Detrimental 10

Onesmartcookie78

Summary: Even psycho teenagers with god-complexes deserve somebody. Too bad for Yagami Light that I ruined everything. Light/OC. Includes Beyond Birthday and plenty of strawberry jam! Psychological-thriller piece with mentions of mental disease, romance, and murder.

A/N: Whoops, I'm late. Sorry. Hopefully this makes up for it TT_TT

Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note, only my OCs. All references to abridged Death Note videos on YouTube is intentional, though they do not belong to me either.

"This is my last time she said

As she faded away

It's hard to imagine

But one day you'll end up like me

Then she said

If you want to get out alive

Whoa-oh run for your life"

– Three Days Grace, "Get Out Alive"

December 5, 2003

I don't know if L ever came on and taunted Light. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. He still learnt information from his plan, even if Light didn't kill Tailor, though I guess L would have broadcast the message the world round hoping for a murder that would never happen. I suppose that left me to fill in any holes created by my interference, but I didn't really feel like dealing with the detective right now. His arrogance was the last thing I needed after Light's, especially since L would probably taunt me for being "wrong".

When I got back to my room, Beyond was lounging casually on my bed, weight resting on the balls of his feet as he ate jam from the jar, as per usual. Unlike normal, however, he was flipping through one of my books, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. He must have just started, too, because he was only seven eighths of the way through, and still turning pages rapidly.

I waited until he'd finished, snagging my teacup off the table and taking a sip of the unholy, thick, red sludge that resided inside. The sugar level was nearly diabetes inducing, but I was much too lazy to get something else to drink. Beyond had added way too much strawberry jam in the absence of sugar.

Finally, Beyond shut the book with an audible snap, snatching the mug from me and ignoring my grimace as he gulped down the rest of it as though it wasn't quite possible that doing so would send him into a diabetic coma. "Good book," he commented. "The writing was perhaps targeted at a younger audience, but it had a nice plot."

"Yeah," I replied absently. "Beyond, do you have an eidetic memory?"

Beyond stuck his thumb in his mouth in a scarily L-like manner. "That depends. Do you?"

"Does it matter?" I asked, reaching for Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

"I could say the same," Beyond said despondently.

There were a few minutes of silence where I flipped absently through my book, filing the information away into my mental library while Beyond gazed at nothing in particular. In the absence of dialogue, rain could be heard pounding into the window pane relentlessly. It had started out a dreary day, as though in preparation for the events about to occur, and had steadily degenerated from there. I figured the constant poor weather in foreshadowing of the big events was due to the fact that it happened in the anime, and not in correlation with Japan's weather patterns. The rain we had been getting all week reminded me of England, but made me long for some degree of foreignness in the place of tedium.

"Beyond?" I wondered aloud, not glancing up from my book and not waiting for recognition before blundering forward: "Did you ever sleep when you were alive?"

Beyond was quiet for a few seconds and his thumb reentered his mouth. "Maybe five times since I was introduced to Whammy's and the concept of being L's successor." The words fell out bitterly as his pretension dropped a notch. "Why?"

"Does there have to be a reason?" I mused. "Curiosity is an excuse, I suppose, so I guess there is some degree of influence behind my question."

"Have you figured out what it is?" Beyond's thumb left his lip, but his eyes were blank.

I thought for a second. "You reminded me of a sad panda." I thought of L, briefly, and had to ask: "Beyond? Did you model your appearance off of L?"

Emotionless eyes shut down even further down, veering to the edge of what was considered human, and what could be counted as Shinigami. "Does it matter?" his voice was tight, almost unsure, and I feared that pushing further would make him break. I wasn't sure if that was a good or bad thing.

We fell into silence as I began reading again and Beyond brooded.

"I'm not 'brooding'." Beyond said immediately.

"Yes, you are."

More silence, filled with unanswered questions and ones that had remained unasked.

"Ellery. I want more tea."

This time, I didn't contest giving him his own mug. Sachiko and Sayu had gone out, and by now, Light was at cram school. It didn't matter.

Barely December 6, 2003

"There is no good and evil, only power and those too weak to seek it."

