It was worse now, the icy void that ate away at the corners of her mind like acid. It hadn't seemed so bad, that week she spent with the woman who feared flowers. The emptiness inside the other had been comforting in that it meant that Sayu wasn't entirely alone in her own torment. It was strange, since the other woman had never acknowledged Sayu in the least. She hadn't thought it would have made a difference in the long run, but experiencing the faint companionship of the void-maddened woman for even the shortest amount of time made it even worse. She remembers vague dreams of a pale boy with blank, empty eyes, and wonders if he too has been consumed by the inexorable void.

She's home by herself often now; her mother spending much of her time at book clubs or some other such thing with the other housewives, and Light was always very involved in student government. He always had been ambitious, and took whatever chance he could to endear himself to the lesser beings. So she had plenty of time to herself, watching the specks of dust float through the halls of the empty house. Sometimes when her dreams became too much for her, following her like hounds into the waking world when she refused to sleep, she would enter Light's room, and sit. She liked how clean his room was, how obsessively organized and sharp and shiny everything was. It was so very him, how his all consuming need for control bled out from under his carefully constructed mask and made itself evident in his surroundings. There's not a single speck of dust in his room, and Sayu knows that Light himself is the one who cleans it every day. It's soothing in a way that it shouldn't be, this stark cleanliness and the razor sharp edges of Light's carefully shelved books. Sometimes she just lays there, on the floor of Light's room and soaks in the evidence of his existence. Sometimes she remembers dreams of Light with messy hair and a horribly broken mask, and then blood so very redredred. On those days she spends hours just sitting in Light's empty room, just reminding herself how very neat and clean and different her Light is from the terror of her dreams.


Sayu didn't want to be noticed. She always did her best to make herself as average and unremarkable as possible, just another face in the shifting mass of humanity, as forgotten as easily as the next face. She knows she isn't as good at pretending to be normal as Light is, but she's small and she's cute so any of her peculiarities are dismissed as the childish fancies of a young girl. Most people wouldn't look closely enough to identify her otherness, dismissing her as a possible threat solely on the basis of her gender and age. In that area she has an advantage over Light, who will always be viewed as a threat on some level no matter how polite or unthreatening he tried to portray himself. He displayed enough of his genius and natural charm to hide his own madness, a mask under a mask, but in doing so he was viewed as a potential threat. He was too attractive, too intelligent not to be considered one. Sayu knows that Light is dangerous, with a conviction rooted in knowledge half-remembered from another life. But she also knows that Light will never be capable of looking into someone's eyes and watching as the light slowly leave's them as blood drips from a throat he slit himself. Light is the type of person who needs a certain amount of justification behind his actions, even if it only makes sense in his own mind. Sayu is different. She knows that she is perfectly capable of killing, regardless of purpose or lack thereof. Her dreams only fuel this conviction.