anathema
Light Yagami dies alone in a warehouse and is reborn as a Shinigami. This is, somehow, not exactly a good thing.
Light Y., Ryuk, BB
AN: The other day, I was looking through my bookshelf when I saw my collection of Death Note manga, which made me remember this story. I wrote it a couple of years back, when Death Note was my biggest fandom - I got on my old computer to check how badly I'd written it and actually, at first glance...it didn't seem too bad, considering it was the production of a fourteen year old me and I'm still not amazing at writing. I cleaned it up a bit, and realized that I actually liked what I'd written. So, I decided to post it in case anyone was interested in it. It's not finished - it's a collection of tiny almost-drabbles about a Shinigami!Light after he was killed in canon. If anyone likes it, I'd be glad to see what I could do about writing more; if not, tell me what I did wrong with it - I haven't watched Death Note in so long I might have not corrected details. Either way, I hope you enjoy it to at least some degree. :)
anathema
The sky is gray.
Everything is gray, he realizes - the ground, the rocks, the gnarled trees with their leafless limbs stretching upward as though grasping at the heavens and searching, Light thinks, for a place different, more alive, than here.
He knows where he is right away, of course; he is still a genius (strange, he's dead but his brain still works) even in this unchanging world of ash and dust. The Shinigami Realm, with its silence and emptiness and lack of everything living is not a fitting place for the Ruler of the New World.
He draws a breath, slow and steady, tasting of bitter ash, in an attempt at calming himself before he lifts his hands up to examine them with a critical eye. They are twisted like the branches of the trees, clawed and dead and gray, nothing like Light Yagami's liquid-gold skin and perfect thin fingers.
This - this, he realizes, is Kira.
He lifts one mutated hand to his shoulder, feeling fabric beneath his curiously sensitive fingertips. Undeterred, he brushes his claws across the fabric, stopping when he feels a strange indent - a hole, where one of Matsuda's bullets hit him. Snarling, ignoring what will certainly be pain, he plunges two fingers into the wound and stops immediately when he notices the total lack of feeling.
The sensation of having something in his flesh and no pain is quite interesting, even as he feels something wet and cold (blood -). Ignoring this, he digs his claws in deeper until they ram into something hard and much too warm; he pinches them together and pulls out the offending object, ripping it out and holding it in front of his eyes to examine what, exactly, it is.
It is a bullet, as he'd suspected, covered in something silver-black that seems to gleam in the nonexistent light. Shinigami blood, he realizes with something akin to a smile twisting his face. He hasn't expected it to be red, and it isn't. He watches curiously as it dries before his eyes into something powdery and white, coating the bullet and his fingers - if there was wind in this unchanging world, it would have been blown away. As it is, Light eyes it briefly before, bullet pinched between the claws of one hand, he lifts a finger to his lips.
He feels pointed teeth probably not that unlike Ryuk's and a rotting tongue that darts out of the cavern of his mouth to taste the powder. It is metallic, edged with sulfur, and Light realizes what it is in an instant – mercury.
His blood is poison. It seems fitting.
With a harsh bark of laughter, he reaches up to swipe more silvery blood from the wound. It glistens on his fingers and dries to powder, but this time he only smiles and blows it away, watching the white grains fall to the gray earth, and wonders if he'll ever see snow again.
The portal to the human world is a lighter, brighter silver than the tainted Shinigami blood, purer than the ash-gray ground and sky. It is almost, he reflects, like human water, although there is no sun to illuminate it and no sunset to turn it into a work of art.
A sharp laugh from Ryuk draws his attention; the older Shinigami is hunched over the portal, knees bent, too-long arms dangling at his side. His bulging eyes, Light realized a while ago when he'd first arrived in his new life (death?), are like a chameleon's; one is fixed on the portal, one is fixed on his face, though he doesn't quite know what Ryuk is looking for in either.
"Miss your old life, Kira?" he asks, mockingly, eyes both snapping to Light's face, leaving the portal ignored.