The sentence played through my head over and over. Hours after L had finished reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, I had gone through all of my mental notes on the book. That had been one of the quotes that would always remain ingrained in my head. "There is no good and evil"... maybe there was and maybe there wasn't, it all depended on perspective; reality is based on perception, on your id, your ego and your superego. Power, even though totally intangible and formed off of perception, would always exist, simply in accordance with society. Physical, financial, social... power was the ultimate form of intimidation and a guarantee for damn near everything. Power in the face of weakness...

And this concept applied to Death Note so perfectly, I wondered if it was part of the basis for the storyline. "The ends justify the means", "Absolute power corrupts absolutely", "There is no good and evil, only power and those too weak to seek it". All of those messages, in a neat little shoebox for all the readers to perceive.

"Ellery," Beyond said, typing furiously.

I swirled the tea in my cup contemplatively, marvelling at the weather once more. "What?" I asked, taking my eyes off my tea and turning to face Beyond in my desk chair. I had wheeled it over to the window, drawn my legs up to my chest and left Beyond to his own devices. Originally, I had been doing homework, but I was currently on break.

"I can't crack your security measures to get through to see L." Beyond didn't complain, but his impatience hinted that it was coming soon, especially if I failed to replace the jar of jam that he had finished.

I rolled my eyes. "That's the point. If you could crack them, I'd be worried, considering Matt is meant to be the computer genius." I half-closed my eyes, fingering the locket mum had given me so long ago and thinking about Kyle, about how much I missed him. About how he always used to say that you could put labels on good, but never evil, and good was what you made it out to be. Evil was just a byproduct of what you deemed "not good".

"Well, you're going to want to sign in," Beyond interrupted again, voice different, almost worried. "L's just called for another ICPO meeting involving all member countries." He briefly flipped the laptop around, showing me the screen containing delicate information catalogued by the ICPO member countries on the Kira case. He had hacked Interpol. "Things are deviating," Beyond determined methodically, lips cracking into a half-mad grin as he deliriously tapped at the keyboard once more. "I do believe you've caught L's attention, Ellery, and he's asking you for help."

Instantly, as though he could sense that something had gone wrong in his grand scheme and decided to bring his dog, Light popped up, Misa in tow. "What's happening?" Light growled as Misa hugged his arm possessively, glaring at me as though the fact that she perceived him as hers was the greatest concern currently.

"Things are changing, Yagami-san," I told him, easily erecting my mental Great Wall. "And you can't stop them."

Light's eyebrows raised marginally, though his tone settled on something a little less perturbed and more arrogant this time. "I am a god. I could stop anything, Ellery."

"Misa-Misa thinks that Light-kun and Misa shouldn't be visiting Ellery-san and Beyond-kun," Misa whined. Despite her high pitch and likeness to the wails of a dying cat, she did not manage to distract Beyond from his mission on the computer.

"I rather wish that you hadn't," I shrugged, blase. "In fact, you're the last person I want to see, Yagami-san."

Light smirked. "Well you can't do anything about it, and you can't change anything."

"Unless time is flux," Beyond pointed out from the computer. "And it must be."

"Why?" Light questioned suspiciously. "What changed? I was observing one of my favourite scenes" – must be the part where L dies – "when something different happened." L must live then. I can't think of any other scenes that Light would classify as 'favourite'.

Beyond opened his mouth to respond, unthinkingly, but Light cut him off before I could. "What have you done, Ellery?" his mouth fell open. "I can't hear the majority of your thoughts, and I can't –" he spun on Beyond, any superciliousness washed away as he realised the extent of what had happened in his absence. "YOU!" he snarled, spinning on Beyond. "But you were supposed to be on our side!"

Beyond shrugged. "I thought of something very interesting and reconsidered." The only consistency in the room was the sound of his fingers still working the keyboard.

Light's eyes had narrowed more dangerously than I'd expected them to, and his fingers had tightened so much, his knuckles were white. Misa, sensing that now was not a good time to play the good pet that didn't leave its owner, moved hurriedly away from the two. Light calmed down seconds later, expression neutralising as he ultimately came up with a plan.

