AN – Sorry about the deletion. Blame my crazy sister. Chapter 2 coming soon !
AN – First fanfic. Suggestions welcome because I only have the barest idea of where this is going. Unbeta'd. Betas also welcome. Anyone interested in how I came up with the basic premise of this story can check out my profile for rambles.
P.S -Am I using too much italics? (in the fic that is)
Disclaimer- Of course I don't own it.
WARNINGS – Fem!Light. Swearing and mature situations. Mind fuckery (But you knew that didn't you? After all, it's Death Note) Depressive thoughts. Let me know if there are anything other triggers in the reviews.
Dull. Dreary. Uninteresting. Mind-numbing. Tedious. Monotonous. Unexciting.
Boring.
Light Yagami let out a sigh.
Her English teacher droned on in his bland voice, his pronunciation laughably pathetic. Her eyes narrowed at him in a chilly glare, before turning her attention to her equally pathetic classmates all engrossed with their sheltered, shallow lives.
Light forced herself to think about the better aspects of life.
Her classroom's air conditioning had improved, though only marginally, making her grateful for her window seat.
She had received another scholarship from St. Brutus' Institute for the Academically Gifted. (She had rejected that one of course. Academically gifted? That sounded so pompous.)
Sakura season would be coming soon. (The school would look beautiful.)
Now who was being the shallow one?
She sighed again. She didn't know what to think. Every thought in her mind was either condescending or self-loathing. She was aware that there was something fundamentally wrong with her. Maybe from when she was born.
Maybe it started when she won her first prize at the age of three for a competition that was held for seven year olds. (She only got a chance to participate because she had kicked and screamed but… that was different. She had won it. Just like she knew she would.)
Maybe it was when she attained puberty. (She had thought she was dying.)
Maybe it had started when she felt nothing (absolutelynothingohmygodnothing) during her first kiss.
Or maybe when S-
She stopped that train of thought.
Wrong. The word echoed in her brain, bouncing off the mental walls she had built around herself to prevent her from completely breaking down.
Her thoughts were wrong. Her mind itself was something … diseased. All her thoughts centered on the world's negative facets when logic dictated that equals and opposites were ever-present.
Of course she acknowledged that while good things existed, they were far outweighed by the bad.
Such a nihilistic world view for someone so young. Seventeen. Seventeen years of living, breathing, existing in this rotten world had hardened her.
This world which celebrated males and shunned females for something as simple, as basic as anatomy.
This world where people defiled their own offspring, murdered their spouses for greed, killed innocent people for fun.
Depressing thoughts aside, she knew that there must be some sort of basic survival instinct embedded in all species that lets you overlook their flaws. After all, man was a social species. Isolation could kill humankind. So she was lacking something essential, primitive and important.
That made her inherently wrong. She was a scientist. A researcher above all else. She knew what happened to beings that overrode or lacked vital instincts, instincts such as the ability to survive in harmony with her kind.
They either formed a new, more powerful species (or sub-species) or they simply ceased to exist, weak genetics being eliminated by the order of natural selection.
Such was the way of life. And she had come to accept it, if not for the simple explanation that logic had never failed her. She was hardwired the wrong way and she would either perish or build a new world with better prospects for the future. That was the simple truth.
But.
She wasn't going to be some passive observer to her imminent demise. She would change the world or go out in flames so brilliant that if it couldn't bring down the whole world with it, it would at least make some mark on history.
She knew she was destined for great things.
Evolutionary concepts and world domination aside, there was something wrong with her mentally, where her biggest asset resided.
And that was unacceptable.
So she began researching mental illnesses and unsurprisingly there were a number of mind boggling illnesses each with symptoms so similar that if they were all true, she'd be suffering from at least a dozen disorders.
Currently she had self diagnosed herself with Narcissistic Personality Disorder along with a dash of depression. Of course being one of the top contenders for the To-Oh University, she was aware of just how stupid she was being, by self diagnosing potential psychopathic (serial killers were mostly psychopaths – was she going to be a serial killer?) disorders without consulting a psychologist.
