A/N I just feel like I need to say that it has a disjointed narrative and that it centres on the memory-less Misa from the end of the manga, so her being memory-less skews her understanding of certain events. Again, big thanks to thebarstool/kiraconversations/Karina for reading over this for me. (hearts) xxx
Murder Ballad
It was Valentine's Day and Light had been missing for eight months. It was assumed after the first week of no contact that he was a victim of Kira, and in a way, he was. His loss to what remained of his already crushed family was like a granite slab on their chests, and not knowing what had happened to him made the weight even heavier. Though they never spoke of it to each other, his mother and sister both hated themselves for independently thinking that the sadness would be less somehow if they had a grave to visit. With a grave, it would be a marker to declare that he had existed, that he wasn't an imagined wraith who whispered through the world for a short time. They'd accepted his death easily as something they'd feared happening and almost expected, but they never admitted that. It didn't make the pain less — because it was the cruelest of the injustices they'd suffered — it just made them feel as if their family had borne the all the sacrifice for the world's sake. Kira had broken the Yagami family, and those who were left felt they lived only to remember those who had died.
Every week, Sachiko would phone the missing person's unit asking for news she knew she wouldn't hear. She lit incense near her son's and her husband's photographs when she was alone and cursed herself for ever letting her child live in such danger. She cursed her husband for it but still loved him. It was their fault that Light was gone and they must share the blame and eternal sorrow of it. She hoped that he was suffering as much as she was but she doubted that he could. There was no repentance she could offer which would bring her son back, and that was all she wanted.
She'd failed as a mother. After the first month, while she lay in bed waiting for sleep to claim her for a few hours of relief, maybe, she imagined Light peaceful, like he was sleeping. Months later she couldn't even half-comfort herself with that. She imagined punishing scenes of him uncared for, lying in some desolate place like refuse. For all the world he was forgotten and unloved and rotting with every painful second that passed while she kept her house tidy for too few reasons now. She dreamt of her miraculous son and hope lying in a shallow grave of fallen branches and leaves. She couldn't even give him the dignity he deserved more than anyone else. After being torn and made ugly by wild animals, he must now only be fit for worms to draw into the earth, she thought. Losing a child was injury enough, no matter the circumstances, but worse for her because she didn't know what happened to him or where he was. Most of Kira's murders had been quick heart attacks, but not all of them. She needed to know exactly what happened to Light so he wouldn't have suffered one of the horrendous deaths she'd imagined. She didn't think anything could be worse than the masochistic scenarios she'd created in her mind, putting herself through it instead of her son.
His body was never found.
Once a week, Light's girlfriend, Misa Amane, visited the tortured family. Though she dressed like a woman in mourning, she was so bizarrely cheerful in speaking about Light in the present tense that it exhausted them in trying to keep up with her optimism and bravery. They tried not to see it as madness.
The winter sun streamed in from the window behind Misa, creating a kind of halo around her blonde head. She never stopped talking excitedly like a manic bird. The only sign of some fragility was how quickly her temper would flare at some innocent comment. 'Light does like coffee!' she'd say sharply when Sachiko remarked about how Light used to avoid coffee but liked tea. Towards the end of every visit, the patience of all involved were strained and the atmosphere became unbearably tense. Mother and daughter would sit awkwardly opposite the girl in black who laughed like she was drugged, and they felt like they weren't included or even needed as ears for Misa, because she would have conversations with herself. She'd had to turn down a film role because it was being filmed in the North. Light would be angry if she left Tokyo even for a day. Light misses her and gets lonely when she's not there, she told them proudly. Sachiko smiled and made another pot of tea.
Misa warmed herself with her own words about Light's devotion to her and her happy burden of duty. Light loved her. She told him that she didn't mind if he used her when they first met, knowing that one day she could make herself whatever he wanted her to be so he did love her. He wouldn't even look at another woman, only Misa, and it wasn't like women didn't try to catch his attention. He was the most perfect man in the whole world, so of course they would. But Misa didn't have to fight them now. She didn't have to worry.
