The world was rotten. It was diseased, racked by a terrible, wasting sickness. Crime was the cancer. And Kira…
Kira was the cure.
With a face and a name he could kill, anywhere at any time. With a little black book he could enact genocide. Would. With the scratching of pen on paper he would excise the taint that marred his perfect world.
Oh, how he secretly adored that concept. His world. No one else's.
It would be his to lead into a grand new age; one where the people could walk the streets at night without fear. His would be an age where crime was a thing of the past; where the would-be scum toed the line in fear of God's own wrath.
He never questioned it – never questioned why taking the mantle of a God seemed so natural, so easy, so… practiced. As if he'd done it once before.
On his seventh birthday, little Light Yagami had gotten an ant farm. A little rectangular box of clear glass, filled with dirt and tiny insects. He was excited at first, took good care of his gift. Swiftly though, he grew bored – he tried to get the ants to do something else, something different, anything. He tapped at the glass impatiently. When he tapped a bit too hard, and sent his ant farm to the floor with the shrill, tinkling crash of glass…
Looking down at them, running about wildly in shock, he felt nothing but a vague disappointment.
Long after, he dreamed terrible dreams. Dreams of a static world, one overripe with stagnation. Of violent purgation. Of looking down upon the ants that scuttled about so fearfully when he was only trying to help them so why didn't they understand? He never remembered them, just wisps of smoke in his mind.
But he still always woke with a smile, so wide and bright and full of cheer. It was a child's smile.
…When was it? When he stopped smiling?
Perhaps when he realized, if only instinctively, that in the end…
He was just as much an ant as all the rest.