Yagami Light was his mother's pride and joy, and there was no denying he was a bright, attractive boy, more than any mother could dare hope for. But sometimes he scared Sachiko.

It was nothing in particular she could put her finger on. It was a series of tiny, insignificant moments that she could not close her eyes to.

From the moment she held her newborn son and met his eyes for the first time she knew he was different, he was special, he was going to be something great. In the imperfect world she loved, he was going to shine like the sun; he was going to light the way for others.

She was content to tell anyone who asked why she named him Light using the kanji for 'moon'. It embodied everything her son would grow to be, she felt, she said with determination. There was prescience in her choice, the type that came from a faith that made the future easy to see.

The true reason (which was not the only true reason, just the only secret one) was that the first time his eyes had met hers she had not seen the cloudy unawareness of a typical newborn, but something bright and cold and ancient, staring at her from that smooth infant face.

"Kami," she had breathed, and let the nurses chuckle indulgently with the knowing understanding of women who had seen countless mothers react in what they believed was the same way.

She told herself in the cold daylight, watching her precious boy grow, that it had been overwrought nerves and the strain and shock and wonder of seeing her first child, but in the middle of the night with nothing to do but think she could stop pretending. Sometimes, even in the day, she stopped pretending. Sometimes she couldn't help thinking that her child was not her child at all, that some ancient being wore her little boy's body like a clay mask.

She had no idea why a kami would choose to take a mortal shape, let alone that of her boy – beautiful though he was, perfect though he was in her mother-eyes – and go through the indignity of being treated as a human baby, but sometimes, sometimes she could think of no other explanation. Every so often, briefly, he looked at her with eyes too old and too wise and knowing and all her carefully crafted denials would slip away like morning mist.

His first word was not mother, not yes or no or any of the simple syllable words she expected. His first proper word at six months old was 'Kira'. She doubted he knew she was aware of this. It had been the middle of the night and she had been heading to his room to watch over his crib and she did every night when he was asleep. She heard his babbling from where she stood just outside the door, heard the frustration and determination in it as he painstakingly and insistently forced his mouth and tongue into obeying him and she knew – even if the books told her it was normal – that it was no more the unaware attempts of a baby than her own words were. Over and over he struggled with syllables, struggled to shape the vowels and consonants, struggled to force coherence from his tongue until at last one of his string of unintelligible sounds ended in kira.

There was a long silence during which she tried to convince herself that what she had been listening to was perfectly normal (for a genius, precocious child – perfectly normal). Then his delighted laughter broke the silence and he repeated himself with triumph undisguised in his babyish tones. "Kira," he said, slowly, quickly, over and over until he tired of it and moved on to other words.

(If she had stayed long enough she might have heard his very first sentence – "Shut up Ryuk! No apple!")

Quite what was so necessary or so fascinating to him about making the word 'sparkle' she suspected she would never know, just one of the many things about her son that would forever be beyond her understanding.

She put away the memory of his diligent attempts to form words – or at least, carefully excised from her recollections everything that raised suspicions in her. When he babbled 'mama' one day soon after as she cleaned his face of softened peaches, her lack of delight even managed to surprise her. She cooed and clapped over him regardless, feeling oddly empty and cheated.

He was startlingly quick, once he began talking, to pick up new words and phrases; he spoke in full sentences long before Mrs Tanaka's boy began saying proper words at all, and Sachiko might have been proud if she weren't uneasy. Why she should be uneasy she wouldn't let herself know; her boy was very clever, that was all.

When he was old enough to sit upright by himself she held him in her lap every evening and read aloud to him, tracing his fingers along the characters as she spoke – from the very beginnings of her pregnancy, alight with hope and idealism she had planned to give her child every advantage she could think of.

He let her – let her – manipulate his tiny hands and followed the words with vague eyes. In any other child Sachiko might have labelled the look as obliviousness or lack of understanding, but in Light she could only call it boredom. Sometimes she had to stop in the middle of the book and tell herself that shaking him and begging for answers – begging to know why he would humour her in such a manner, insult her in such a way – was pointless. He wouldn't respond. Most of the time she was pretty sure she didn't really want to know.

Over and over there were moments when Light did or said something that Sachiko managed to convince herself was normal.

(Children had invisible friends, right? Toddlers had invisible friends, yes? Imaginary friends named Ryuk who wanted apples… shiny red apples…)

She was a mother for the first time, and she took pains to remain ignorant of the things that would force her to see Light as anything other than a very intelligent child.

It ended the morning she went downstairs to find him sitting in Soichiro's chair at the computer, tiny fingers slipping and tapping at the keys faster than she could, and she knew he was hindered by lack of reach and coordination. He had only recently gained the fine motor skills to hold objects between thumb and forefinger instead of in his fist. The faint green glow of the monitor made his face smooth and impenetrable in the pre-dawn light and there was nothing in him that was human; nothing that was hers at all. Little boxes and files popped up on the screen, codes dancing across them like butterflies in flight, and she turned away and went quietly upstairs.