As well as being the beneficiary of Light's love, Misa was also the proud owner of having an 'artistic temperament,' and as part of that, highs were chased by self-inflicted lows. Light's popularity with women despite his aloofness or perhaps helped because of it, reminded her of a low she could never really escape from.
It wasn't unusual for him to stay at work all night, but Misa was insecure by default and Light did nothing to lessen that. Misa followed him to a hotel one night and watched from the shadows on the other side of the street. Her breath was like a ghost in the freezing air, but she hugged her arms around herself tightly for reasons other than she was cold. Fifteen minutes later, Kiyomi Takada arrived. They stayed there all night, and so did Misa, outside. A few nights later, Light left again and Misa followed him in a taxi. This time she had dressed as a hotel maid and slipped in the staff entrance, and chameleon-like, she was accepted as a piece of furniture. When she'd found out which room to go to, she stole an emergency door pass and went into Takada's suite. The bedroom door was open and she saw… And Misa knew that she wasn't even needed for that anymore. She had no use at all. God had found another beloved disciple.
Two sets of eyes were on her as she died. The woman clutched a bed sheet to her chest until recognition dawned on her, then she dropped the sheet and smiled in her cruelty while Light glared at Misa over his bare shoulder.
When Light stood and walked towards her, salt water filled her eyes in the silence when he looked at her like shit he'd stepped in. 'I am shit,' she thought. Light was always right. She must have failed him or he wouldn't have done this. She's too loud. She doesn't dress to properly compliment him as she should. She's not pretty enough. She's not clever enough. He's ashamed of her.
Any of her exuberant desire to live left her, and she hoped that he would kill her so she wouldn't have to, but he just shut the door in her face. His voice was low and annoyed behind the door while Kiyomi's was high and heady with laughter. Misa left the hotel in a daze of broken, painful thoughts and went back to the apartment which was more Light's than hers, but she liked what he liked. She sat on the bed while a moth's wings chinked against the lightbulb above her, timing her circling mind. Some time in the night, the moth fell on Misa's lap and crawled unsteadily and panicked, but Misa knew that it was dying.
"God only gave you life for a short time. You've displeased him, so he wants your life back. Give him what he wants," she told it.
The moth died in a ragged, feathery ruin, but Misa did not.
Anger revived her. The fault was hers and Takada's and both of them must be punished. And where was Takada now? Pushed out of a window so her head made a crunching noise on the concrete that even Misa could hear from a bedroom window. 'I'm not your friend,' Misa had thought as the blood spread and made Kiyomi's grey dress turn red.
Misa had been quiet all the time in Light's family's home as she relived things she didn't want to think about, except the conclusion. To get the satisfaction from it though, she had to remember the whole story. Light said that he was going to marry her. To Sayu and Sachiko it looked like she had travelled through all the depths and sorrows of Hades to find some life, but now she smiled and stood, fluffing her skirt to stand out again like a parasol and clasping her hands in front of her to bow neatly. She had to see Light now, she told them. Her visits always ended this way. The first time she'd said it, Sayu thought that Misa knew where Light was and that he was in hiding, but it was a forlorn hope.
Light was dead; she felt it, knew it. The part of her heart which was her brother's felt empty and different to when he was alive. The outline of it ached with sadness. Inside, it was filled only with memories like air which sustained her but didn't feed her. She knew that he was dead because her heart felt more hollow of life than it did after her father died. Misa was just mad with grief. She'd already lost so much.
The only thing which was some solace to Light's mother and sister was that Kira's killings had stopped around the same time that Light died. The task force had disbanded and the case was declared cold. It was closed but unsolved and ready to be reopened if Kira ever returned. But to Sachiko and Sayu, even if Light had died, he must have taken Kira with him.
Whenever Misa saw the woods, she smiled. She rushed across the road so the heels of her shoes skittered on the crossing as quickly as her heart was beating. The branches crunched under feet as she wandered off the footpath and into the woods on a path only used by nocturnal creatures and herself. Her feet had scoured a path to be brightened by emerald green moss in a place so dense with wildness that it was almost in a permanent twilight.
