Apathy
The Squabble Over The Sandpit
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His mother manages to wrangle a promise from Hariel to come back the next day, and so she does.
Despite her slight hesitancy at having such an obvious stranger in the house, his mother has become quite enamoured with the strange English girl her son has befriended, even to the point where she asks Hariel if she could have the recipe to make the pie the redhead had presented her with on the first day. Hariel had handed the recipe over without the slightest problem, and had since then proceeded up to his room once again.
Unlike yesterday, she hasn't spoken a word since they met up, and it isn't until he closes his bedroom door that she seems to consider talking.
It's half an hour later, when he's onto his third page of daily justice, that she voices her thoughts.
"I healed a dying boy today."
At that Light does pause, pushing back and away from the desk to get a better look at the young woman sprawled out on his bed.
Ryuk floated above her, and the dissimilarity is startling. Ryuk is the end, a Shinigami, a manifestation of all death and decay in the world.
In contrast, Hariel seems to be a beginning, a being of light, sparkling stardust from the four corners of the universe moulded into something that could only just pass off as human.
Neither are typically beautiful, but both are just as striking, as visually intriguing as the other.
One carries an object of death and disarray wherever he goes, and the other... Apparently heals dying children.
"A dying boy?" Light repeats, fingers threading together as curiosity wells up within his stomach.
He has seen, of course, a small sample of Hariel's powers. The hair that seems to hold its own version of physics, the appearance of money and pies as if they'd always been between her fingers, that disappearing act on the first night.
But there's a significant difference between these little tricks and healing a dying boy, truly healing him.
In a pair of jeans once again, Hariel's thin legs cross behind her back, head cradled in the nest her arms make as her gaze never wavers from his form.
"He got hit by a car, the man drove off without even a backwards glance, and his mother was still around the corner," she pauses, lifting her head from her arms to stare down at her pale, thin fingers, as if they hold the exact reasoning that must have passed through her mind, the thoughts that had spurred her into action.
"It seemed wrong to leave him there."
Was it possible that Hariel's reasoning was as simple as that?
Sitting back in the chair, Light considers what he would do with infinite power, with Hariel's power, were it his own.
Certainly he'd have given up the pretence of the perfect little student.
Would he travel around the world, stopping murders and other crimes? Would he make the world a better place?
Or would he be like Hariel? Without any challenges, without any obstacles and hurdles, would he flounder and stagnate?
Was her depression and apathy as a result of gaining those powers, or was that already there when she became all powerful? How had she drummed up the willpower to go over and heal a dying boy, exposing herself in the process?
Would Light have done that?
He seriously doubted he'd have been anywhere near the boy when he was hit. But would he be able to stand back and do nothing, even if it meant the boy dying, just to not expose himself to the world?
It unnerves him that he can't quite answer that question.
"Are you not planning on hiding your powers then?" He questions, tucking the Death Note into his draw and locking it, done for the day.
Hariel pursed her lips, brows puckering as her mind turns.
It's like witnessing a hurricane, watching Hariel think. There's so much swirling around in that mind, so much unknown to him, and she probably weighs pro and cons that would never even cross his mind. Their exceptionally different backgrounds mean she's probably seen more of the 'real world' than what he has, and while he's incredibly intelligent, Hariel has experience.
"I think I will," Hariel muses, and something like relief untangles the thick chain of dread that'd twisted up in Light's stomach, "otherwise people will come bother you to get at me." She says this as if it is the most distasteful thing she can think of, Ryuk watching the two of them talk in interest.
He knows the Shinigami isn't much for talking, for words, but he seems to appreciate this conversation.
Or, perhaps he too wishes to have a little context when it comes to the third being in this room.
Still, he's quite pleased to know he won't have to share Hariel with the rest of the world.
For Light's alter-ego -tentatively dubbed Kira by the world- was fashioning himself as a god. It is only rational that he surround himself with the very best.
And what could be better than the most intriguing, powerful person he knew?
"Thank you for taking that into consideration," Light muses, flashing the young woman a charming smile.
Her face crumples slightly, confusion blooming to life on her face.
