Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note or any characters therein.
A/N: Inspired by a certain scene in volume…eh, 6 I think, when several references are made to Misa's sister. Enjoy.
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Brief Overview
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If you'd asked my mother-back when she was alive, obviously-she probably would've said that I'd gotten along perfectly well with my sister. It was what she told everyone. It was what she herself believed.
It was also, incidentally, a load of crap.
To be completely honest, there was in fact a brief period of time where my twin (I'm two minutes older, for the record) sister and I could actually stand to be in each other's presence. Still being honest, it was when we were both about four years old and didn't know how to hate for longer than a few seconds. After that, we just grew apart (I know it's cliché; bite me, it's true). Big time.
And hey, that worked fine for us. For almost ten golden years we could dislike each other, snap at each other, lunge at each other's throats without feeling guilty about anything. Hatred is so much easier to maintain when it's mutual.
Then we turned fourteen and suddenly Misa had this big turnaround, this epiphany that she wanted us to be "proper sisters" and love each other and tell each other everything. It sickened me, to be honest, and I made a conscious effort to shut the brat out until she came to her senses and decided we could fight again. I mean, come on-a decade of sisterly animosity and she expected me to just flip a switch and open up to her? Please.
She didn't quit trying, though. It got uncomfortable after a while, so I conceded a minor point and quit slamming the door in her face (a totally useless gesture, by the way, seeing as we shared a room). We managed to have civil conversations a few times a week. One big happy family; that was us!
Notice how I tacked 'civil' onto the beginning of 'conversations'. Well, I'm not trying to be funny; 'civil' was as good as it ever got with us. As we'd simultaneously hit our teens I'd really started to resent her. Excluding her fights with me, at thirteen Misa was what you would most likely call angelic. She was bubbly and polite and a real airhead, if you ask me, but she was the biggest social butterfly on the planet and everyone loved her.
On top of making me, the ever-shunted-aside eldest, pretty angry, the whole socialite thing kinda freaked me out. Misa had been a really shy kid, very quiet and reserved. I have no clue when the change occurred; I just know that she never changed back.
So the attitude was a pretty big part of why I loathed having anything to do with her. And yeah, fine, I guess jealousy helped out as well. Bluntly put, my sister was gorgeous. Shiny dark hair, big blue-green eyes (I swear Mom had an affair with some guy; there was no way Misa got those beautiful eyes from anyone in our family). And, well, we were fraternal twins. Get my drift?
Bottom line, I couldn't stand Misa. Which you undoubtedly got already. But things didn't get really bad until roughly a year after our newfound civility.
The first contributing factor to this was all the Goth stuff. It was only little things at first, like a Gothic poem printed out and taped to her wall and the occasional donning of fishnets. But it escalated into crazy short Lolita dresses (which she wore to church-let me repeat: to church), a suddenly sizeable collection of crucifix jewelry, and loads of black eyeliner.
To this day I'm not sure why she did it (maybe to contrast all the black?), but while the rest of the family was still trying to come to terms with cute little Misa becoming a member of the Addams Family, she went out and dyed her hair blonde. It looked great on her, of course, but we still went a little nuts when this sorta-familiar-but-I-can't-quite-place-her blonde beauty stepped into our home. I think it was all Mom and Dad could do not to go postal at that point.
The last straw for me was when she sat up straight at dinner one night and announced that she'd gotten a modeling contract. We were both fifteen at the time-barely-and the thought that she had actually landed a paying job was hard to compute. I quickly resented her for that as well. My parents were proud of her, naturally.
They never got to see her face in a magazine, though. They never even got to sit at the table and eat another family dinner. The evening after Misa's big announcement, I came home from school to see a mass of police cars surrounding our home. I spotted Misa being talked to by one of the cops, but I didn't move towards her. I couldn't move at all, actually.
It was five minutes before someone noticed me standing there, and another few before they realized who I was and saw fit to tell me (as gently as possible, which still felt like being shredded by multiple chain saws and then being bathed in salt) that my parents were dead. Murdered by some thieving bastard who had run off right after taking everything that he could carry.
Misa and I sat together in the backseat of the cop car as they drove us to wherever. We didn't speak or even so much as look at each other.
Three blurry years of living with an old half-deaf three-quarters blind grandma in the middle of freaking nowhere later, we were eighteen and more than ready to get the hell out. Misa started traveling with her precious modeling agency, now that she was of age and no longer needed other people's signatures or supervision. I moved to Kyoto and got a job working as a secretary.
We didn't speak for a long time after that. Misa did settle down at an apartment after less than a year but we didn't try to contact one another. I resisted the urge to do a Google search on Misa Amane countless times, although in time it became unnecessary, as her stupidly smiling face was plastered on every other magazine and advertisement after awhile.