Suddenly calm with humility and the heat in her heart, she slowed when she first caught sight of the ruined and forgotten shrine in a clearing. Nesting crows stared down at her in condemnation from a pillar of ragged stones, her form abstract in their concave eyes as she walked like a funeral procession. She reached a small outcrop near the shrine which was so overgrown with ferns that it almost blended into the forest floor, and when she placed her hands on the top of the stones, they cut warmly into her hands in their roughness.
The stones formed an opening to a deep, dank cavern of a well. Water dripped from lichen, which was long like mermaid's hair and clung to the inside of the shaft like the dank, musty smell which rose from the depths. It was so dark that Misa could only see about 10 feet below before it just became a void of black serenity, though sometimes the wind brushes aside leaves in the trees to let some sunlight through. It could have run as deep as the core of the earth. What a beautiful place to die.
"Light? Happy Valentine's Day. We can be together now."
How responsible are we for our actions?
This place was important to Light, but Misa couldn't remember why. It was so gothically romantic that she was enchanted by it, and even more by Light for telling her where it was. She asked him to meet her there at lunchtime, but he didn't appear. He was too busy with the Kira case, she thought. She'd come back tomorrow. The next day she stood by the roofless shrine which offered no shelter, and she waited there until she was drenched by the rain.
She didn't see him for three days in total, because he never came back to their apartment. He was busy working, she reminded herself, blocking Kiyomi Takada from her mind.
On the second day, she returned from a modelling assignment with some framed prints of herself to give to him, and her key wouldn't open the door. The landlord told her that Yagami-san had changed the locks, and her belongings had been boxed up and were waiting for her to take away. The man, who must have been the age her father would have been, pitied her at first, she felt. He gave her an address of a place which had vacant rooms, but he couldn't let her live here anymore. He was sorry that such a nice couple had to end this way, but Yagami-san paid the rent. Her crying and pleading and defiance, saying that he must have made a mistake, cut his empathy off at the root. He asked her to leave as soon as possible.
On the third day, after constant attempts at calling Light, he called her. Her heart leapt in her new dingy apartment, surrounded by all her things still piled up in boxes. What did she want? She wanted to see him, and she begged him to meet her. Fuelled by cheap wine and frantic with hope and his attention, she told him that she'd meet him 'in our special place.' He didn't know where their 'special place' was and sighed when she told him. He's so funny, pretending that he doesn't remember these things.
As her begging turned into wailing and half-hearted reprisals which she swiftly apologised for, he reluctantly agreed and put the phone down. He must have been cut off. He's very busy, she thought.
He was late, but he's very busy, she thought again. She stood there waiting in her uncomfortable shoes, too frightened to sit down in case she dirtied her dress. She heard him first and thought that he was talking to her, but his phone was clutched to his ear as he carefully stepped over the tree roots which crept out of the ground. The days of having not seen him had been endless hours of emptiness while she was slowly dying like that moth, unable to accept her fate. The world had closed its doors on her as Light had done, but seeing him again was spiritual to her. She had nothing to forgive him for; he was perfect and she was worthless without him. She ran towards him but he held her away with one hand as he finished his conversation on the phone, glancing at her angrily before turning his back to her. She looked at his shoulders like they were wings and the hair on the nape of his neck, which brushed against the top of his collar as though they were bronze threads. She'd never felt so inferior and so desperate, and her knees shook in a weakness she was used to whenever she saw him, like they were telling her to kneel to him.
The sound of his phone being switched off sounded so alien in such a feral place of nature that Misa flinched even before he turned to face her again.
"What is it, Misa?" he asked tiredly.
She started talking quietly, tripping over words, unsure of them and herself, but as she looked at his feet, the words flowed from her, overtaking her mind. She told him everything. How sorry she was, how she'll try harder, she can't live without him, he must forgive her and take her back or she'll kill herself, she'll kill Takada, she'll kill everyone, everyone who looks at him, everyone who keeps him from her, she'll kill Kira, she'll do whatever he wants her to do.