Ryuk gives a choked chuckle, clearly well aware that Hariel was about to throw another curveball into the conversation. Anytime emotion flashed across her face the same thing was going to happen. Hariel was going to make a comment that would have Light sinking into another session of deep consideration.
"Are we friends, Light?" That, wasn't quite what he was expecting.
Hariel wasn't looking at him anymore, staring off into nothingness to watch the the explosions of distant stars. But he knew she was paying attention, waiting for his answer.
In all honesty, Light's never quite experienced friendship. He has his peers, people he can talk to, can work alongside. They eat with him at lunch, and they sit by him in class, but he wouldn't consider himself close to them.
He doesn't consider them friends.
He doesn't sit and talk about the universe with them, doesn't discuss the morality of what Kira is doing, he doesn't just sit in the same room as them and bask in the peace and contentment their presence generates.
But he does with Hariel.
"I suppose so," he murmurs, and how strange a thought it is, to be able to hear the word friend and instantly think of someone.
"I had two best friends once," Hariel confines, eyes settling on a distant supernova that escapes him.
Ryuk looks surprised by Hariel's confession, and Light wonders just what kind of people Hariel would ever consider friends.
"We fought a war, I got my power upgrade, they let the fame go to their heads." A war? And a power upgrade?
Was Hariel implying that she has always had these powers, that only recently they had grown to such extraordinary heights? There were more people like Hariel out there?
If so, he felt incredibly insignificant in the grand scale of things.
As if reading his mind -could she do that?- Hariel's lips twist up in a bitter parody of a smile and her eyes sharpen, though their focus still remains outside of his room.
"It's just me here, I made sure no one could follow, even if I didn't know that's what I was doing at the time."
Well then, the next question was what kind of person would let someone as thought provoking as Hariel escape their grasps? The only answe his mind is coming up with though, is an idiot.
"You know, when you're on one side of the coin, you don't know which way it's going to land. And whichever side it does land on, that's the right side. History is wrote by the victors; take that from someone who landed right side up."
She grins again, this time with the thick tang of heartbreak on her lips before finally she turns her attention back to the present. A twist of her fingers, and she's throwing an apple up to Ryuk, who lets out a delighted cackle at the sight.
"I am quite aware that history's wrote by the victors, you only need to look at the glory of the atomic bomb, the greatness of the British Empire and the romantic ideals of the Romans to know that. We never really get into the horror of all the people they killed, subjected, oppressed. Society changes and adapts to higher powers. It'll be the same when I win the coin toss, they'll come to accept me as normal, that my way is the right way."
Hariel makes a noise in the back of her throat, an acknowledgment of his words, though her own opinion doesn't reflect upon her face.
There's something freeing about Hariel's presence.
She's not something he can control. He highly doubts the Death Note could touch her, otherwise she wouldn't have given him her name and face so freely.
No, if she wanted to turn him in, nothing Light could do would stop her. But, she's happy to sit back and watch him, and while he can't count on her aid, he can count on her not hindering him. He'd have been turned in already, otherwise
To her, it's probably like watching two children squabble over the sandpit.
The results are either way inconsequential; regardless of who wins, something is going to get built. The only difference is what will be constructed in that sandbox.
No wonder she doesn't particularly care.
He just has to get her invested in him; like a parent would instantly believe the other child guilty and shuffle them away from the sandpit.
Nepotism at its finest.
He just needs to twist it to work in his favour, to get Hariel to favour him over her preferred indifference. And the friendship route seems to be working so far.
She's his friend, truly is, but he needs to get to the point where his friendship is more important than remaining her a spectator.
"What is going on in that funny little head of yours?"
Snapping back to the present, Light coils his hands tight into the armrests of his chair upon noticing just how close Hariel had gotten; her large green eyes were less than a foot away from his own, head tilted to a side.
Light had once done a study on eye colour for biology. And he knew eyes that green had to be the rarest genetic mutation in earth, because there should be flecks of yellow or speckles of brown in there.
But there isn't.
Just infinite shades of green, pine and emerald and lime, each as bright as the other.
