Holding the Universe Together
Fandom: Death Note/Doctor Who
Characters: Misa Amane, the Doctor (guest appearances by Jack Harkness and Light Yagami)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "Four days after Light Yagami's death, a blue police box appears in the courtyard of the Teito Hotel." Misa Amane, aboard the TARDIS.
• • • •
Holding the Universe Together
Misa Amane, aboard the TARDIS.
"She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together." ~ JD Salinger
Four days after Light Yagami's death, a blue police box appears in the courtyard of the Teito Hotel. Misa notices it from the rooftop patio. She has dragged one of the hotel's plastic desk chairs to the building's edge, and spends long hours staring down unto the streets below. She squints, her eyes dry from the cold, but ignores the odd new structure by the poolside.
The pangs in her side have become deep and steady. She sleeps late and drinks wine with the small lunches the bellhop brings her, unbidden. Some days, he will linger in her room and watch her stare at a cell phone, resting exactly where she'd dropped it following Matsuda's call. She still feels as though someone has snuck up from behind and struck her on the back of the head.
Misa's days are long and purposeless. She leaves the TV off and what news she hears of Kira, she hears from the gossip of the cleaning ladies in the hallway. She cries occasionally, but only in brief and unrelated moments, clamping both hands over her mouth. For the most part, her grief is quiet, accompanied by neither words nor memories. She does Light's laundry, and dusts the picture of his smiling sister, and does her best not to think of him at all.
She spends most of her time on the hotel's roof, watching clouds stretch across the skyline. The guests change age and nationality, but the police box remains. At the end of the third day of it's sojourn by the poolside, Misa watches a man in a brown suit run into it as if being chased, slamming the door behind him. She waits for him to reemerge, tapping her black fingernails against the railing, but an hour comes and goes and the door never opens.
Eventually, she rides the elevator down to the hotel's lobby, maneuvering through a group of German tourists with complicated names bobbing above their heads. Misa pushes the doors to the courtyard open with too much effort, feeling weak from the lack of the food and the now-perpetual hangover. Purple curlicues of steam rise from the pool, but it is late January and the deck chairs are empty.
The police box stands alone and unnoticed.
Misa approaches it without being entirely sure why. She's been watching the box for several days now, but has never seen it from this angle. There is a white sign on the door, covered in English writing that she does not understand aside from the words FREE and OPEN.
The door is locked. She lifts her fist to knock and then hesitates, at once remembering that Light would scold her for indulging her curiosity and also that he can no longer do so. Misa nearly turns then and retreats back to her room, where the world is just as nonsensical, but at least in a familiar way.
But she doesn't.
She taps her knuckles on the wooden door.
Nothing happens.
Misa waits for several minutes in the courtyard, rubbing her arms against the cold, watching crows gather on the hotel balconies. She feels vaguely disappointed, and punishes her own stupidity by thinking of Light and his vicious smile, laughing at her from the darkness.
• • • •
Misa meets the man in the blue box the next evening, around the same time she notices that an enormous hole has opened in the sky like a bullet wound.
She spends most of the day in her room, doing her makeup. She rims her eyes in kohl and paints her lips black with a fine-haired brush. She pulls her hair into high pigtails that tug uncomfortably at the skin over her temples.
Her corset pinches too tightly on her climb up the emergency stairwell. By the time she reaches the rooftop, she is out of breath and there is a deep cramp in her abdominal muscles. The man is already there when she arrives, pointing a short silver rod into the western sky. It emits a high-pitched whir that makes Misa wince.
He turns briefly when the door shuts. Misa can see that he is relatively young, Caucasian, and has hair that seems to defy gravity in unexpected ways. Misa looks up at the name suspended in red light above his head. BAD WOLF, she reads. He blinks twice at her and then turns his head back to the sky.
"Excuse me," she says, tired of being ignored.
For a moment, the man's device silences and she hears him mutter, "No, no, no, no."
"Excuse me," she tries again, "But why is there a hole in the sky?"
It is a valid question. The hole is framed by a low cluster of violet clouds. Earlier today, the bellhop had warned her of foul weather, but she had considered this oddly appropriate. Misa has been melodramatic her entire life, and sees no reason why she should have to stop now.
The man turns suddenly and runs, pausing to grab Misa's elbow as he passes. "You can see that? Well, that's interesting. Better come with me. I suggest we go now."