He looked at her in his boredom. It was boredom. It was resignation. It was the hatred he handed out to her with a monotonous regularity since she met him. It was the way he'd looked at her countless times. All the time. It was the way he looked at her when he told her that they should move in together, and she only recognised it for what it was now. She'd interpreted it in other ways because she'd wanted to; she'd wanted him to love her. She'd wanted to believe that he did, but he didn't, did he. But she still didn't care. She'd make him love her. She could only make herself better with his guidance.
Raising herself onto her toes, she held onto his neck to steady herself against him as she kissed him. His mouth didn't move but she was used to that; she'd taken him by surprise, that was all. His hands pushed against her hips so that her skirts and all its layers of tulle crunched under his palms, and she was so happily grateful for his touch that she fell further against him. But he was stronger than she was.
It didn't take much for him to shove her off her feet and away from him. She collapsed in a heap of limps on the earth, and her disappointment and anger was towards herself, not him. She'd tried so hard to stay clean and pretty for him.
"It's over, Misa. Don't be so ridiculous."
Over. Don't be so ridiculous.
She felt pathetic, smelling of the soil and rotting leaves which smeared her dress and hands. To him, pathetic was all she was and she couldn't change it no matter how hard she tried.
"I won't let you go. You can't leave me!" she shrieked in the hysterical, high-pitched way he'd always told her annoyed him and that she had to stop. She couldn't even do that. "I will do it, Light. I'll kill her."
"Well, you are a murderer," he mumbled quietly to himself so she could barely hear him. She didn't understand him. "But you're becoming a liability now," he sighed.
"But all I want is to make you happy!"
He was talking to her, but for the first time, she wasn't listening to him, really. The words slashed at her but she wouldn't let them cut deeply. She was good at excusing and ignoring and misinterpreting negatives for positives or something that she could fix. She piled the blame on herself as if Light's word was a testament burned onto stones as guidance she must live by. He said that he was with Takada now. He called her Takada, so he didn't love her. He called Misa, by her given name, because he loved her. But he said that he didn't need Misa anymore, and she knew then that Takada really had taken her place whether he loved her or not. Takada didn't mind being used either.
Misa clawed across the ground for her little bag and her dirty hand scrambled inside it.
"I have to get back now," he said, looking at his phone. She couldn't see his eyes now because they were hidden by his hair, but before that, she saw them thin and cruel with disgust for her. "Don't call me again, Misa."
He said something about Hideki Ryuga. She didn't want Hideki Ryuga! She wanted Light and Light was there and she couldn't let him walk away from her. She couldn't let anyone take him from her. She was the true Beloved Disciple and she would prove herself.
She clambered onto her knees and pushed against the soft ground until she was standing again, hulking with a sloping, defeated spine. Light was walking away from her.
When her parents were taken from her, she was abandoned; alone with nothing but their estate and piercing memories of peeping through the slats of a closet door. She'd heard short, cut-off screams and shouts, seen flashes of light and blood, and she was alone until she realised that they hadn't left her, not really. She felt so close to them despite their deaths, perhaps more than when they were alive. She was spared as their avenger, and her duty and goal was to find their killer. Though she couldn't do much herself, she trusted that their murderer would be found and executed. But that didn't happen. Her testimony was cast aside due to 'mental instability' and an expert statement from the defence which said that she couldn't possibly have seen the killer's face in the darkness from the inside of the closet where she had been hiding. She hadn't said that she did, but she'd recognised his voice. The killer was her father's business partner. Physical evidence was scant and the killer had rounded up a fake alibi, and he walked from the court rooms as a free man saying to reporters how he planned to go on holiday. She'd failed her parents and they did really abandon her then. She didn't feel them with her anymore because they were disgusted by her. Then one day, as she was forcing breakfast into her mouth out of routine, she heard on the TV that the man who murdered her parents had been killed by Kira. In a split second she dedicated her life to Kira. Kira had judged this murderer when everyone else had failed her and her family, and gave her vengeance through anonymous justice.
She became a model and actress with the intention of creating a name for herself through her family name. She craved idolatry but wanted to be a voice in support of Kira. So while the public started worshipping her from afar, she worshipped Kira. One of her own disciples became her stalker out of a similar kind of adoration. While he held a shaking knife out to her, she told him that she understood — she did, she was flattered — but she belonged to Kira and she'd accept nothing less, even if she had to die for it. She loved the poetry of it and almost goaded him to kill her, though she didn't know why. She was a martyr for Kira. The only thing she could repay him with was her devotion.