I didn't keep tabs on the case against the burglar who'd killed our parents, either. The police had caught him, but with the glaring lack of evidence present it was obvious the case was going to be dropped eventually. I really didn't want to watch that unfold.
So I didn't know the lowlife had died until a week after the fact, when my sister called for the first time in, uh, forever solely to inform me of the fact. I didn't call her back; I just deleted the message and tried to go on with my life as if nothing had changed. Which it hadn't, really-the death of the burglar wasn't going to bring back Mom and Dad.
She called once more the week after, saying that she was going to Tokyo to meet Kira. That was it. I for one thought the whole Kira thing was a hoax, and chalked it up to just another insane venture my sister was undertaking.
I was bordering on twenty years old when Misa nudged her way back into my life again. I came home from the office one day to find a message on my answering machine from some detective or somebody who "wished to discuss the topic of Misa Amane" with me over drinks. For lack of anything better to do, I complied.
The guy was blond, foreign, and pretty hot. Which was about the last coherent thought I had that night. The jerk kept buying me drinks, and idiot-for-brains here, miss can't-hold-her-liquor-to-save-her-life, kept consuming them. All I remember was that he did ask about Misa and at one point I told him where she'd gone. Other than that, it's all a blank. I woke up the next morning with the mother of all hangovers and basically tried to forget the whole experience.
After that incident, I saw my sister three times.
The first was on a huge billboard advertising the Yotsuba company, an arch-rival of the company I worked for. I'll let you imagine my reaction when I looked up from a cup of coffee and saw Misa's humongous face beaming down at me.
The second time wasn't until years later, when I noticed her on a poster for this big upcoming movie. Somewhere along the line she'd made the transition from model to actress; talk show hosts mentioned how much she'd "grown up", but I scoffed. She looked exactly the same to me.
In between the second and third times, Misa called me again. We hadn't spoken in years at that point, so I was a little surprised when I picked up the phone and heard her voice on the other end of the line.
She was friendly and bubbly as always; to hear her you'd think that we'd always been close. So, possibly softened by years of no contact, I threw her a bone and played along. We ended up chatting for hours about everything, every stupid little thing. She told me she was married-to some hotshot genius detective or something-and somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered if she'd let me visit when she had a baby.
The talk didn't end until we were both practically falling asleep over the phone. She laughed and said goodnight; I replied in kind.
We hung up.
I went to bed grudgingly thinking that maybe I would call her this time. Same time next week, maybe.
That never happened, though. I got fired from my job with no warning, and suddenly all of my time had to go into finding a new one before rent time came up. Mainly because of this, I put off the phone call for almost a year.
When things finally settled down and I could afford to relax again, I resolved to call her within the week.
But that never happened, because the third and final time I saw my sister was three days after this resolution-in a morgue.
It was a suicide, they said after I came rushing to Tokyo. She'd jumped off of a bridge. Apparently her husband had died in January of last year, and she'd only been told of it a few days ago.
They waited a year to tell her that her husband was dead?! What the hell?!
I looked down at her pale face, beautiful regardless of everything. And then I turned tail and headed back to Kyoto.
Someone sent me the date and place, but I didn't go to the funeral. It would've been too much. She may have been the sister that I'd always been angry at, the sister I'd hated for years, but she was my sister nonetheless. And she was all I had. Her presence, however annoying, had been one constant throughout my life, after our parents died, after everything. No matter how far apart we were or how long we went without a word, I'd always known that she was out there somewhere. That she was still there, and that she did care for me.
That strange type of comfort was gone now.
My sister. Hyperactive, irritating, childish, loving, beautiful Misa. Always talking, always grabbing somebody for an impromptu hug, always smiling.
It seemed unreal to me that she would never breathe again.
Every once in a while I'll take a trip over to Tokyo again-when I've got the time, which isn't often-and visit her grave. It's a pretty morbid habit, but I feel some obligation to do it. Like it'll make up for being a crappy sister when she was alive.
Which it won't. She was no angel, but neither was I. And there's nothing I can do to change that. I acted like she was the spawn of Satan rather than my family.
Grave visits won't ever get rid of the guilt I feel from that. And neither will anything else.
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…Is this what she felt? Is this how Misa felt when she learned her husband was dead and gone? This crushing loneliness, the stark knowledge that you have absolutely no one left?
Well, if it is, then I understand why you picked suicide, sis. It's kinda nice to know that I can relate to you on some level.
Being all alone sucks something fierce.
Death…would actually be preferable.
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Owari
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A/N: Well. That was gleefully morbid. Uh…hope you enjoyed?