It takes Misa a moment to process this, because her mind is busy dealing with the fact that the sky has been suddenly filled by flares of orange light.
"Come on," the man says again, and this time Misa does, lifting her skirt to chase after him as panicked voices rise from the streets below.
• • • •
The orange lights turn out to be Drornidian ships, although Misa will not know it until seven months later, while she is idly painting her nails in the TARDIS's library with a semi-circle of books around her.
For now, she chases after the stranger and shouts, "Wait, wait!" struggling to maintain balance on her platform shoes. They tumble down the stairwell, the rattle of Misa's skeleton earrings echoing through the yellow halls.
"What was that?" she says, lightheaded, when they finally stop to catch a breathe. Misa has been loved by a shinigami, has committed murder with a notebook, and she has watched the god of the new world straightening his tie in their bedroom mirror. She is not entirely surprised that the sky is on fire, but she would feel more comfortable with the situation if she knew what was going on.
"They're aliens. Want to destroy the world. Long story. Better keep running," the man says.
"Wait! The blue box is yours," Misa says, and he finally makes eye contact, looking slightly taken aback. Misa is used to men staring at her mouth and her slender, wing-like collarbones. She rolls her eyes.
The man opens his mouth, but his answer is interrupted by a series of resounding thumps from above them.
Misa decides it is probably a good time to start running again.
By the time they reach the bottom floor, the courtyard of the Teito is swathed in orange light. There is a low-frequency vibration in the air that Misa can feel in the metal fillings in her molars. Around her, the hotel's occupants have emptied into the sidewalk, filming the sky with their cellphones, mouths agape. They look like refugees, barefoot, wearing damp bathrobes.
"What is it?" Misa yells, pressing her palms over her ears.
"The end of the world," says the stranger, gleefully.
• • • •
The Doctor saves them all, of course, like he always does. Misa spends most of the evening chasing after him. At first, in platforms, and then in a pair of sneakers she steals from the window of a department store once the looting begins. Twice, she charms their way behind police barricades, and by the night's end, the Doctor defeats the Drornidians with a coffee grinder, a book light, and what he calls a 'sonic screwdriver'.
They end their night on another rooftop, across town, watching the taillights of a Drornidian mothership fade into the atmosphere. Misa's skirt is torn to the knee and her ribs hurt from running from hostile interplanetary life forms in a corset.
"And now to deal with you," the Doctor says, peering at Misa over the rim of his glasses. It is an ominous statement, but Misa is not afraid. She has taken naps beneath the watchful eyes of a death god, shared a fork with the world's greatest detective, and just ten minutes ago, she had knocked a seven-armed alien unconscious with a flower vase.
"Are you going to kill me?" she asks. There is dried blood at the corner of her mouth and she can taste it mixed with the astringent flavor of her lipstick.
"Kill you? What? No, I can think of something much better than that. Come with me."
Misa does not immediately follow him. Tokyo has been blacked out for two hours, and she has never experienced this sort of primitive darkness. Her thoughts loop and loop in panicked circles. She looks up, feeling helpless and enraged, because the universe has just revealed another of its awful secrets to her and she still hasn't quite gotten over the last one.
"Well, come on," the Doctor says.
She does.
They return to the Teito on foot, twice having to climb over the wreckage of a bus, tipped and blocking an intersection. Misa stares for too long at the garden of cooling metal and the pale white of an arm, crushed beneath a tire.
"Don't look," the Doctor tells her, which is the perfect excuse to turn her face into the shadows and hide her pleased smile.
The courtyard of the hotel is empty, save for a stray dog barking at an empty deck chair. A light rain has picked up, and Misa can feel her hair crimping. The Doctor points to the blue box, but there really is no way she could have missed it. It is bright and glowing and stoic, like the statue of a god.
"You can see the hole in the sky," the Doctor says. "The funny thing is, there is no way you should be able to."
The Drornidians are gone, but the hole remains, large and obvious like a tear in black fabric.
"I see a lot of things I'm not supposed to," Misa says, because she's tired, and she will probably be dead before tomorrow, and it just doesn't matter anymore.
"Like what?" the Doctor asks.
"Bad Wolf," Misa tells him.
The Doctor frowns.
"Come with me."
• • • •
Misa pretends to be unimpressed by the TARDIS. She diverts her eyes, forcing herself not to stare at the vaulted brass ceiling or the tapered jade jewel at its center. "Oh," she says, spiraling a pigtail around her index finger. Her sneakers have left a long trail of ash and mud on the floor behind her.