"Well, whatever you've done, and whatever you are going to continue to do to assist Ellery," Light said almost diplomatically, "I will correct and redirect." And with that, he vanished. Honestly, I was expecting something a little more violent than a verbal slap on the wrist, but I suppose Light still figured he could manipulate me. And if my timeline was constantly changing, then this was just one alternate reality and–

"WHAT DID YOU DO!" Light reappeared, real fear in his eyes this time. Eyes that were amber with a touch of 'I-may-have-just-lost'. He had paled considerably, as though whatever had seen was truly terrifying, and he'd lost blood because of it. "WHAT HAVE YOU TWO DONE?!"

"Light-kun!" Misa jumped on him, knocking him to the ground. "What's wrong?!"

She was shoved away with more force than necessary, and I watched as she went through my wall. Sometimes the three of them felt so real, I forgot that they weren't exactly corporeal beings.

"Shouldn't you know?" Light snarled, face twisted savagely in a mix of anger and panic. His hand closed around my throat, lifting me up off the floor and slamming me into the wall. His other hand found my throat as he began to throttle me. "What did you do, Ellery!?"

I choked and spluttered. "F-fuck you!"

His hands tightened, and somewhere behind me, Beyond was still typing away. "WHAT DID YOU DO?!"

My vision started to blacken along the edges as my lungs were deprived of oxygen. Tears were leaking down my face, and I wanted to ask Beyond for help, but knew he would not. "I don't know! What happened? You were so sure that you could 'fix' things!" I coughed out when he loosened his grip enough for me to talk.

Light moved away, violence gone as he tore aggressively through his hair, hands shaking. "I can't access your past anymore. I can't 'fix' anything. I can't go back to do it! You closed off all the alternate realities!" he accused, waving his finger between Beyond and I.

"I would like to take a second to say that my involvement in the matter is completely impossible," Beyond piped up. "You, Misa and I cannot do anything this time around, Light, because we don't have true bodies. We can influence Ellery, and could originally take her over if necessary, but we were never, and will never, be able to do anything ourselves. Therefore, blame Ellery, not me."

Way to throw me under the bus, Beyond.

My pleasure, came his voice inside my head, vaguely amused.

Light, on the other hand, was not. "Something happened. I don't know what this thing that changed is yet, but I will find out."

"Maybe you can't go back because things are going the way whichever god who brought me here wanted them to," I speculated. "Things are finally turning out, so there's no need for revision."

"Ridiculous. I'm the god here," Light scoffed. "I–"

"'Am the God of the New World'," I drawled weakly, rubbing my throat. "Yeah. Sure. The closest you came to god-dom was being a demi-god, and you've acknowledged that other gods must exist before, so you you can't really be this conceited. But assuming it was any sort of 'god' that brought me here is a bit presumptuous. Maybe it was science from the future," I speculated. "But who knows. It doesn't matter. All that matters now is that things changed and everything's going to take a new direction."

"The only 'new direction' this world is going to take," Light mocked, "is one in which I am not martyred."

It was my turn to laugh. "'Martyred'? Is that what you think happened?" I wondered dazedly, vision hazy from oxygen deprivation and barely walking straight. "What happened was that Matsuda shot you in payback for all the wrong that you've done, and then Ryuuk put you down like a dog."

Light chuckled lightly. "Does it ever bother you, to know that you are so consistently wrong about everything?"

"Are you trying to tell me in some convoluted way that I don't know your life and can't tell you how to live it? Because I could argue that all day long."

"No, I'm trying to tell you that you're an idiot."

"You're the one who thinks he's a god," I snorted, crossing my arms.

"Oi, you two quit flirting!" Beyond roared, "We have a problem here!"

"WHAT IS IT?" Light and I both shouted, leaping apart from our close-range eye-dagger throwing.

"L is looking for Ellery right now," Beyond said more calmly. "And when the three of us are all here with Ellery, the moment becomes a temporal tipping point, her decision is crucial. Since L doesn't have the information he needs and Ellery is most likely going to supply it, all other universes in which the opposite decision has been made have been closed off. That's why you can't go into the past and change anything, Light; everything up until this point is now fixed, just like we couldn't change anything from before the plane crash, since we all helped Ellery, then, and she chose to let us."

My mouth dropped open. "How do you figure that?"

Beyond's eyebrows raised. "It's not exactly important now, now is it? We need to answer this, Ellery."

At the royal 'we', I cocked an eyebrow.