He was two years and seven months old.

She had seen enough tiny, accumulative signs from her child (who was really only her child in that the body had formed within her womb) that the sight wasn't as startling or as disturbing as it should have been, but it still drove the breath out of her and she sat for a long, long time in the stillness of her son's room, willing herself not to weep.

Her child, her beautiful, perfect baby boy, and when she finally gave the situation the careful consideration it deserved, when the pain was no longer quite so raw, she wondered that she hadn't expected it. She had done nothing to deserve such good fortune in the form of her son, and she should have already known that a price would be asked that she couldn't pay.

(It just wasn't fair. She shouldn't be afraid of her own son.)

It was shortly after that incident that she brought up the possibility of another child with Soichiro. The pretence was over, though for Light's sake she would keep it up, just as he (she? it?) was careful to play the child for her.

When she became pregnant again a few months later, she prayed that her next child would be normal. A healthy, normal child, who would not look at her with sharp eyes, who wouldn't do un-babyish things behind her back. A child that wouldn't need to make deliberate mistakes with its speech, a child she wouldn't see judging its every action when she spoke to it, trying to imitate average behaviour.

("How is your friend Ryuk?" she remembered asking Light one morning, sitting in his high chair with all the imperiousness of a king. "Wouldn't he like something other than an apple?"

"No. Ryuk only like apples. He say they like alcohol for shinigami." He paused to consider her, and then confided seriously, "He's an addict."

"I… see…"

Any other child and she would have laughed. Any other child she would have responded in the same manner as Natsuko always did when she told her some of the things Light said, "…what a darling imagination your boy has, Sachiko!"

But… how many children Light's age spoke of shinigami? How many adults spoke of shinigami? Had she ever mentioned gods of any type in front of Light?

"He like red ones best." That, if Sachiko was not mistaken – and she wasn't – was an order.)

She expected questions like why are you getting fat, and how did the baby get inside and what was it doing there, but it seemed to suit Light – no, the thing that masqueraded as Light – to show honest disinterest in such matters. He would rest his sun-kissed head against her belly though, as it slowly grew rounder and rounder, listening to her heart and feeling the baby's movements beneath her skin and for the short duration of her pregnancy she nearly managed to convince herself she'd imagined everything.

Yet when he announced firmly that the baby would be a girl she didn't doubt him for a moment.

("Sayu," he said firmly. Soichiro wanted to name the baby Hoshiko if it was a girl, and Sachiko had agreed, more out of fear of what her last naming choice had brought her, but-

"Sayu," Light said.)

She continued to read to him, waiting for the moment he grew bored and gave her an out, and she was relieved, the day he finally snatched the book from her and declared with imperiousness that he would read. She'd hovered close by obligingly, but he'd traced the words without her help and deliberately mumbled several aloud, and in the end she'd turned away and gone into the kitchen. She didn't bother to lie and tell herself that she didn't hear him stop the moment she left the room.

She never attempted to bring up her suspicions with Soichiro. He was a busy man, he had an important job that kept him away far too much, and he didn't need further worry about his wife's mental state. He didn't need to know that she never left Sayu alone with Light, although Light was an attentive big brother who never showed any sign of jealousy or anger towards the new baby. (Light was, in fact, almost worryingly devoted. She wanted to ask sometimes what he saw in Sayu's future that he felt he had to make the most of her presence now.)

Soichiro didn't need to know that while he was gone and it was just herself and the children she made more noise than necessary travelling from room to room, to give Light time to hide or undo or simply destroy whatever it was he was doing out of her sight, so that she didn't have to face what she already knew.

He didn't need to know that she rarely spent time alone with Light any more, unnerved by his stillness and his smiles – his smiles were always a little too knowing, a little too self-aware, for all his advances in other areas of concealing himself.

No, it was best that Soichiro kept the illusion she had given up when she walked downstairs one morning and found Light typing at the computer – that their son was a prodigy, a genius. Nothing unnatural at all.

"Ryuk."

Hyuk hyuk.

"I'm bored."

"Oh good. Interesting things happen when you're bored."

"…and when you're bored, the world gets turned upside down."

"Hey, I never made you use the Death Note the way you did."

"…riiight. 'Give it to someone else if you don't want it.' 'Never seen a human use it like you before.' 'Going to kill anyone today?' 'Hey Light, what you gonna do now? Looks like he's outmanoeuvred you.' …you couldn't have been more obvious if you were Misa."

"Still didn't make you do anything. And I'm bored too Light. What's the plan?"

"What do you say… to a game of L?"

"Sounds like fun."

"I knew you'd agree with me."

Nakamura Takeshi was thirty-four when he met God.