"Oh?" the Doctor says, disappointed. He taps his fingers along the esoteric lights of the control panel. During her long imprisonment in Ryuzaki's Tokyo skyscraper, she had read every science fiction novel stuffed into her room's narrow shelves. She knows this is a space ship. Her heart is beating an arrhythmic patter against the suicide note in her bra.
"What's your name?" the Doctor asks.
"Misa Yagami," she says. She's pretty sure the Doctor does not have a death note, but Light had taught her to be careful.
"Well, Misa Yagami, you are an absolute statistical impossibility. And I would like to find out why."
He does not ask Misa about death notes or Kira or shinigami eyes, but he does take her to 18th century China, and the deep ocean city of New New York, and then a planet whose fat domes remind Misa of Byzantine Europe.
Everywhere, they are watched by a gaping black hole in the sky above them.
• • • •
"Allons-y!"
• • • •
The TARDIS builds Misa a bedroom in black lace, lit by flickering crystal lights that look like church candles. She spends hours splayed across her four-poster bed, reading books she pulls from the TARDIS's massive library. The wardrobe Misa finds empty, save for a pair of used jeans a size too big and a union jack t-shirt that she happily exchanges for her corset on her second day aboard the ship.
On the planet of Abydos, Misa saves the life of an infant princess, foiling an assassination attempt by the head of a rival family. She helps the Doctor avert the extinction of an ancient invertebrate race on the planet Arden, and her name becomes synonymous for 'liberator' in their language for the next ten thousand years.
The holes follow them across the universe. Misa begins to take comfort in their presence, greeting them like a familiar landmark in each strange new world.
They rescue Lewis Carol from a parallel universe where flowers speak in tired voices, and after, Misa and the Doctor spend three days in Victorian London, arguing about art in dim teahouses and listening to brass bands in the parkland. Misa buys herself a funeral gown, and the Doctor eyes her warily as she waltzes across the floor of the control room humming My Melancholy Baby.
They visit The Library in the early 50th century, and Misa manages to sneak away while the Doctor whispers apologies to a courtesy node bearing the face of a woman with red hair. She searches the term 'Kira' in an index computer, and eventually finds a single mention in a book of early 21st century Earth history.
Misa thinks of Light, dying on the floor of a warehouse in Tokyo, and shoves the volume back unto the shelf. It takes a moment for her to compose herself, dabbing at her eyeliner with a scarf.
"What's wrong?" the Doctor asks her, when he finally catches up, his glasses askew.
"I was just thinking about — time," she says, and the Doctor nods in understanding and drags her back to the TARDIS, where time is meaningless.
• • • •
Misa learns that humans never stop acting stupid and cruel. There are times when she aches for a death note, aware of the irony in her being here and not Light, who could do so much with the gift she has been given. But if there is anything the Doctor teaches her, it is that the universe is immense and unchangeable. Gods rise and fall and are all eventually forgotten.
• • • •
On the planet Kantra, they meet a man who greets the Doctor like both an old enemy and an old friend.
Misa and the Doctor arrive at the tail end of a war, and spend two weeks tending to soldiers' wounds at the edges of vast battlefields. Captain Harkness paces among the bodies of his men, looking lost.
The name floating above his head does not match the one he introduces himself to her with, but Misa says nothing. If anything, she's learned that the universe keeps its fair share of secrets and not all of them are meant to be spoken of.
On the day Misa fails to save a woman she'd been caring after, Captain Harkness drapes his overcoat unto her shoulders. She sags beneath the weight of it, taking comfort in feeling small. He loosens her ponytail, and massages the muscles at the base of her skull, and stares at her in a way that Light never once had. When he leans into to kiss her jawline, Misa does not draw back. The tall, black grass of Kantra sways around them like water.
The Doctor finds them before it goes any farther, and drags her off to another place and time. That night, Misa cries in her four-poster bed, thinking of Light and the war he had started, so so far away.
• • • •
Ryuk catches up to her on a space station circling the moon of Flidor, 5050 years before the day he kills Light Yagami. Misa is cross-legged on the floor of the station's hospital ward, clutching the plasma gun she has just used to kill the Dalek whose shell is shattered around her. She is almost sure there are pieces of tentacle in her hair.
She had been faster than the Dalek, but not by much. Her heart is beating in odd palpitations, but her mind only registers numb shock.
