A/N: This is mainly just a stream of consciousness surrounding Light's death/thoughts of death/all of that fun and not at all dreary crap. Rip to Light Yagami. (And thank you all to the reviewers that I can't reply to, your kind words and words of support are appreciated so so much! Like what? I didn't even think people read things on this site anymore, but thank you kindly. Virtual hugs for all of you.)
Mourning Light
I died so I could haunt you.
The moon and the stars never loved you as much as I could have sweetheart, darling.
They stole your energy away day after day.
I'm not here, I'm just a ghost, an endless imaginary vision that might've been real, but you'll never know, 'cuz I'm gone now.
Death was something queer that he didn't much like to think about, even though he was constantly surrounded by it. He held it's hand most days, he caused it with his own. More specifically, he didn't like to think about his own death, even though it was inevitable. He just didn't subscribe to the idea that one day he would be wiped clean from the slate. He couldn't imagine not existing as he always had. He couldn't imagine the world spinning without his presence. Call him big-headed, but he supposed it was like that for everyone. No one wanted to imagine their absence, it was unfathomable. Even though it was accepted, death was not easily understood. So many people ran from it, prolonged it, fought it, until the bitter end, when there was no more road left to run down.
He'd like to think he was better than most, smarter than all, and could understand his own demise. He never talked about it, but if he was going to, he'd like to say he wasn't frightened. Fear was the most nauseating part about death. It was undeniable, uncontrollable, it struck into the hearts of even the fiercest of men.
There was nothing you could to do prevent death. It came to all and was coming quickly. It was always behind you, looming, holding a dagger that shook as it inched closer to your lungs.
He wondered if he'd been afraid.
He wondered if she had been.
They'd both known it was coming, but they liked not to think about it. They thought they were invincible, perhaps, immortal, and they fell into the delusion because the reality was thick with roughened pain. They thought Light might protect them.
But he couldn't even protect himself. When he could, he chose himself above everyone. It was only natural. Survival was animalistic and instinctual, and he'd fight tooth and nail to breath in another steady breath until every tooth was knocked out and his fingers were left raw and bloody.
He didn't want to die.
He'd always known that he would; it was fated. In the stars that circled the moon, they spelled the story of his life, and those stars twinkled up in the darkened sky until they ran out and began freefalling fast in a violent end to the earth themselves.
If you could see the stars, it meant you were already dead. Stars were dead the moment they entered your line of vision. They might have died years ago, but now was the only time you were noticing.
So many stars died. There were billions of them, and to the untrained eye, they were all identical. There was nothing special about stars. They were crafted into a mold. And when they died, there was no cause for tears, because you hadn't known them. Different stars illuminated your path every night and it'd be impossible to mourn the loss of something always changing. He wouldn't have enough tears, if he did, he'd be weeping constantly. Sparkling, sparking, dazzling sparks of light fell over your head like a halo and slowly burned you to your core. Harsh, iridescent crescents caved your name into stone.
His loss would be felt immediately.
Maybe death was the only way you could be free. You'd be free of your physical confines, and bound and tethered next to nothingness. Death didn't discriminate, and death was not inherently evil. It came to everyone, big or small, meek or brave, cunning or dull. Sometimes it came naturally, and other times years were stolen from you. No one thought they'd die in their thirties, and sometimes old souls' hearts beat on until they hit triple digits.
Death was terrifying in its ambiguity.
It was something that couldn't be understood.
Only accepted.
What if death wasn't free? What if it was something worse? Something you wore like a crown of thorns? What if it damned you to confinement in the darkness, letting you wander aimlessly in a hopeless oblivion with no saving grace in sight? He wouldn't be able to survive the loss of light, without its golden glow that was sometimes milky when it bled through the curtains, he had always known the light. His eyes would suffer horribly if blinded forcefully with fire.
He didn't want to accept it. He wanted to fight it.
When he pondered over the meaning of life for some ages, letting it nestle into his bones and run freely through his bloodstream, when he let it become a part of him, he could accept it with a sort of wise old clarity. If he could put it off and remind himself he had years left, he could settle back into his armchair like he'd just snorted a fat line of ketamine and let the small rocks burn holes into his head. Their damage wouldn't be felt or seen for some time. It was fine. It was fine, so long as you destined it to hit sometime in the future, near or not, it somehow became not as real, and that was soothing.
The reaper found him and told him his fate. He wiped it from his mind, throwing those words out to the fearsome waves tumbling on the roughened sand behind him. He had no time for it. The thing was vague, anyway, it liked playing mind games that would unravel his person into a jumble of messily thin threads.
The thing that was eating him alive turned into a gentle teething. It wasn't so frightening if you turned your feelings to mush, made them dissolve into thin air and deemed them unimportant.
He was no God. He was no saint.
Good people still wore the soles of their feet down on the way to the murky underground where they were destined to stay. They took a deep breath, their eyes fluttering shut so that their glossy irises could roll to the back of their skull and see the maggots feasting on rotted, lost intelligence, and they fell backwards as the breeze forcefully dragged them back down the hole. The cycle of life was this; born from a cavern, hide your demons out in a cave, crawl back down into a hole. You were always trapped in some sort of machinery not of your own creation. The elders had set this practice up, blame them for the first sin that made all the humans pliable and susceptible to sin which could only slowly steal bits of their soul out of the cracks in their corneas.
