Yesyes, I promised a longer chapter. Fear not, the second part of this will be up tomorrow; I just thought the ending was good on this one. Thanks again for all the kind words. :)
Light Yagami had always known the answer. He always held up his hand first in class, always the first to interject his opinion in his university lectures, always the first with to come up with a new theory on the Kira case. Admittedly, the latter involved something of an unfair advantage, but Light could always offer a reasoned, sensible, and completely unsuspecting answer. All his life. If he didn't know, he wouldn't stop looking until he did.
But right now, Light Yagami didn't know any answers. More importantly, he didn't feel any remote urge to look for them. He was stumbling in the dark. Quite literally.
"Yagami-kun, I am well aware of the amount of physical pain you must be going through right now, but with your free time rapidly decreasing I suggest you attempt to focus on the task at hand."
L shuddered visibly as his hair grew slightly and became thick with grease, the thorn-like embellishments that Light had last seen on his hands and feet now protruding from his neck. He walked slightly ahead of Light, not slowing his pace in the slightest as he turned to face him, the sunken black eyes and mass of hair almost camouflaged against the darkest parts of the swirling charcoal sky above them.
Light ignored him, largely because another iron-like spike had just emerged from the middle of his back. Another hurried inspection told him that they had reached nearly halfway up his spine. Not bearing to touch or look at them for much longer, Light attempted to walk in a straight line rather than think about it.
This, however, was becoming more difficult, with each new addition to his anatomy creating a weight strong enough to drag one vertebra down until it made firm friends with the next. So much of a distraction was this that Light barely noticed when the unlikely pair left the row of deadened trees and walked out into open ground.
"Not far now." L sounded bleak.
Light took a glance upwards and found himself unable to look away. The gaping hole in the Shinigami World dropped sickeningly into miles, continents, dimensions that he wasn't sure it was possible to drop into, and along its edge, great cracks escaped and ran like lightning bolts as far as the eye could see.
Ten, maybe twenty of these colossal fault lines, the foremost of which ran past Light and L's right hand side, were either spat from the endless, black vortex in front of him or gathering toward it, depending on which way they looked. Light quickly decided he just about preferred the latter and, fortunately, turning to talk to L allowed him this perspective.
"Do you have a plan yet?" He asked quietly, still feeling both shocked at his surroundings and slightly undeserving of such a plan, should there be one.
"I have two possible options, probably about to become one." He started calculating with his fingers, but promptly stopped as the muscles of his left tightened, straightening his fingers excruciatingly as more thorns reappeared.
"I thought for a long time about how Death Note users are kept tabs on, and if it were possible to fool a Death Note into thinking you weren't the user; or at least not intentionally. That way you could simply claim you were forced into using it and so did not deserve the same fate as a willing candidate."
Light listened, but kept his head down so as to keep his mind away from the blistering sensation of another of those wretched spikes about to reveal itself.
"Unfortunately, all possible conclusions seem to point to that plan not working. However effective our combined intellect, I doubt we would be able to pass such a story off. Right, Ryuk?"
"Hyuk-hyuk, lie to the king? Cheat the lord of death himself? It'd be fun to watch you try, that's for sure. Nobody's ever tried it, so far as I can remember."
Ryuk's grating, heavy voice boomed from somewhere above them, and Light squinted upwards to see a familiar pinned, toothy grin. Ryuk, obviously rather amused with his current predicament, seemed to smile more widely, and waved with enthusiasm.
"Hello, Light. How's Life? Or should I say, how's death?"
"Ryuk," Light managed, "how long have you been following?"
"About four years, on and off. Hyuk-hyuk-hyuk!"