The knife slashed at her. She held her hands over her face and thought that this is what should have happened to her when her parents died. Her life had simply been extended but now her true fate had caught up with her and it was right, it was justice. But suddenly she heard the metallic clanging of the blade on the floor at her feet and the strange, animalistic noises coming from her murderer. 'Kira,' she thought as the man flailed desperately on the ground from some god dealt suffering. Kira struck him down and extended her life again for a purpose. She had to thank Kira, she had to thank him for caring for her. She wanted to be his servant because she owed him her life. He'd protected her and given her justice and she'd repay him with her love and worship and everything she had left, because she was his.
But when she met Light, she loved him with all her soul and being immediately. The time that love truly hit her was a lightening strike and she spent weeks in some forgotten daze. Light wanted to catch Kira and she wanted to support him instead — that's how much she loved him. She was devoted to him even though she knew that she wasn't worthy of him. She would try to be better and be what he wanted and give him what he wanted, even her own life. If anyone asked her why she loved Light, she thought it was the most stupid question in the world but she couldn't put the answer into words, she just loved him. Ryuzaki had asked her why. Ryuzaki was stupid. Ryuzaki was dead.
Her anger still wasn't towards Light, but she couldn't be left without him. To know that he'd abandoned her would be worse than her parents being killed because he loved him more than she'd loved anything. Her parents had been taken from her, but Light was leaving her. She was nothing without him. She wouldn't let Takada take him and she wouldn't let him discard her. What would she be then? She was stabbing herself when she plunged a knife into Light's back.
His body gave into her so easily she couldn't believe it. How someone who was cast in iron and gold could give way way to her hurt seemed to her like he was allowing it in his mercy. And he noticed her, perhaps for the first time in all these years. As he spun around without making a noise, the knife slid out. He grasped at his back and looked at her with wide eyes but didn't say a word when she leaned against him, pressing her weight onto the knife and his chest. Her hands felt wet, the handle slipped and Light staggered backwards, away from her. He looked at her like he'd looked at his father when he'd held a gun to his son's head. Fear was the most unnatural expression for him and she wanted to make it go away and have him smile at her just once. But as she walked towards him, he stepped back and tripped, falling onto his back. What had she done?
The air was knocked from him, blood followed it, and he spluttered bright red drops. They spattered his face and ran in lines from his mouth. One hand held the seeping red from his chest while his legs scrabbled against the ground, digging heel tracks into the soil. He started shouting "Ryuk" breathlessly until Misa knelt beside him and used her skirt to wipe his face clean of blood. She whispered to him soothingly that it would be alright. It would be alright now.
Through death, you can keep the one you love.
Eight months ago Misa had lain on her side in the dirt and pulled a still warm man into her blood-covered arms. She pulled his hands across her to hang over her waist and pushed her face against his chest in the way she'd always wanted him but which he'd always denied. His shirt was soaked in his blood and it cooled against her over hours. She thought this time was the most beautiful and perfect hours of her life. When she spoke to him, she imagined his answers as silky, loving words. He wanted to stay here, he told her. 'He can hide in the well,' the crows suggested. 'You'll have to help me. ' Light said. 'I'm so tired. I can't do this without you.'
Misa stood at his command and carefully dragged him by his feet towards the well, apologising every time he bumped his head on the ground. He was so tired, she had to find somewhere quiet for him so he could sleep. No one would find him here. He'd be safe.
"You'll be ok, Light?" she asked him after struggling to pull him onto the edge of the well.
'Yes, Misa, I trust you. I'll be happy here as long as you come to see me.'
"Oh, I will! I'll come every day!"
'I'd miss you if you didn't. Don't forget about me or I'll die, remember? I love you so much, Misa.'
"I love you, too, Light," she told him as she hugged him close to her, and then she let him slip away from her.
Today is Valentine's Day and Light has been missing for eight months.