Light doesn't respond, at least not at first. He presses the tip of his pen into the paper of his Death Note, harder than before, a flower of dark ink spreading across the too-white pages, and briefly debates whether or not to kill Nate River right away. A moment passes; he sighs and, pen still pressed to paper, glances up at Ryuk, deep black eyes meeting red-yellow. "I can't be God now."
Ryuk laughs again, the broken laugh Light is fairly sure gave him his name, as he straightens back up, all dangling limbs and spiky hair, and reaches a gnarled claw-hand to play with the crucifix hanging from the cold dead flesh of his ear. "You kidding? You're a real god now, more than you ever were before."
Light keeps a growl in; he hasn't expected Ryuk to understand, anyway. Few Shinigami even remember their human lives - he himself seems to be one of the rare exceptions and perhaps this is for a reason. Instead, his gaze returns to his Death Note and he lifts the pen away from the paper, holding it delicately between his claws before he looks back at Ryuk. His eyes, chips of obsidian, hard and bright in the vague, ethereal light of the Shinigami realm, are blank and expressionless as always; they're L's eyes, and he wonders why he has them. "Gods aren't supposed to look like this," he points out, using his pen to motion to his dead grey skin, dark eyes, pointed teeth.
Ryuk snorts derisively. "But that is what they look like. Anyway, you don't need to look like some weak human when you've got Shinigami power."
"If you hadn't killed me," Light grumbles, and the thought is enough to make a surge of anger run through the cold black eyes - his hand has written down Nat before he knows it and he freezes and tells himself revenge is boring if you can't watch it.
The older Shinigami only waves his free hand. "Look, Light, if I hadn't killed you, you would have just gone to prison and been stuck there for the rest of your life -"
"No," Light interrupts, and Ryuk glances at him. "They do have the death penalty in the human world, you know."
Ryuk rolls his eyes. "You think Nate would have given you an easy way out?"
Light scowls, the expression twisted on his Shinigami face, and breathes out, irritated that Ryuk can be so logical at times and so illogical at others. "No."
"Right," Ryuk chuckles, and his hand drops from his earring to his side. "Gods don't need to look like anything other than what they are. You can kill humans with just a few letters, and they can't kill you in return unless you fall in love with one, which I'm fairly sure won't happen." He eyes Light speculatively.
"Of course not," Light says, because the world is full of criminals and those who oppose Kira and they need to pay-
- or do they, anymore?
Does it matter?
"Well," Ryuk interrupts him, "now you can do whatever you want, and they can't do anything in return." The grotesque grin constantly on the older Shinigami's face seems to widen at this, and he stretches his arms lazily.
Light blinks at him, a sharp click of his eyelids, and Ryuk leaps into the air. Black wings explode into being, loose feathers drifting to the ashy ground as a rush of air stirs the silty dust into a miniature whirlwind and Ryuk disappears among the monochrome clouds.
It isn't until he feels the wind against his dead grey skin that Light realizes just how much he has missed the human world, his old home; how different it is from the Shinigami realm, all bright and colorful rather than dark and grey.
The rush of wind blows his auburn hair, the only real remnant of his old human body, into a frantic dance, and Light leans his back to present his face to the sun in an attempt to push new thoughts out of his head. It doesn't work.
The talk with Ryuk, he decides, just made it worse. He can kill people, he can complete his work as Kira without any real opposition, but there is no risk in this game anymore, and even though he fights to deny the truth this realization brings (you were only doing this for the fun of it, out of boredom, you do not deserve to be a God) it's hard to ignore reality.
It has been different since L died in the first place. Before, Light's life had felt like a game of chess with his enemy, a life-or-death game but a game nonetheless. They moved the pieces across the board and eventually, when Light called checkmate and watched the detective die in his arms, he felt a sense of sorrow and anger, mixed together as one.
He'd banished it at the time - Kira had no need for human emotions while he was trying to purify the world - but now he realizes just what that feeling was. L had finally fallen, and he was left feeling cheated. It was just a game, a game that was so exciting Light didn't realize how much he'd miss it until it was too late.