If he didn't want to fall to sin, but it took him anyway through the course of his own actions which he was forced to make to survive this hellish terrain, then who was responsible?
Not him, he couldn't let it be so. He had never been responsible for anything. Except a pipe dream only he could drag out of the confines of his mind and sew onto the corners of the denuded reality. He had added a sepia filter, is all, how was that so terrible?
His world had been as black and white as his skin, nails, teeth and hair. His eyes had been absolution, pure desolation, simultaneously. He had been so many things once. Those eyes of the devil had been swirling black holes that wished to consume him. He had wanted to kill him. He had killed him so that he wouldn't die, one could only live without the other's presence. He had killed him because destiny had given him the key.
But who had the key to his own heart?
Red, unflinching eyes stared back and gave him the answer.
Stolen time. There was so much of it, and so little. The clock hands sometimes dragged on so painfully slow that capable fingers had to wrench them from their tedium to forcefully pull them along. Sometimes you needed a bit of peace, so you clapped your hands over your ears with a shout as the hands spun out of control, weaving wicked theories for when loss could come to hurt you the most.
Lunar tides, lunar nights. The nights are the bleakest, the strongest force of solitude they remind all that the sun is entirely capable of crawling away. The darkness makes good people fear that the sunlight will never return. It could become coldly permanent.
The darkness is a cover for sins, a casted shadow of a cloak that covers grimy teeth cracking open with yellow rot and eyes that would make you crawl back into your mother's womb and cry.
He wants to be all used up and drained of anything of substance when he dies, so he doesn't feel like his energy was wasted on autumn leaves that will be blown away. But he cannot imagine being a hollow husk, that's the problem.
Maybe his left brain's turned off. Maybe he's just not very imaginative.
He sees the truth, but he makes it into his own if he doesn't like it.
And he despises the premise of death.
He thinks he realized this harsh hatred when it was too late in the day. The sun swirled into the Milky Way, and not even the stars cold comfort cold shone upon him now as he lay dying, barren and bleeding. He wants to get up and fight, but the pathway is much too narrow, and the stairs are daunting, long and sinister, and only lead up to a higher level he cannot achieve.
His heart trembles. It aches. It cries out for a helping hand that can only grasp it punishingly, crushing it to embers that will fall and burn out on the cruel floor.
Crystalized tears form and never fall. He feeds into the sadness, but it never makes him full, he hungers for something he could never find nor slide across his dehydrated taste buds. Ambrosia was not for his silly mortal form. This life has always been sad, full of misery and fright, and he's never gotten anything out of it. Now, he knows that. He knows it but it's too late.
His smile was always worn, torn. The corners of his lips were uplifted into a prayer that was never answered.
Pronounced purple bruises form around gaping gunshot wounds, the blood has stopped pouring because there is none left. The cells cannot work fast enough to form a protective layer of bandages. His wounds have never gone away, they've always festered, hidden alone inside of himself where only he can feel them. They're white, jagged, unkind to his mind. They burn on rainy days when the sleeting water turns frigid and mean. The stars are raining down upon him now, they're all he can see.
He'll wait a second...
Orange blazes over him like a fire, taking him to where he belongs, and he can only whisper now as it comes that it doesn't hurt as much as he's thought. He wishes in whispers that he'll know nothing.
There's a falter, a waver in time. He's holding on to nothing because it is the end, his fingers are slipping from the edge, and he wants to let go. He tells himself to let go. He's always been coldly logical, but he hoped with a sliver of thin thread that it wouldn't come to this. But he cannot dream, his mind is white and blank, he is pragmatic about this whole affair because there is no place else to go and he knows his time has run out. His watch fell off his wrist somewhere down the line, it might be floating in the stagnant waters of the wintry river.
The seasons change, his heart never could.
And it rises from the ashes, once, to emit a low, mournful sob that sounds a bit like a wolf pup crying out for its mother. Like him, it's already been shot, and knows there is no room for hollow redemption now. These affirmations will send him to the grave. His mother will spit on his, the Madonna's arms held a beast she could not see. The howls soar up to the moon, it's cold, wavering face has no time for pleads of mercy. It watches with a cruel eye.
Tumbling, trembling, flying, soaring, dying, the surroundings in his vision darken and swallow all hope, coming to tower over him once, then they fall and fade into a quagmire of hopelessly sick stupor. He's spinning out of control and he has let go.
He's gone, but never buried. His vessel is not himself, though it hardly ever was. And one day it too will be nothing more. He is alive only in the hearts of mourners because he wasn't their savior, only a placebo.
Darkness consumes him and it's even more wicked than he imagined. His saving grace was this darkness, because he was always destined for doom.
It was his birthright.
Screams are lost in translation, they come out as silence, and the worst kind. But he's never feared the silence. He only feared hope, because he knew it could take him to a place nothing else could.