"Oh hey, Misa," Ryuk says, stepping over one of the Dalek's twitching appendages. "How's it going?"
"Hey," she says and then gives a ragged laugh, realizing that she's about to die after all. She feels dizzy with the cosmic absurdity of it. Misa often remembers that her lifespan has been halved twice, but the thought normally fills her with only quiet acceptance.
Ryuk appears delighted by the blinking blue lights on the nanogene chamber. He presses a button at random and the glass fills with golden light. Somewhere, an alarm is going off. Misa closes her eyes and waits for her heart to seize.
When it doesn't, she looks up. Ryuk is grinning at her.
"We've been watching you. You're even better than Light! He never had a time machine."
It takes Misa a moment to realize that by 'we', he means the shinigami, gathered in the rotting world Rem had often spoken about. Back then, Misa had not known about things like the multiverse, and psychic lifeforms, and wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. Still, she feels oddly flattered. She supposes the admiration of murderous, trans-dimensional beings is better than none at all.
Misa hears something solid fall to the floor, and knows immediately that it is Light's death note.
"He would have wanted you to have it," Ryuk says, which she knows is a lie. Ryuk is just bored and Ryuk wants to see what a Kira would do with the entire universe, spread out before her like a sacrifice. He laughs and laughs, then lifts his hands defensively when Misa points her plasma gun at him, even though they both know it would do nothing.
"Hey, I get the picture, okay?" he says, and disappears to wherever shinigami disappear to, leaving the death note behind. Misa exhales after too long, her brain full of static tingle, and lifts a second weapon from the dead Dalek. It is a de-mat gun, powerful and small enough to be tucked into the pocket of her coat.
Misa takes a detour to the ship's nuclear core reactor and tosses the death note in before going to free the Doctor from his cell on the third floor. Light is dead and maybe it is better like this — the two Kiras separated and locked in their respective corners of space and time.
• • • •
Shinigami, she realizes suddenly, and looks up at the round puncture in the sky above them. They have always been watching.
Misa and the Doctor have been taking a holiday on the mostly-ocean planet of Granados. She is sunburned from skinny-dipping beneath the pastel orange sky while the Doctor reads on a lounge chair, eyes respectfully averted. Sometimes they tell each other stories of their lives before meeting. The Doctor tells her about divergent timelines, an enormous face in a jar that speaks absolute wisdom, and a woman around whom two entire universes had been created. In rare moments, he talks about a girl named Rose, and Misa can see that he loved her more than septillion stars surrounding them.
Misa talks about music and modeling and losing her parents, and occasionally Light, carefully omitting any reference to Kira or shinigami. The Doctor does not ask Misa about him, and she does not ask about Rose. They share in the silent companionship of grief.
She spends long hours alone at the silk markets in the planet's sole city, buying scarves and shell beads that have been carved into the shape of human skulls. Their days are long and idyll, and Misa feels resentful of the fact that remaining interesting is probably the only thing keeping her alive. She could spend eternity here, with the dark-skinned race of humanoids native to Granados's small islands.
The Doctor no longer seems adamant about chasing the mystery of the holes. Misa wonders if he put it together before she did. Last week, she'd been feigning sleep on her favorite armchair in the TARDIS's library and felt the Doctor brush his index finger across her wrist and whisper, "It's you, isn't it?"
She'd been too afraid to confront him about what he'd meant, and it's too late to do so now.
"Where do you want to go next?" he asks, over a dinner of sort-of-fish and savory fruit with opalescent skins. Misa eats greedily, licking oil off of her fingertips. It has been sometime since she's bothered dieting, and she likes the new weight in her breasts and thighs. Sometimes in her bedroom, she will run her hands over her entire body, memorizing every small lump and scar, pushing her fingers into her stray bruises.
"I don't know," Misa says, watching a flying reptile circle in the updraft. "Someplace where the world isn't ending."
The Doctor regards her sadly.
• • • •
"You have to promise me something," the Doctor says, out of context. The TARDIS is circling the onyx-black planet of Zure, but he and Misa are in the music room, listening to Billie Holiday on the Doctor's phonograph.
"Huh?" she says, without looking up. She is reading a history of the Slitheens, and drinking a flute of Laurent-Perrier champagne they'd picked up in 18th century France. Misa does not want to hear whatever the Doctor has to say next, because she has suddenly realized that this may be single happiest instant of her life. The Doctor has a special talent for ruining moments like this.