By the time he'd gotten to his second game with Near, he had to almost force himself to sit down and move the pieces, and eventually he'd gotten to the point where he didn't truly care anymore. A second of inattention is all it takes, after all, and when Near finally knocked his King down it was with a pawn of all pieces.
But he cannot manipulate like this. Here, in his patchwork body of different people and creatures - Light's hair, L's eyes, Ryuk's teeth and Rem's claws - he is no one. He may be a Shinigami, a god of death, but he is not the brown-eyed young adult with the perfect looks and lying eyes, the one with a tongue so silver nobody realized it until they were gasping their last breaths, the one who killed twelve FBI agents and tricked the other into suicide.
Now, he is the black-eyed monster with the dead skin and curved claws and vicious grin, with poison blood and ruined bat wings, holding a black leather book and a silvery pen, watching the watery portal to the human world in a broken, bleached land of monsters and dust, writing names and spelling death in black ink.
He is more obvious now - he can no longer act with deception as he used to. Deception and manipulation were once his greatest allies, after all; now, what human would trust him in this new body, if they could see him in the first place?
Nobody. He is a twisted, warped version of his human self, dead and gray and decaying, the perfect model of a dying world that could not be saved. The model of a mortal-turned-god living amongst the broken bones of a world already faded to ashes, a shadow presiding over the humans who will never fully recover from his presence.
They are working on another case when he sees them.
Matsuda - Touta Matsuda, say the characters above his head - is the first one he notices as his black eyes are drawn to the one who condemned him to this half-life in the first place. The man is hunched over a computer, but he doesn't seem to be really doing anything; his fingers peck half-heartedly at the keys, a cup of coffee steaming gently at his side.
Light cocks his head and watches, wondering what has gotten into him.
He doesn't have to wait long.
"Matsui!" someone, Shuichi Aizawa, snaps, and Matsuda's head jerks up as though he's been electrified, banging the table with his arm and upsetting the coffee on the table next to him. The man glances around, meeting Aizawa's gaze, and wilts, muttering an audible 'sorry'.
Aizawa sighs. "Look, Matsui. Light was Kira - he killed so many people, like L and Soichiro - you shouldn't feel bad for killing him. He would have died anyway, and it's not your fault."
A smirk has made its way onto Light's lips by this point, turning his already hideous Shinigami features into something vicious and predatory. Matsuda is already drowning in guilt for what he did, and guilt is such a pointless, ugly, human emotion. He lets out a laugh, confident in the knowledge nobody will hear him. Humans are so amusing - and then, with a start, he realizes this is why Ryuk dropped his Death Note in the human world in the first place. He also realizes he has started referring to his fellow taskforce members (sheep, herded by a force so much stronger than themselves) as humans now, as if he wasn't one. As if he wasn't ever one.
"It's just…hard," Matsuda admits, glancing towards his cup of coffee and reaching out a hand to pull it towards his lips. "I thought…I really thought Light wasn't Kira, but that's not the - I shot him," he breaths, and the coffee cup falls from his fingers to shatter on the ground. Everyone else in the office leaps up at the sound, and the whole thing is so reminiscent of how L died Light almost feels like he's playing the game again, smiling at his foe - 'Checkmate' - and watching him fall to the floor.
He reminds himself that his king fell long ago.
"I killed someone," Matsuda snarls, and Light watches with detached interest as the man stands. "I'm no better than Kira now," he adds, kicking viciously at the shattered pieces of coffee mug on the ground and sending them spinning across the room where they crash into the wall.
There is a moment of silence.
"Control yourself," says a jumbled mechanical voice, and Light instantly whirls around, snarling, displaying each one of his pointed Shinigami teeth; it would have been frightening if anyone could actually see him. As it is, he ends up staring at a laptop he can't quite believe he missed before; it is pressed up to the wall, displaying a too-familiar gothic 'L'.
"Nate River," he murmurs, almost lovingly, and then - faster than a human could ever hope to move - he lunges forward and smashes the computer screen into pieces with one clawed fist.
