A/N: Another fic of mine that was inspired by TzviaAriella's This Is How I Disappear, but it's a bit too loosely related for me to warrant tagging them in here. It was inspired by Light being blindfolded for his death sentence and then the pages of the Death Note being clumped together… My brain makes weird connections. :p
Summary: Near preserves God.
.o
They had already made a complete replica of Mikami's notebook by that point, and Near had been curious as to whether or not the pages could actually regenerate themselves. When he dropped a piece of water on the second to last page and tore out the last page, he was surprised to see that a new page was now behind the page with the water. It really did regenerate by itself.
Near's hands found themselves at work. He could have used regular paper for the project that aided his mental process, but instead he used genuine paper from the Death Note. None that Mikami had written on; with blank slates with the incredible power to claim lives, he built a bust of his prime suspect.
At the time, he wasn't a proficient artist, but he'd found a side interest in Egypt, where death masks were made of papyrus in a type of paper mâché. In modern times, paper mâché projects were generally taught in elementary schools rather than something heralded as a mature activity to take part in, but Near was never someone who conformed to societal standards, nor did he see reason to change his childlike interests when they favoured his performance.
He wanted to make Yagami Light's death mask. How fitting it would be to craft his image out of the very weapon he used to kill. Most normal people might have balked at the idea of using evidence in some throwaway recreational activity. Near was pleased that no such normal person existed in his bubble.
He worked as he thought and as the case progressed. The cheeks, nose, lips, ears, and even hair were formed of this man as best Near could recreate them. From the jawline down to the slender neck to the thinly-muscled shoulders and collarbone. The only thing that was left was the boy's eyes.
Near traced the skin of his work, staring at the emptiness that remained left to be filled, waiting for the right pieces to do it. Normally, he finished his projects and destroyed them as soon as he honed in on what the solution was. He knew the solution already, but this… this was something he might have wished to keep. L didn't keep souvenirs, but if Near was going defeat the prey—or was it predator?—that was able to take down the world's three greatest detectives, he might have wished to keep a souvenir. Perhaps the head.
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When Yagami Light died in the stairwell, the remaining Death Notes were brought to Near's attention. He was now in the possession of the Death Note used directly by Kira. He flipped through it, looking at the thousands of names that were written neatly in lines, page by page. He removed each of these, using them to layer more onto the shoulders of the bust. What was once a blank, featureless chest now contained the death sentences of his victims, weighing on his shoulders and spiraling up his neck. He had specific pages in mind to use to fill in the holes that were to be his trophy's eyes.
The very first page, which was the start of his descent into finding Kira within himself. Then the pages containing Lind L. Tailor, which was important because that was the first time Kira had made contact with L inadvertently. Then Raye Penber and the FBI agents; they were tasked to investigate families for any hints of Kira, and thus became pawns in Kira's game. Naomi Misora, who had worked with L in the past. Higuchi, Mello, anyone who, in Near's mind of connections, had any importance. The eyes of the human turned God were the most important.
He flipped through the notebook that had once belonged to the shinigami Rem. It was less populated with names, and in languages he could not read nor did he think existed in this modern era. Yet it was easy to distinguish the names of Watari and L, written hastily in the book.
He carefully removed these pages, sealing them in glass and hiding them within the paper mâché bust of Light Yagami. He had taken down people he'd known and respected, and thus evidence of it must be preserved.
He had never written on these pages himself before.
He assumed that if someone was already dead, writing their name in the Death Note would not have any consequence.
The Death Notes were burned. It was necessary and expected of him.
The ashes, which he collected, he mixed with a few other ingredients to make a black sludge with a semi-aqueous consistency. A paintbrush with the finest hairs from sable dipped into it, and withdrew in a perfect tip. Strokes were placed carefully onto the chest of the bust, covering some of the names of Kira's victims, but they were inconsequential. When a genocide occurs, the names of the average become lost, and the victim's identity becomes a number, a number for statistics. Kira's victims were just statistics.
The kanji 夜神月, Kira's true name, painted with the ashes of a god's otherworldly weapon upon that chest, so that no one who came across this bust would ever forget who this was. Kira would become just another name in history books, and perhaps as society evolved in ebbs and flows, eventually scrubbed from history as though it never happened, for history is doomed to repeat itself. He would never forget this face.
He idly wished that he could have had the remains of Kira's actual body, but there were several reasons why he ended up not doing this, despite preserving what was considered a weapon of mass destruction by building this bust out of said weapon. Thankfully, it would never reach the hands of anyone foreign to Wammy's House.
He sat back, satisfied, staring at his work. His trophy of a man-made-god, of material that only a god should own. Maybe this was his way of coping with the loss of people who held a raised position in his mind, and that the excuse of continuing this project after Yagami Light died was just that—an excuse.
The Kira case was now closed.