Beyond sighed. 'You need to deal with this, Ellery. If you deny L, you're going to open up alternate universes again. Light will be able to change your decision, if he wants to.'

'If I'm going to do this, then I need to get rid of Light.'

'This is your dream. Send him away.'

'I thought we said that this wasn't a dream?'

Beyond's ominous reply of "who knows" set me on edge. Hadn't we already decided that all of this was very real? I had spent days here. It was no longer possible for me to be dreaming, right? Still, I doubted the truth of that statement. Anything is possible, even if improbable.

I concentrated for a few precious seconds on the fact that I didn't want Misa and Light to be there, and got what I wanted easily enough. I had to wonder as to whether I was really here, or if this was all inside of my head. Why else would I have so much control over this? There was no reason. Even if I was here through the will of some unnamed deity, it wouldn't be possible for me to keep Light outside of my head with a little mental compartmentalising, or get rid of him through a simple thought. Then again, this whole universe defied science as I knew it; for Christ's sake, there were children killing people with a goddamned diary.

And that's all Light was right now; a child. His morals and his belief system were at the level of a preteen boy: he believed that two wrongs make a right; it's not about how you get there, it's about the end result; he painted a pretty little picture in black in white of the world and its people and their wrongdoings. But in the end, he was the one in the wrong. He planned to kill people for being sick and for being old when he eliminated the criminals. He planned to do what so many would undoubtedly consider evil. Sure, maybe he had the right idea in the beginning, or his morals were at least more intact, but when it came down to it, he wasn't a threat to all the criminals and them only, he was a threat to the world.

He went after law enforcement officers because they came after him. He was a scared child waiting to be caught, and he would be, eventually. I would make sure of it. I would help L at all costs. Or, at least, I would now. Who was to say what I would do in the future? I may be obstinate, but even I could recognise that, at the very least, my body was attracted to Light. And maybe my mind as well: as little as I agreed with his ideology, I couldn't help but admire the mind that had produced it.

And that was perhaps the worst part; the fact that my brain was willing to forgive him for the most awful things, because he was intelligent and attractive and like me. I could connect with him, because we were on the same intellectual level. It was rare to find that, with my eidetic memory, but he, L, Beyond and maybe Near were probably the only people that I would ever find who were like me. And that was frightening too, because I knew how smart Light was, and I knew what he would do in the future. With his brain, he could have done so much good for the world, but instead, he tried to use his mind for his own skewed sense of justice. Egged on by the support of the people, he had lost his humanity – and maybe he did ascend to god-dom at that point – and become a monster.

All of this, if it even makes sense to you, dear reader, is the reason that I absolutely had to keep Light from getting the Death Note again, at all costs. Once he lost his memories of it, the world would be a better place and he a better person. No potential down the drain for false allegations of god-dom. Just him with his brilliant mind, working for the world.

Maybe it was selfish of me to do this all for myself, which is sort of how it seems, let's be honest, but I didn't care. Saving Light equated to saving the world that this point, and that's all that mattered.

"Ellery. Ellery!" Beyond shouted, shoving the laptop in my face, like that would help me read whatever it was that he wanted me to see better. Though to be fair, I did zone out. "L is still looking for a response."

"Gimme," I said eloquently, wiggling my fingers until Beyond put the laptop in my awaiting hands. "What does L want, anyway?"

Beyond snorted and popped open a new jar of strawberry jam with a snap. I had to wonder as to how he constantly had one of those in his hands, considering I certainly hadn't bought any for him. "His plan to draw out Kira has failed. He's in an information slump. If I was in his position, I would contact the anonymous source that I had received relevant data from in the past and ask them if they know what's going on. Then again, I don't have the same childish need to do everything alone and right that L does... but then again, I'm right, aren't I? L's just contacted you for the very reason I cited."

At that, I had to break out into a fit of laughter. After I'd calmed down, I went over to Beyond, pet him on the head, called him a nice panda and logged onto the secure server to contact L again.

Beyond wore an expression befitting an abused puppy afterwards, "Why the hell would you do that?"

"Sometimes, Beyond, I forget that you're Backup, as well," I said quietly, not daring to meet his eyes. "I just forget that you're as smart if not smarter than L."

If he felt like preening at the compliment, Beyond didn't show it– though he did re-mess up his black tuft of hair.