Everything happens at once.
Matsuda screams, and everyone else gasps; Light doesn't have to turn and look to know they're stumbling away from the ruined device. No blood oozes from his claw-fingers and there is no pain, not that there ever has been since he became a god of death.
Smiling victoriously at the broken computer screen, he turns and comes face-to-face with Aizawa, moving towards the laptop. Light doesn't move as the man passes through him, but feels him shiver as humans normally do when passing through Shinigami.
"It's just…shattered," Aizawa announces after arriving at the scene and, hatred flooding back, Light turns, snaps out his wings, and floats through the wall of the building, back into the air above the crowded Tokyo streets.
He glances down at the ground, eyes landing on the first person he sees; he pulls out his Death Note and scribbles the name above their head in dark ink. He doesn't even stay to see the man fall or wait to count out the numbers until his death; he just beats his overlarge bat wings, flies up into the sky, and pretends not to notice when his keen Shinigami hearing picks up the sound of screams.
He plucks the bullet out of the pocket of the jacket his new form came equipped with, the same one he'd been wearing when he died in the warehouse, and stares at it.
"Whatcha doing, Light?" someone asks, and he doesn't even have to glance over his shoulder to figure out who it is - the voice is so familiar by now he could identify it in his sleep.
"Ryuk," he replies evenly, turning the bullet around in his fingers. The metal shines in the dim light, warm against his dead skin, and he is struck with a realization of how fragile humans are, to be killed by something as small and useless as this. Then again, Shinigami can be killed by love; and that is a small and useless thing as well. "Nothing."
"Saw you got back from the human world," Ryuk says, crouching down next to the younger Shinigami. "Did you kill anyone?"
"Of course. That's the only way you can go down there in the first place, intent to kill. But only one person," Light says, but his voice holds no emotion as he flicks the bullet in the air and catches it as it falls. "If you mean anyone I knew in my past life, then no."
"Then why go down there?" Ryuk asks, glancing at Light. "You didn't drop your Death Note, did you?"
"I still possess my intellect, if not my brain, Ryuk," Light says dryly, tossing the bullet in the air again. "Or the information from what used to be my brain. No. I was going to go kill everyone in the taskforce, but…" he sighs, frowns as Ryuk snatches the little piece of metal out of the air, "there's no fun in it anymore."
"What do you mean?"
Light shrugs. "You're right, Ryuk. Humans are too amusing to kill, especially the ones I used to work with. I have an infinity in front of me; I need to do something with it. But it's not just that; there's no risk anymore. It's…boring."
"Maybe you should think about acquiring a new Note," Ryuk says then, dropping the bullet, watching it fall to the ground before one of Light's hands jerks out and catches it. "Find your successor. Another Kira." He laughs. "But you were a one-of-a-kind human, Light. I doubt there are many more like that in the world."
Light gives a half-hearted smirk in response, remembers the laptop screen shattering under his clenched fist and decides being a god is overrated.
It is winter, now; while the Shinigami realm remains unchanged through time - in fact, sometimes Light isn't quite sure if time is passing - the human world is always different, so he assumes time must be flying by at a much quicker rate here.
After you die, after your heart stops beating and your lungs stop contracting, time ceases to have any meaning anyway. It drags on and leaves you in its wake, unchanging and forever undead. There is, quite simply, no end.
He perches on the edge of the building the real L had built to house the Kira taskforce members and stares down at the street, watching white flakes swirl in front of his vision like his own dried blood. His hair flutters in the howling wind, and although he knows he should, wishes he would feel cold, he doesn't. His skin is dead and nerveless and he doesn't really exist in the first place.
He feels better here, though, in a place that is still thriving, and he idly wonders how long it will take before the world crumbles around the ears of mankind. It won't upset the Shinigami - after all, there are other worlds than just this one, something that was once of only passing interest to him as a human - but it is an interesting thought nonetheless, that he will get to see it happen when Near and the taskforce are long dead, when Kira is no longer anything but a vague echo of a presence.