Please don't, she thinks, please just let me have this.
But the Doctor does not take instruction well.
"I need you to promise me that whatever has happened to you, you will not try to change it. We've been through so much. You know there is nothing we can do to alter our own timelines, no matter how much we regret them."
Misa smiles and sips at her champagne, and kicks her heels off unto the TARDIS's gold floors so she can gather her limbs into her armchair. She thinks of the de-mat gun hidden away in the drawer of her nightstand.
"As usual, I have no idea what you're talking about," she lies.
• • • •
Misa notices that the holes in the sky are shrinking. It is simultaneous to the realization that she may not have much life left. It happens while she is wearing a pair of frayed khakis and Rose Tyler's old union jack t-shirt, and she crosses her fingers, hoping she is not about to die in such an embarrassing outfit.
They ricochet from planet to planet, hardly stopping long enough for Misa to learn their names. The Doctor takes her to the golden deserts of the Boeshane Peninsula, to the Lost Moon of Poosh, to the Singing Towers of Darillium, where they listen to the hum of radiation left over from the big bang. The Doctor asks her to dance, and they spin and spin. The song of the universe reminds Misa of Light's voice, and Rem's, and Captain Jack's. She tries to remember that it is better to be a pawn in this colossal game, than to not be on the board at all.
"Where next?" the Doctor asks, his arm still cradling her waist.
"Earth," Misa tells him, and he does not have to ask when or why. The Doctor's expression turns solemn, but he lights the console and begins to flip switches and turn levers, while Misa pets the walls of the TARDIS fondly. Together, the three of them vanish into the time vortex.
• • • •
It has been a year and a half since Misa has been in Japan, and two (or many thousand?) since it was in her own time. It is late spring. When Misa opens the TARDIS's door a swirl of cherry blossom petals tumble in, settling by her slippers. She steps from the TARDIS into the pedestrian traffic in Ueno Park, but the Doctor does not follow her.
"Have to recalibrate her," he says. "I'll stay behind. You go. Have fun. Don't get into too much trouble."
She had half-expected this. For a long moment, she waits alone in the crush of people on the park path, watching paper lanterns swing from low branches. The TARDIS stands in stark contrast to the pink and white blossoms surrounding it.
Misa walks to the neighborhood's department store, staring at the radiant high rises like a foreigner. It is 2002. No one in Japan yet knows that Kira is slumbering quietly among them. Misa is not as famous as she will be, and no one would recognize her anyway — hair brassy, wearing jeans and an olive green jacket that she had once fought a war in.
Out of curiosity, Misa finds a magazine rack and sees her own face on the cover of Eighteen. She thinks of all the things that have not yet happened to that person and, for a moment, begins to doubt that she can actually do this.
She buys a black wig and a pair of oversized sunglasses, and the cashier does not notice that she is paying with bills dated eight years into the future. By three o'clock, she looks even less like herself, riding a crosstown bus with her mouth carved into an anti-social frown. She occasionally brushes her fingers against the outline of the small de-mat gun in her pocket, feeling it tremble like a living thing.
She checks her watch when she gets off the bus at Shinagawa. Light Yagami will be walking the fourteen blocks to his cram school across the neighborhood. Her legs seem to work autonomously, carrying her across the asphalt, and Misa recognizes Light before really seeing him.
He is turned away from her, walking alone in his beige uniform, a backpack slouched over one shoulder.
She nearly turns away then, sets off running, back towards the TARDIS and the Doctor and the browning cherry blossoms in Ueno Park. Back to Kantra, and Arden, and Abydos, and the abysmal silence of the time vortex.
But she doesn't.
"Hey," she calls. It would be easier to do this with Light's back turned, but she wants to see his face again.
Light turns. He is younger than Misa has ever seen him, and she nearly steps back when their eyes meet, overwhelmed by the familiar shade of brown. Her fingers are clenched around the de-mat gun, but her hand is twitching. She looks up involuntarily, sees the hole through which the shinigami watch her every move, and wonders if Ryuk will kill her once he realizes what she is about to do to his plaything.
"Hey," Light says, "Do I know you?"
He looks nonplussed and slightly bored, even though Misa's wig is askew and she is probably shaking visibly. Just do it, Misa thinks, doitdoitdoit. One shot for Light, one shot for her, and Kira will be erased from the universe forever.
"N-no. You looked like someone I used to know."