"I'm thinking, and you are being distracting."
Ryuk snorts, cackling over his head and Hariel offers him a rueful simper, thankfully taking a step back out of his space, taking the overwhelming scents of the Galaxy with her.
"Planning more for the big game, huh, Light?"
Ryuk grins, dancing around Harry and after a second, she offers him another apple pulled from the cavity of the universe only she can access.
"Right, If that is all, I'm going to pop over to England, need anything?"
It takes a second to compute in his mind, the way she casually asks if he needs anything from a country on the other side of the world, as if it were as simple a chore as heading to the local corner shop.
Shaking off his bewilderment as Ryuk requests some English apples, Light runs through a quick list of those closest to him, and cross references them against upcoming birthdays, along with potential holidays.
"If it's not too much trouble, could you pick up some genuine, English chocolate? The expensive stuff? I'll pay you back."
"Don't worry about it," Hariel carefully says, waving her hand back and forth as if to dismiss the thought of her ever needing actual money.
Given the fact she seems capable of creating it from thin air, it is probably a hollow offer.
Still, his pride dictates he at least offer.
"When I get back, would you mind terribly helping me find a therapist? If I'm going to be around people again I should probably deal with the PTSD."
And just like that she was gone, a bomber-plane disappearing behind cloud cover the second after it's cargo was released.
Reeling from the very real possibility that Hariel was suffering from PTSD -and if she was, did her powers lash out in response to her panic? Such a terrifying thought- Light turns to Ryuk.
He's been putting it off for a while now, but really, he needs to know.
"Ryuk."
The Shinigami snaps to alertness, spine straight as he looks down at him.
"Yeah?"
"What exactly is Hariel?"
.
.
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The Master of Death -the last one there will ever be, according to Ryuk- returns three days later, laden down with English chocolates and all manners of apples.
Light has been bored without her, he realises.
Well, not bored, pre say, but certainly the intrigue and enjoyment has been suspiciously absent as of late. Only the methodological march to victory through Kira had remained, hidden beneath the shroud of his perfect student visage.
The three days Hariel has been in his life so far were the most engaging yet, even given the Death Note's presence.
Her very existence is something he's struggling to wrap his head around; the Death Note at least, came with rules, with a semblance of order.
Hariel is the wildcard in this game of chess, a thing that comes flying in from out of nowhere, pays no attention to the rules and quite frankly, shouldn't be involved in the game at all.
Yet, she has the potential to change everything anyway.
She is beyond his control, but she is also beyond L's control. And as long as things remain that way, Light can cope with that.
He doesn't even realise she's back in the country until there's a knock at his bedroom door, and he opens it to find her standing there.
"You're mum's lovely," Hariel states, flouncing in and dropping the large bag she carries. Chocolates and apples spill out from between the fabric's mouth, and Ryuk is upon them like a starved animal.
Something about her seems, freer than it did the last time they spoke. Not quite like the weight has been lifted from her shoulders, but certainly that there's less to it.
"She let me in and sent me upstairs and I didn't even have to bribe her with pie this time."
She still did though, he can see a few pastry crumbs on the sleeve of her faded jumper. It's another handmade one, in a handsome shade of diluted gold, and a matching 'H' in red branded across the front. It's a little smaller than the previous one, with more signs of wear and tear.
But it's clearly well looked after; Hariel obviously adores it.
"If you keep bringing my mother pie, you're going to have to roll her out of this house soon enough."
Hariel grins, and it's a nervous thing but it's honest. She really does seem happy to be back here.
She jumps up, and the air seems to just catch her, ever so calmly depositing her upon the mattress of his bed and she cracks open one of the chocolate boxes in response.
"Did I miss anything exciting?"
Light rolls his eyes, turning his attention back to the Death Note as Ryuk forcibly switches his attention from the apples to the girl.
"Not really. Just a lot of writing, we don't know what L's up to yet. But we do know that it's gonna be fun!"
Hariel frowns, and she comes to rest by his shoulders, looking down at the pages with a frown.