Nevertheless, she was confident in her diagnosis.
Many geniuses of her caliber were afflicted with depression. It was natural, of course. It was extremely lonely at the top.
Being a girl didn't do much to help matters. Boys her age were intimidated by her intelligence; they just couldn't wrap their minds around the possibility that she could really be that smart.
If she sought out boys who didn't care that she was intelligent, then that was a different scenario altogether. Those types were only interested in getting into her pants.
Girls were even more horrible. Unable to understand or empathize with her situation, they resorted to the only thing they knew to do when confronted with something different- humiliate.
Light dealt with slur upon slur until middle school when she decided she'd had enough. All those people were inferior to her. Being humiliated by people inferior to her was, in short, unacceptable.
So she confronted them head on, met each problem directly and emerged the victor in everyone of those situations.
Light Yagami always won.
But this illness, she would not allow depression to overtake her sanity and make her commit suicide in a dark room where no one would find her body.
That was so clichéd.
So what was she to do then?
Seeking help was out of the question. (The perfect Light Yagami mentally unstable? How the world would laugh. One child mad, the other one-)
But she had to do something. Anything at all.
As she absently stared out the window, she noticed….. a falling book ?
"Yagami-chan. Would you kindly translate that passage for us? "
She sighed. This was going to be a long day.
She stared at the notebook in disgust.
Death Note? What kind of amateur was writing these petty hoaxes?
She threw it down and began walking away.
Light glared at the innocuous notebook as if it had personally offended her.
Here was something that was testimonial to her failing mind- she had done something which she had no explanation for. She had picked up a notebook for no reason other than simple curiosity.
Curiosity about a notebook that killed people.
'Just calm down', she told herself, 'it's not going to kill anyone.'
She placed it carefully under her pillow and went to have a much needed shower.
The shower did nothing to relax her troubled mind and she emerged from it more confused than before.
After getting dressed and purposely wasting time so as to avoid making a choice, she finally picked it up.
The human whose name is written in this notebook shall die.
How childish.
Of course, the very idea of pranking was a very childish thing to do so it was unsurprising that the prank itself would be uninspired.
She could probably pull off a better prank in her sleep.
However, there was something off about the note.
She carefully read the remaining rules and came to several conclusions.
One, all the instructions were written in English (not to mention in impeccable grammar) That in itself was suspicious.
Not many people knew how to read English. Atleast in Japan that is. When you go to such lengths to create a notebook and fill it with such gothy, emo rules, why not make it in a language accessible to more people?
Second, the rules themselves. There were just too many and they were too complicated to be a simple prank. So much thought must've been given to invent the rules when the basic premise itself was juvenile. There was no correlation.
Third, there was something about the book that made you want to try it at least once. A strange sort of pull, if you will. Something almost …. supernatural.
Inspite of herself, an impossible thought began forming in her mind. What if?
She shut her eyes, took a deep breath and asked herself a simple enough question. If you could kill someone, who would it be?
Before she could get sucked into the philosophical ramifications of that question, an answer sprang into her mind, instantaneous and with blinding clarity.
She stopped herself before the answer fully completed.
No. She would not go down that road. She would not make this personal. That way even the notebook did work,(she mentally scoffed at the ridiculous thought) it wouldn't be so painfully obvious that it was her killing random people.
She turned her mind and thought hard. She needed someone to test the notebook with, someone truly vile and despicable and –
"… the criminal named Kurou Otoharada killed and wounded six people before taking eight pupils and members of staff hostage….."
She glanced up in surprise. She'd forgotten about the TV she'd switched on sometime earlier.
And just like that it hit her.
If she wrote this man's name down, she'd be saving eight people, including children!
There was not a single thought of doubt as the words were quickly scribbled in elegant kanji.
Light kept counting. 38… 39… 40.
She shifted her eyes eagerly to the TV but was disappointed. There was no sudden exclamation; there were no running hostages, no-
Wait a second.
"…. there appears to be some sort of confusion in the – oh what's this? The hostages have escaped! They are all safe! It appears that the kidnapper suddenly collapsed. The police have assured that they did not open fire. They're claiming… Oh… It appears that Kurou Otoharada died of a heart attack! It was truly a miraculous-"
The TV went blank.