He had been watching the noonday sun, filled with the mild ache that comes to the religious after too long exposed to human ugliness without any of its redeeming beauty, when he felt an alien gaze on his back. He turned around, and there he stood, eyes solemn and wise and mouth smiling slightly with the loving amusement of someone watching a friend make a fool of themselves but caring for them despite that.

He intended to ask where his mother was, if he was lost, but the child – tiny and ageless, dressed for shichi-go-san – had tilted his head, given a slow, self-aware smile that grabbed his heart and squeezed and said simply "Nakamura Takeshi," and in that moment he knew he was seeing God.

"My name is Kira," he said. "I have a proposition for you."

Kira. How oddly familiar that sounded.

"Where is your mother—" he wanted to say 'little boy' but the words stopped in his throat. No, impossible to treat God so disrespectfully, even if he clearly intended to be seen as a child.

"Mother is praying for my soul," he said wryly, his smile a bright flash of white teeth. "Pay attention now. You are thirty-four, unmarried. A forensics expert, you attended Tokyo Medical University and left with top scores. You are fluent in English and French, and an expert at self-defence. I am searching for an assistant of sorts. You will do me well."

Takeshi felt his mouth open, but couldn't understand why no words were coming out.

"I am… a detective." Kira tilted his head back and surveyed him with half-lidded eyes, and in the glow of the sun he was something else, the incongruous combination of the slender childish body with ancient eyes making him intensely beautiful and strangely terrifying. "Or, to be more precise, I will be. I need an assistant to help me and to act as my intermediary. I will provide all the equipment you need, and I can pay you very well. My one condition is that I am your first priority. You must be willing and able to help me at any time I require it, day and night. I am not an easy taskmaster, and I demand obedience above all. If you do not feel you can fulfil those requirements, kindly say so now and I will find someone else."

"I…"

"You have… five minutes to consider it," Kira said pleasantly. "My mother will realise I am not at her side soon, and I may have difficulties contacting you again." The wry smile he made at this pronouncement would seem to mark it as a considerable understatement.

"…I… yes…"

"Are you sure? Regardless of time constraints, this is not a decision to take lightly."

"Of course I am sure, Kira-sama." He said and bowed deeply, honoured and over-awed.

The boy – god, god – flinched a little, but nodded his acceptance. "Good," he said, "Then let us discuss this further. Meet me at this address in a week. There is much work to be done."

Takeshi stared after him long after his mother appeared and dragged him away, apologising for any inconvenience her son might have been. God didn't look back, but Takeshi knew, despite the complete and utter lack of any visible difference in the world around him, that everything had just changed.

He would never ask any questions about how Kira knew so much, or why he decided on Takeshi or how he knew he'd say yes, he would never ask why he did anything the way he did. The moment his name was spoken by that falsely childish mouth he realised he would spend the rest of his life in servitude and be grateful beyond measure.

L Lawliet, world's greatest detective (and, he decided as he meditatively licked his new lollipop, perhaps he should set up a new alias or two, or six, just in case) was intrigued. Not by his current case, a relatively mundane serial killer that he'd figured out three hours ago and was still debating on how best to bring in without completely breaking his ties with the police who hired him when they discovered it was one of their own. No, he was intrigued by the lack of cases from Japan.

He had requests from organisations all over the world (not on the scale that he one day would, he knew, but still an impressive amount) and over the past eight months requests for help with cases from Japan had at first slowed and then almost stopped completely.

He doubted the crime rate had suddenly dropped, and if he recalled correctly (which he did) the pattern mimicked something of his own appearance on the law enforcement scene. He had Watari bring up the files on his old cases just to be sure, and carefully refreshed his memory on the circumstances of his introduction into detective work. If he was correct in his suspicions, there was a new player in Japan who had already proved his bona fides on difficult cases and was rapidly gaining notice from the police force there. If he (or she, he reminded himself in the interests of equality) was as good as the sudden dearth of requests to L indicated, his reputation would eventually bring in offers from law enforcement outside Japan, until he was at a stage similar to L, able to pick and choose from unusual cases anywhere in the world. Interesting.

L wondered why he hadn't announced himself, as L and Watari had made sure to do on a grand scale that had brought a flood of unsolvable (for anyone else) cases from just about every country that possessed a police force in the world. Yes, a good – great, brilliant – detective would gather notice in time, whatever they did, but it was good to speed things along (not to mention it prevented boredom, which was vital as far as Watari was concerned because genius or no L was still nominally a child, capable of horrific things when bored).

He abandoned his (solved, completely, boringly solved) case for a moment, determined to find out more about this mysterious case-stealer from Japan.

Four hours later he was astonished to realise that all he'd managed to gain from his labour was a name. Impossible, and irritating; the records filed by police involved in his early jobs had contained more than that – usually about Watari, the means and reasons (read: excuses) for initiating or accepting contact, but still.

Yet he had nothing except a name.

Kira.

How… fascinating.