"Light, what kind of crimes lead to death?" She means by the notebook, of course. So few countries have the death penalty these days, but you can find the information out online.
"Murder, for one. Rape, for another." Rape is disgusting, a complete violation of the victim from a human that does not know how to deal with rejection.
There would be no rapists left by the time Light was done.
Only good, honest people.
As if reading his thoughts once again, Hariel leans against the edge of his desk, arms slouching against her body and fingers spilling out across her thighs.
"You can't turn everyone into a good person, Light, no matter how hard you try. Some people are just incapable of changing, but to survive, they'll craft a mask, put it on and dance to the tune. Just until the music stops, but they will dance."
She speaks from experience here, and he wonders who the performer was, who she knew that danced to the music but failed to keep up the act once the song was done and the lights were off.
"It's the same with you, Light. You need a fault in the sequence, a misstep, otherwise interested parties will conclude you're far too invested in the perfect performance. And they'll come looking. It's what weighed down my fellow coin face so that I could land right way up."
All this talk of coins is starting to get irritating, no matter how much sense Hariel makes with it.
"But I'm not perfect. I've fallen in with a foreigner, it's the talk of the classroom. That's teenaged curiosity and enthuses right there."
Hariel doesn't seem to understand how isolated Japan is, simply by its geography. When people come to this country, it's for the scenery, for the history, for the work. Very few actually bother to talk to the locals, and even less befriend them. And Hariel's oddities carry over into him, which is perfect.
It's the misleading flaw in the surface. Like looking for a new mirror, if there's the slightest crack in one, it'll be passed over, turned away in favour of an unbroken piece.
Which is exactly what he wants.
"Have you ever killed anybody, Hariel?"
Light has. Light has killed so many people that it keeps him up at night. He's been cleansing the world, purifying it from all the rotten contamination.
But, in doing so, he's also been infected. He sees the faces of those he's killed on the few occasions he can sleep; he's taken to using some of Sayu's concealer to hide the dark bags that now seem permanently etched into the tender skin beneath his eyes.
But, it's getting easier, or perhaps it's just getting easier to ignore.
Just the other day, he had watched on the news as six year old Aleksey Rovanoff had been reunited with his family in Russia. His kidnapper had been in the process of carting him off to an illegal trafficking ring within China, and had suffered a heart attack in the process.
The police had found a list of names within the truck, of all the associates he knew of, and were in the process of cracking that ring wide open.
The Death Note had influenced the trafficker to write all those names down, and now, Light had the chance to save hundreds of children by offing all those people.
When they called him a killer, they seemed to be overlooking all the lives he was saving with each body on the ground.
"I have."
Hariel's answer barely registers, his thoughts are spinning so fast, but when it does reach the centre of his brain, he snaps to attention to stare at the woman.
He can't quite picture her killing anyone, not in cold blood.
"Are you going to get rid of me too?" Hariel asks, deaddeaddead eyes drifting over to settle on the Death Note.
She's a murderer, there are three murderers in this room.
Ryuk does it to keep living, he needs to in order to survive.
Light does it to ride the world of the infection that weakens it.
And Hariel...
"Why?" He needs to know why.
Though Ryuk had already warned him he would fail to kill Hariel even with the Death Note, that even he as a Shinigami couldn't do it. That the woman was under the protection of a higher power.
He still needs to know her motive though.
"It was war. The head of the opposing fraction wanted to tear down the old regime and implant a new one, in which everyone who was not pure of blood ended up a second class citizen, if not outright sent off to die, simply for who their parents were. He'd already tried offing me once when I was an infant, there was a prophecy that is be the one to stop him, you see? And he kept trying and trying and trying."
Here, Hariel pauses, running a hand through her hair before she thinks better of it and tries scraping it back into a ponytail.
Light is still busy trying to imagine a war between people of Hariel's power, and the thought is terrifying. For as powerful as she is, he does not believe having so many attempts made in your life makes for a healthy psyche.
It really shouldn't be a surprise now, that she wants a therapist.
"And then he put me in a position where it was my life or his. Probably didn't think I'd manage to turn it back in him, but I did. And then I ran and lost almost all my emotions."
