Death Note: What Might Have Been
Summary: AU. Raito wins in the end, but it's not as satisfying as he might have liked.
He signs them away to death, one by one, calmly and without remorse. There might have been something for his father, blind as he was—the man who raised him (raised a god) and taught him justice. It is just as well Soichiro is already dead, and blessed in ignorance.
The floor is littered with human bodies like so much trash, outstretched hands that will never reach their holsters flung about like discarded sticks. Raito cannot remember their faces, already. (No attachments.) But he remembers L's face now, that look of weary resignation given up to the peace of death, and smiles as he imagines the same look on the face of his successor.
There is still one left, a boy whose gray hair surrounds his masked face like a cloud, the unseen eyes through the holes glaring with emotion. His bare feet scrape against the cold floor as though he braces himself to spring. But oh, the indignity of it all, a young boy's gangly limbs flailing against the older and stronger man, accompanied perhaps by mocking laughter! So Near does nothing at all, but sits and broods and stares.
"Mikami will be coming along soon," Raito coaxes. "Why don't you tell me your name now and end it all?" His fingers itch to tear off the mask, and he imagines beneath it some sort of strange hybrid of L's and Mello's features (blond hair and dark strange eyes) and the defeat that refuses to show in his posture.
"There is a difference," Near says with cold composure, "between risking your life and throwing your life away. No one wants to die without reason." He stills, but the finger in his hair remains mobile, looping and curling and trembling subtly. Then he puts his hands down, and raises the mask to reveal a childlike, curious face, the eyes large and intent in an oddly colorless face.
There is no fear at all.
And much like L, there is still no fear, when Mikami speaks Near's name aloud and Raito writes down his death sentence in the piece of Death Note in his watch, dark and wrinkled with the ink (blood) of the names of the investigators. As the seconds count down, Near picks up the Kira puppet, and says, with conviction ringing from every syllable, "You're…just a murderer, Yagami-san."
And he crushes the Kira puppet between finger and thumb, and dies with his eyes still fixed on Raito's. Raito feels disappointed, cheated, and oddly angry; as though some part of him knows he would never face death with that much dignity, and the thought makes him so furious that he storms away.
That night, he takes out the Death Note, and kills anyone whom Near might have leaked his secret to, and feels only marginally better.