the kiss for a second or two - as if what he wants to do is suck the warmth right out of Teru, to leave him dead as well, crusted in ice. Then he breaks away and speaks, that low bubble of airless talk with one lung shattered. "I think you've sadly misunderstood what we're doing on this bed, Mikami." It devolves into insane, soundless, heaving laughter - but he does leave. Does return to his corner, to tremble and whisper and laugh. And to watch.

But the next night, it isn't screaming that wakes Teru. Yagami climbs into the bed with him, shivering and snarling and icy cold, and as close as he can make himself.

"Don't move. Don't say anything. I'm cold, that's all. Why is it so cold in here?"

Teru doesn't say it isn't cold. Doesn't flinch from the icy flesh pressing up against him, or cringe at the little sighs of - of pleasure, yes. Not anything unspeakable, just an insistent, purring pressure, as much of the other man wrapping around Teru as can be managed, leeching from him. Equalising their temperature. Teru's teeth begin to chatter, but when he reaches to pull the blanket further up, Yagami's hand darts around and seizes his wrist like a steel shackle.

"I said, don't move."

Perhaps it's something about that restraint, that exercise of force, that does it. The situation twists away from being a simple theft, and the dead weight behind Teru is suddenly far more threatening. And even mad and feral and broken as Yagami is, there's a terrible authority to that command - as if the younger man's used to being obeyed without question. Or as if he's used to seeing the world that way, from far above. Teru freezes, racked with reluctant shivers; tight against him, Yagami's body is cold and hard, like rigor mortis. Like bathroom tiles, and shame.

After that, Yagami never leaves the narrow cot. He coils there, naked, beneath the blankets, and demands that Teru - the only source of warmth in the room - stays there with him. Teru's own failure lying in his bed, and stripping him with pitiless eyes: prison clothes and skin and muscle, all gone; vaporised. They press against each other, and Yagami purrs like some bedraggled cat, while Teru shivers and submits and tries not to think about all the uncleanliness that breeds in human corpses.

And sometimes they lie beneath the blankets, and talk as lovers might.

"Is that really your name? Light? It - didn't show up as that." Because there's nothing over Yagami's head any longer: never numbers, and now no glowing red kanji, either.

"Of course it did." Airless, impatient, chattering words. "It's the kanji for moon, but it's read 'Light'. Moonlight." It's the English word he gives. One of his hands - the one whose fingers no longer flex - is exploring, scuttling over Teru's hip like a spider, outlining the sharp bones with damp, red promises. Teru thinks he might never feel clean again, and Yagami's ruined voice softens to a sticky hiss. "You can call me Light, if you like. I don't expect anyone else will again."

Teru shivers, and it's nothing to do with the touch, the way the icy flesh raises goosepimples. "I - I can't. I couldn't."

Yagami's fingers brush very slightly inwards, teasing and threatening. "Mmm, you could. You can still speak, after all." The spatter of his voice, spraying droplets of blood whenever he speaks, or screams, or laughs like poison. "Or is it something else? Something different you'd like to call me?" He reaches down, brushing two of his rigid fingers against the gaping wound in his shoulder, and he holds Teru's eyes with his own unblinking gaze.

Teru can't move, can't think, lost in that mad, compelling, whirlpool stare, in that accusation of everything the two of them might have been. And when Yagami sketches in blood on Teru's forehead, he can't pull away, can't fight, can't do a thing to stop it; the tiniest squeak of horror escapes. But he feels the mark for what it is - a slanted, double-barred cross, drawn left-handed with three quick strokes. The ki- of Kira.

Teru wishes he could have done something. Anything. Stabbed himself with a pen, to show his remorse. Bled out like a pig while they watched, to give Light time to run, or at least to die in private. It would have been fitting; he's cut the wings from God and let him fall broken to the earth, and there can be no greater failure, no worse betrayal. Maybe Teru could, at the very least, have looked. Maybe he could have faced up to what he'd done, instead of spitting his disbelief and disappointment before all the rest of them.

(But he wasn't God, whispers the tiny voice inside him. You know he wasn't. He was - and Teru hears it in the voice of the white-haired boy on the floor, in Nate River's voice - just a murderer.)

Light is sleeping now, wrapped in all the blankets while Teru shivers out his guilt. His voice drowns out the truths that Near had spoken; it confirms the guilt that Teru can't leave behind; it rewrites history. "Do you know what it feels like, to be shot five times? Do you know what a heart attack feels like, when you've committed no crime? Do you know how many innocents will die now, and suffer, because you made it so?"

It was the screaming that was worst, Teru thought. His own screaming, sucking his tongue back into his throat, threatening to choke him. That terror.

He'd never credited the rumours that when people died, they reported a bright light, and the sight of all the people they'd loved in their lifetimes. But as his tortured mind gave way and he hurled himself against the bedframe, as he cracked his ribs with screaming and his limbs with his convulsions, as his hands clawed up to strip the flesh from his face, to puncture his eyes and tear them from his head...

… that was when he saw, not the white light of salvation, but Light Yagami. Smiling.

Waiting for him.

"Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there... if I say, 'Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light become night around me', even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you."

- Psalm 139, NIV.