Fear
Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note.
It was difficult to go on living without him, but it was nearly impossible to go just one day, one hour, one minute, one second, one breath without thinking about him, which was somehow even worse.
The world outside her heart was a void that moved too quickly; within, it was just a swirling slowness sprinkled with bittersweet memories, memories of the him that had changed her life. She knew and didn't know what to call him: her love, her husband, her obsession, her life, her soul mate, her god—her traitor seemed to be appropriate enough. Because only a traitor would leave her in this world, this horrible-wretched-diseased-murdered world alone.
And she was alone. Solitude was new to her; it tasted of loneliness and despair and death and a million other things that repulsed her, a million other things that she could do without and had done without when she had still been the idol of Japan, who was now nothing but a vanished enigma featured on the last page of the daily newspaper.
But as tragic as her life had become, it was still her life, and she could still breathe and eat and walk and wonder at how far she had come and how low she had fallen, with every thump of her heartbeat reminding her of how, once upon a time, it had only beat for him.
And now he was gone, and now she had nothing, nowhere, no one to breathe for.
And she could follow him freely because his path had been so clear and so final, and they could live together as the god and goddess of his—their?—eternal realm, with no one to bother them, not even that annoying-vain-ugly hag Takada. It could be such a beautifully bloody ending, a romantic beginning—would be, if she so chose. They would be the newest Romeo and Juliet, memorialized forever for their love—or was it their tragic end that made people remember them?
She pondered, in the middle of the night, why she didn't walk down that path, and her answer came in a flood of cold sheer fear that made her scream and hide under the covers like a terrified child. Clinging to her existence, the sound of her racing heart, she tried to breathe normally and swallowed hard. Don't think about it. Don't think about it.
She was scared, wholly and overwhelmingly scared, of dying, and now she was scared of having to face the night, when the monsters that fed on her soul would torment her. And that fear drowned out all else, even him, even her strongest-most-precious memories of him.
She relived those nights, those thoughts, those fears all too often; they came and struck at her when she tried to smile, when she hugged herself and bit her lip and willed her tears to stop. But today was Valentine's Day, the most romantic-perfect day of all, and she could no longer wait, even when every single living fiber of her body was screaming at her not to be stupid, even when she knew she had already lived—survived—a year, no, more than a year, a whole three hundred eighty-two days without him, bloody-cruel-smirking traitor.
The next second, she told her voices to shut up, dug her fingernails into her white flawless skin, tried not to think about what would happen next, and jumped.