"Okay," Light says, glancing around him. "I'll be one my way, then."
He continues down the sidewalk, and Misa follows after him.
"Yes?" he asks, once they travel half a block together. "I'm sorry, but this is really strange. Are you sure we don't know each other?"
"No, it's just like I said. You remind me of somebody."
Nownownow, she thinks, and tightens her finger around the trigger.
"I'm flattered, but I really have to be getting to class now —"
"Wait!" Misa says, "There's something I wanted to tell you."
Light crosses his arms and pauses. In six months, he will pick up a death note in his school's courtyard and attempt to become the god of a kingdom that will rise and fall in a blip of time, remembered only in a footnote. Misa loves him, regardless. It will be better this way, for both of them.
"I just," she begins, floundering. "I just wanted to tell you that I'm sorry. For interrupting you. For everything."
"It's fine. I'll be going now," Light says, and walks away.
This time Misa remains still, watching him turn a corner and disappear between two houses. She does not immediately release the trigger of her gun. Misa closes her eyes and imagine she can feel the universe tilting on the hinge of her cowardice. She stays on the street corner for too long, watching the sky fade from pale blue to yellow.
She walks back to the TARDIS in the darkness, and finds the Doctor waiting for her in the doorway offering a cup of Earl Grey with milk. He doesn't question her wig, or the pink glaze in her eyes, or why she shoves him away with her forearm when he tries to drop his hand on her shoulder.
"Fuck off," she tells him, and searches the halls for her room, where she finally disrobes and tosses the de-mat gun unto her nightstand, no longer bothering to hide it away amongst her black silk scarves. She lifts her sheets over head and waits, shivering, for the Doctor to come after her. He never does.
In a way, she is grateful. She spends the evening sobbing silently into her pillow while the TARDIS hums her lullabies of love, and guilt, and resentment.
• • • •
Misa stops speaking. She spends most of her time in the TARDIS's library, sometimes reading, sometimes staring at the printed words, trying to remember what it was like not to know how the story is going to end.
Sometimes, the Doctor keeps her company, recommending books or reciting his favorite passages in ridiculous voices. Despite his apparent cheer, Misa can see that he is growing restless. The TARDIS is primed. The Doctor wants to run.
But Misa is getting tired of running.
"Where do you want to go next?" the Doctor says, like he always does.
Misa considers this, looking to the familiar brass bookshelves and the amber lamps. She thinks of her bedroom, and the cabinets full of oddities, and the rusty smell of the ancient heating system. She thinks of the manic energy in the console room, and the heart of the TARDIS, steady and ageless.
"I'd like to stay here," she says, her voice rough from the days of silence, "Just give me a few more days."
The Doctor puts his hand over her wrist.
"You know, I think that's a wonderful idea. I've been meaning to find the squash court again. I haven't seen it in ages."
• • • •
The TARDIS is telepathic, the Doctor had told Misa on her first day aboard. More than that, she is alive. The TARDIS sees every moment in every universe, layered over one another like glass panes.
Misa sleeps and dreams, but not necessarily at the same time. She suspects it is the TARDIS filling her head with what are not-quite-memories, but feel as real.
Misa dreams of an Earth where Light wins the war and spends many years ruling over his dystopic kingdom, growing older and madder. She dreams of an Earth where Light never picks up the death note, and he and Misa do not meet. She becomes an international pop star and moves to Los Angeles, where she learns to speak poor English and hears over the television that a detective called L has caught Kira.
Mostly, Misa dreams of that day in Shinagawa. In this version, she reaches out and clutches Light by the shoulders. She tells him, "You have to come with me, there is something I have to show you."
Light is reluctant but he is also terribly bored, and he follows Misa back to the TARDIS. She waits for a moment before letting him in, toes curled into pleased spirals. Misa enjoys building drama.
"It's — it's bigger on the inside," Light says, which seems to immensely satisfy the Doctor, who proceeds to ramble for fifteen minutes about transcendental engineering. Which, of course, Light understands.
They set off across the galaxy and Misa teaches Light how to run and run and never stop. Light saves worlds and topples villains, and after he kisses Misa upon the pink moon of Shantella Prime, they cling to one another, breathing in unison.
"Please," Misa whispers to the TARDIS. "Please, let me have this one."
Misa sleeps and dreams, but not necessarily in that order.
In her dream, she and Light and the Doctor travel to the fraying edges of the universe, and find their homes at last.