The remote dropped from her shivering hands.
It worked. It actually worked.
The Death Note was real.
Takuo Shibuimaru.
The name kept echoing in her mind. If it hadn't been for her, that man would be alive.
Two men would be alive. She had killed two men. Two humans.
Two living, breathing people who probably had families.
Families which were probably mourning them right now, right fucking now, when she was being a coward and hiding under her bed covers.
She shook her head to clear away such vehement thoughts. She never swore, not even in her thoughts.
This incident must be affecting her worse than she thought.
Incident? It was murder! She had killed two people and had the audacity to refer to it as incident!
Just who did she think she was, prancing about the world killing people with a few strokes of her fingers? Just who did she think she was to pass her righteous freaking judgment?
She was just a bored seventeen year old teenager of above average intelligence with way too much time and more power than one human could possibly dream of. Anything more than that was wishful thinking.
She had killed people merely to alleviate her boredom, not out of any misplaced sense of justice and it was high time she accepted that.
I am not a killer.
Of course she was! Who was she fooling anyways? A killer, by definition, meant a person, animal or thing that kills. Synonyms – murderer, destroyer, executioner, slaughterer.
She wasn't creating a peaceful new world free from criminals-she was destroying it.
Executioner.
She liked the ring to that word. She preferred that term to the other less … savory labels. She passed righteous judgment on the people who committed heinous crimes.
Like that Takuo Shibuimaru.
He probably would have raped and murdered that girl if she hadn't intervened.
She was impartial. She was Justice. She was God.
She flinched as the 'g' word flashed through her mind again.
She had killed two people and already she was becoming some sort of megalomaniac with a God-complex? She had read enough manga and watched enough anime to know that those types never won.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And the Death Note was definitely absolute power. Absolute power over the most important aspect of life- life itself.
That kind of power and with such a detached method of killing (after all, she never had to actually pierce her victims with her knife, feel the crunch of their bones or the soft gasp of their dying breath) this Death Note could have huge ramifications in her life.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Alright. She would kill criminals who escaped justice. That was all.
A sort of vigilante. A watch dog of Justice.
Though that sounded derogatory, she needed an ounce of humility to keep her in check.
This vigilante business was dangerous, however. She would probably (no, definitely) catch the attention of the police forces because they most likely would assume that she was taunting them about their inability to truly eradicate criminals from the world.
They would devote all their effort and power in catching her.
In that case, it would only be a matter of time before she was caught.
She would have to be careful. A single mistake, a slight overstep, a small oversight could cost her, her life.
She would just have to be perfect, then. Being perfect was something she could do, something she had been doing her whole life. She would need a method to this madness.
But if anyone could pull this off, Light was confident it would be her.
"Watari."
Watari dropped a stack of files in front of him.
"There are seven cases requesting your response as L and there are four other cases for your alias Eraldo Coil and two for Denueve. Amongst these, there's this one case that might hold your attention, it's the Boston str-"
A stirring of a teacup.
"The Kira case. What is the Kira case?"
Watari frowned faintly at the interruption but continued.
"Believed to be an international organization after criminals, they have caused an uproar in the law enforcement world. They are rumored to be capable of killing two or even more persons across the opposite ends of the world. Police org-"
A bite of a strawberry. "Why was I not informed of this?"
Watari frowned deeply now.
"The killings started barely a week ago and there have more than thirty cries for help from all over the world. I've been-"
Spindly fingers held the file precariously as dark eyes roved over it.
Plop! A sugar cube was dropped into the cup of tea.
Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop!
"….. assassins with high caliber ….. "
"Watari. Start a conference with the ICPO."
Watari sighed. Honestly he didn't know why he even tried.
End chapter note – Please do review. There may be grammatical and typographical errors. Feel free to point them out in your reviews. Taking time out of my crazy schedule is worth it to see the blinking message in my inbox. All constructive criticism accepted. Flames shall be used to warm hot chocolate. Cheers.