One day, he realizes, Kira will only be a story. A story of the type used to intimidate children into going to sleep, no doubt. Light laughs at the thought, running his sharp claws through his thick auburn hair.
"Hello."
Light nearly leaps out of his skin at the voice, jumping to his feet, turning around to face whatever is talking to him. It's not Ryuk - Ryuk would never say anything so mundane as 'hello' - and it doesn't sound like any of the other Shinigami he's met; humans can't see him, so it must be a god of death. And it is; a hunched-over man with raven feathers for hair, dark bags under vibrant red eyes, wings of shadowy darkness stretching out behind him.
The man almost looks like L.
"Who are you?" Light asks without preamble. The man cocks his head and smiles, a wide Shinigami smile (Kira-smile) that bears sharp teeth in front of the grayish-purple cavern of his mouth. His skin and teeth are startlingly pale against the dark hair and wings, the deep crimson of his eyes.
"You are Kira," the man states, firing bluntness right back at him, taking a few steps to the edge of the building and sitting down. He curls his toes - bare toes with sharp pointed toenails - around the edge, tucks his knees to his chest, wraps his arms around them; the pale skin is studded with dark feathers. "Took your time in getting here. Henh henh henh."
"Just Light, now. You've been watching?" Light asks; from what he's gathered, watching his antics as Kira was one of the more popular pastimes of most Shinigami. Something to break them out of their boredom, watching a mortal try to play as a god. He was stupid, then, despite his towering intellect.
He steps forward, seats himself a few paces away from the man-who-is-not-L. He's learned that it's hard enough to get Shinigami to reveal their names - most Shinigami do not know them, do not learn them for a long time because they've forgotten their past lives. Light has two names; a name for now, and a name for then. Light and Kira, Kira and Light. It makes no difference.
"I have. Since you killed me." The man's voice is flat, light; amused, even. "You killed Naomi Misora. I was impressed; you even managed to kill L. Not even I could accomplish that."
Light shoots a sharp glance at him. "Who are you, exactly?" he asks, repeating his old question, because if this Shinigami remembers his old life, remembers L and Naomi, then he must remember his old name.
And the Shinigami, still sitting like L, clawed hands around knees and red eyes glinting savagely, bares his teeth in a twisted imitation of a smile. "Just another criminal like you. Rue Ryuzaki, private detective. B Backup, L's successor. Beyond Birthday, failed copy and criminal, at your service. Henh henh henh."
"I used to have the Shinigami eyes."
"What?" Light turns, fixes Beyond with a curious glance. The dark Shinigami is behind him as always, wings spread, toes just lightly brushing the earth - or they would have been, if Shinigami could truly interact with their environment. As it is, they simply dip through the earth, like a pencil in water.
"From before I was born. No traded lifespan," Beyond says, exposing all of his teeth in that predatory mix of a smirk and a grin. "I saw the numbers and the names, parents and teachers and classmates and children. Knew names before they introduced themselves, knew the time of death of every person I met."
Light blinks at him, owlishly, instinctively turning on his Shinigami vision though he knows he cannot see details of fellow Shinigami. Beyond is no exception; above his head is nothing, no lifespan, not even the dancing letters of a name.
Beyond's smile grows bigger. "You can't see my name or the numbers. I know. Henh henh henh. I can see yours, you know. I can't turn mine on and off," he adds, giggling slightly, which only contributes to his deranged appearance. "Light Yagami, spelled with the Kanji for moon, night, god…date of death January 28, 2013. Looks like you were going to die that day anyway…"
Light jerks slightly at the news. "How can you tell, when I can't see yours?"
Beyond laughs the laugh of a Shinigami, harsh and soft and breathy all at once. "I'm special. I can see these things. They can't. I can see older Shinigami's human names and dates of death. But why should I tell them?" His wings beat slightly, carrying him higher into the air, shedding wisps of gray smoke.
Light unfurls his own; charred black bat's wings, solid and so much different from Beyond's liquid pair. Everything about him is different then his companion; his eyes, his skin, his wings and hair. "Is your name really Beyond Birthday?"