She looks down at him, from where she's half perched on the desk beside his chair, and her eyes flash with consideration.
"Don't lose touch with your emotions Light, don't try to become God because gods are too rigid, too set in their ways. Humans evolve and adjust; stay human."
He wants to know more, to understand how despite everything, she has yet to fall into the same cynical pit within which he has made himself home, only prompted by boredom.
But the jiggling of the door handle explodes through the mood like a strike of lightning and his train of thought is broken.
As he starts for the door, he catches Hariel magically shrinking the Death Note, pocketing it, and he grits his teeth as Ryuk speaks.
"Good idea, if any other human touches the note, they'll be able to see me."
It would certainly be nice to know these things before he's put in the situations where such information could be relevant.
"Oh, so that's why you locked the door! Hi Harry!"
Sayu bounces into the room, a booklet of homework clutched tight in her grip and waving at Hariel with her free hand. She had been quick to take up Hariel's nickname, given that it fell off of the tongue with a much greater ease than 'Hariel' itself.
The alien girl is the first of his 'friends' that Sayu has ever taken an interest in.
Then again, Hariel is also the first 'friend' he's ever bothered to bring home before, and certainly she's the first girl he's spoken to for more than one forced occasion, at least before his sister's eyes.
"Hello Sayu," Hariel greets his younger sister with obvious bemusement in her tone, clear quite confused over why this girl would ever be even remotely happy to see her.
"Were you two kissing?"
Ah, of course that's the conclusion Sayu would jump to.
Hariel looks as if she's take a hit to the cranium, blindsided, with wide eyes and lips parted in shock.
She gathers herself quickly though, pushing off and away from the desk to allow the two of them access to it.
"Unless you call deep theoretical discussions the kissing of two minds, then no."
Sayu grins over at Hariel, dropping into her seat and spreading out her homework, which seems notoriously blank of any and all effort.
"Come on, Light! I really need help!"
.
.
.
It's how he spends the next half hour, even though he could complete these equations in his sleep.
But Sayu needs it all explaining to her, because otherwise she'd never learn how to complete them herself. And he did not have time to do ever last piece of homework Sayu brought home.
He has much more important things to fill his time with now.
"Nee, Harry, is your hair natural? It's just, like, super bright."
Hariel lifts her hand to the mass of curls that form a riot of swirling red at the back of her head, patting the ponytail fondly.
"Yeah, it is. My mother had the same hair." He doubts that.
Oh, the shades might have been the same, but it is quite clear the intensity of Hariel's hair has been turned up about seven times too much.
Sayu pauses, as if trying to picture a woman that could ever stand in as Hariel's mother.
Light hasn't missed her wording though.
Her mother had the same hair.
Past tense.
Her mother is dead, and with how uncaringly she spoke of it, she has been dead for a while.
The doorbell rings in that moment, and Light straightens up, Sayu happily declaring that it could be none other than their father returning.
She races for the door, grinning wildly as she goes, and Light turns his attention to the suddenly awkward Hariel.
"I, I think I'm going to go. You haven't seen your dad in a while, and I-" she cuts off, grimacing and stars seem to flare in response to her frustration.
"I'll say I slipped you out the back," Light confirms, watching as Hariel's face lights up ever so slightly.
And just like that she's gone, no sound of flash or indication that she was otherwise there. Not even the snap of displaced air, though he can feel the slightest breeze as it rushes to fill the now open space.
"Tch, looks like Harry's got no idea what to do with family time." Ryuk cackles, and Light rapidly recalls what she had said that first day.
If there had been a Death Note years ago, would the murderer of her parents been a truck down?
Evidentially, the same man she has now admitted to killing, if only in self defence.
Hariel Potter is an orphan and a killer, and Light's head spins as he tries to figure out what to do with this information.
I dont don't know if I'll be pairing Light and Harry together; right now this is just a friendship thing. Which way Harry's going to swing on the Light v L pendulum, I'm not sure yet. If at all. We'll see.
Tsume
xxx