Beyond cackles. "Do you want to know a secret, little Kira? Henh henh henh…names are not set in stone. Did you know L's real name?"
Light shakes his head slightly, determined to ignore the older Shinigami's teasing. "Rem killed him to save Misa. I never got his name, never checked the Death Note too closely, but I think the names she'd written faded when she died. That was how Misa got Gelus's Note without any names in it."
"I can see why you managed to beat L," Beyond laughs, chewing at one of his claws now. "Smart. His name was L Lawliet. But by the time he died, it was no longer L Lawliet; it was just L. Every human being has to have a name, no matter how detached they are from it; otherwise he probably wouldn't have had one. That was the one he was most attached to.
"In fact, if you'd lived any longer, you probably wouldn't be Light Yagami anymore." Beyond glances above Light's head, to where his faded name and date of death are certainly hovering. "Any longer, and you'd be Kira." And he laughs, loud and long, smoky wings beating wildly as he doubles over, gasping for breaths he doesn't need. A human reaction.
Purely human, Light thinks. That's what they all are, in the end, sinning human beings warped and twisted by death and a power far beyond their comprehension.
The lazy beats of two pairs of Shinigami wings are the only noise in the derelict Los Angeles alleyway Beyond drags him into. Trash litters the ground; it's dark, and the only light to see by is the faint glow of the stars hovering languidly over their heads. He can't tell the temperature, though; his dry gray skin won't allow that.
Light eyes it all distastefully, the discarded reminders of a broken civilization. This is why you are Kira, says a little voice in the back of his head, taking advantage of this momentary confusion as to why he is not killing criminals, purifying this filthy world one corrupt human at a time. He doesn't even try to correct it, doesn't protest I was Kira, when I was human.
After all, Kira and Light are the same thing.
"Why are we here?" he snarls to cover his indecision. Beyond glances at him, red eyes into black; Light briefly wonders what it would be like to know exactly when everyone you met would die, what it would be like to have death as a constant in your life, hiding around every corner and watching from above each person's head.
"Los Angeles," Beyond says almost fondly, those liquid wings creating dark shadows in the air. "This is where I committed my murders, little Kira. This is where I played God," and he chuckles slightly, sound eerie in the silence. Before Light can reply, though, he quiets, surprisingly quickly. "More accurately, where I played the reaper. After all…you cannot kill humans before their time."
"You can with the Death Note," Light points out, and Beyond nods, conceding the point.
"The Death Note," Beyond says, "is meant to steal the lives from humans to extend Shinigami lifespan, so naturally...on the other side, though, when a human's lifespan runs to zero, they usually have a bit of time before they die. That gives any human with Shinigami eyes time to interfere." He smirks, pointed teeth glittering. "They would have died anyway. I just sped along the process…"
"And L stopped you?" Light asks, pausing mid-step, obsidian eyes gleaming.
"It was a challenge," Beyond replies evenly, a beat of his wings taking him higher into the air. "I was the Backup. A Alternate took his own life…and L didn't care." His voice turns bitter, angry. "I would never be anything more than a copy. I couldn't be L until L died, but at least I could beat him in something."
"You lost."
"To his pet, no less," Beyond sneers. "Naomi Misora, too smart for her own good, but the playing field was never level from the start. I couldn't kill her, because it wasn't her time to die. Not that I would have; she was part of L's response, but she would never have caught me if I wasn't there helping her the entire time."
Light laughs for the first time since he became a Shinigami. It's different than Ryuk's, different than Beyond's; it is not light or breathy or sharp (hyuk, hyuk) but dark and soft and somehow even more dangerous. Light's laugh, not Kira's. "A little too smart for your own good?"
The older Shinigami cackles, beats his wings and soars off into the sky, Light following close behind, leaving the city below, spread out, expanding like a cancer. Humanity is a cancer, one that Kira devoted his existence to trimming and making harmless.
Light glances down at the receding lights and wonders whether Kira should have given up his mission already. It's not too late to start again.