Hidden Faces – a Death Note fanfic
Chapter Two: A Face Lit By Fire
"I . . . I feel responsible for this," he had said. "Chief Yagami took the Shinigami eyes to atone for his actions . . . Allow me to destroy the notebook to atone for my own!"
Near turned to look at the Shinigami.
"The thirteen-day rule . . . Is it fake?" he asked, trying to appear nonchalant.
"Heh-heh . . . yes," Ryuk laughed.
While everyone turned their attention to the Shinigami, Matsuda dropped the Death Note into his lap and took the replica out of his briefcase.
"And the rule about everyone who touched the notebook dying if we destroy it – is that also fake?"
"Yes."
"Then Matsuda, it's a horrible murder weapon and you can burn it."
Matsuda nodded. He ripped the pages out of the cover and threw them on the floor, then took out a lighter he had packed for the occasion and set fire to the stack. It was the end of the Death Note – for the near future.
Matsuda woke. Most mornings, waking was a gradual process, slowly coming into the real world from the fantasy of dreams. Occasionally, he would sleep in later and would experience the short shock of the alarm clock. But today, the events of yesterday, especially Light's tortured face, with his messy hair covering his face, a stream of blood flowing out of the corner of his mouth, and furious despair shining brightly in his eyes, flashed in front of Matsuda's vision and threw him upright in bed.
"Damn it!" he roared, "why the hell did I shoot him?"
Ryuk was sitting in the corner of the room, laughing and eating an apple.
"You think you can ever measure up to Light, Matsuda?" he asked.
"They can all see you. I can't have you following me around all day," he countered, ignoring the challenge.
"Surely you can find a way around that?" asked Ryuk. "C'mon, things have gotten so boring around here. Go make things interesting, Matsuda."
"I can't do anything if they see you following me around. What's the one conclusion they'll come to? I want them to think Kira is dead and buried. Seeing a Shinigami floating all over the place isn't going to help them arrive at that conclusion. Give me a year."
"I have to sit around the house for a year?"
"I'll do some tests in the meantime. What happens if I give up ownership of the note?"
"You lose all your memories of me and of the note. I told you already."
"And what about everyone who's touched the note? Could they still see you?"
"I'm not sure," said Ryuk, happily munching the apple. "It's worth a try. Anything is better than being stuck in the house for a year."
Matsuda grinned.
"Fine then. I'm going to mail it to myself. Once I give it up, go check if Misa can see you. It'll be back in about a week."
Ryuk laughed, managing to spit out, "Humans are so interesting!" with chunks of apple.
When Matsuda had first been introduced to Light Yagami, he had taken one look at Light's face and gotten an impression of a charismatic, successful person who was nevertheless somewhat vain. Of course, you got that with geniuses. L, and, of course, Matsuda himself exhibited that trait sometimes (but Matsuda had needed to suppress it for his disguise, and was thus better at eliminating it from his behavior). Something about the way L looked at Light made Matsuda suspicious, and as L guessed that Light was Kira, Matsuda felt himself supporting the guess. But he wanted Kira to win, so he used his persona to combat against it as fiercely as possible. L, knowing of Matsuda's second face, probably thought that behavior was his version of support. Once again, no one took any notice of Matsuda's antics.
With a flash, Matsuda's memories were restored to him.
"Well?" he asked, staring at the Shinigami who had just appeared in front of him.
"Your plan worked, Matsuda. You're looking to be even more interesting than Light!" Ryuk chuckled with glee.
The notebook had spent a week without an owner. That seemed to have had the effect of canceling out all of its past influences. As he thought, Matsuda reached for an apple, but Ryuk got it first. He scowled at the Shinigami and took a different one.
"Whatcha going to do now?" asked Ryuk. "After all, you ever told me what you were going to do once you figured out if they could see me."
"I'm going to perform some tests to see exactly what the notebook is capable of. If you want to watch the tests, feel free. Otherwise you get to wait in suspense. Your call."
Ryuk had to hand it to the human – he knew how to make life difficult.
"There's nothing really scientific about the notebook," Matsuda said two months later, a grin spreading across his face.
"What?" asked Ryuk. "What do you mean by that?"
"Think about it for a moment," he said, leaning back in the chair. "All you need to kill someone is their birth name and their face, as well as the notebook and a writing utensil. You know this probably far better than anyone else."
Ryuk laughed.
"Well, it's true, Tota Matsuda," he said, reading the name on Matsuda's forehead.
Matsuda's smile grew wider. Even a Shinigami . . . How interesting!
"Anyways," he said, "It doesn't matter what kind of ink you use. Blue, black, blood – people died every time. I bet you could use mayonnaise if you wanted. So it's not the actual writing that kills them."
Ryuk cackled.
"Interesting!" he chortled. "Humans are so interesting!"
Matsuda pressed onward.
"And we know that the Death Note itself works whether or not the pages are intact. Light was always hiding little bits of the note in his wallet – or his watch," he added, mentally kicking himself for the events in the warehouse. "So the pages have the real power. The cover of the book mean nothing."
Ryuk kept laughing.
"Thirdly, you need a name and a face to kill them. I wondered about this for a long time. Then I realized that, as your rules said, many people have the same name. And identical twins have the same face. So one or the other wouldn't work. Rather, the combination of face and name, which I might add is what the Shinigami see when they look at someone's face, is what the Death Note works on. It was designed for use by the Shinigami, so all you need to operate it is what a God of Death can catch with a glance. The rules about taking excess lifespan follow from this reasoning as well."
"So then why do you say that there's nothing scientific about the notebook?" Ryuk asked.
"Because, from a physics standpoint, nothing directly links the notebook to the deaths it causes. It's not radioactive and it works when shielded. The only reason we see a sort of cause/effect relationship is because the evidence hits us again and again and again. No one can say that the notebooks are fake at this point. Now, what I'm getting at here is the source of the notebooks' power."
"Oh, figured it out, have you?" Ryuk laughed. "Do tell."
"The source of the notebooks' power is its origin: the world of the Shinigami. That's why you need to be present now that I've got one under my control. You provide a link to the source of power. It's like taking along a radio antenna when going camping."
"Camping?" asked Ryuk.
"It's a human activity where you pack up a bag and go and sleep in a tent in the woods," Matsuda said dismissively, adding "away from civilization" as an afterthought.
Predictably, Ryuk chuckled. It was kind of therapeutic, in a way.
"So, why did I do all of this research?" asked Matsuda. "Why did I spend all this time arriving at conclusions I already know? Because now I can go ahead with an experiment I had planned."
"Ooh, sounds entertaining!" said Ryuk.
"Yes, yes it does," smiled Matsuda. "Follow me. Well, I guess I don't have to tell you that."
They walked into Matsuda's basement, where a single page of the death note was lying on a table with various pieces of equipment scattered around the room.
"The first question is whether or not the note would work if you damaged it. Yesterday I cut it in half and taped it back together. Writing on the taped-up side," he said, lifting up the page to show Ryuk the writing on the bottom, "didn't work. I'm guessing that's because some of the name went on the tape. But the guy on this side," he said, flipping the page around, "died. So making a cut and resealing it doesn't affect the notebooks' power."
"Oh!" said Ryuk. "So you could repair damaged pages. That's useful."
Matsuda wasn't sure if the Shinigami was mocking him or not. Regardless, he was always laughing.
He walked over to the basement sink. After filling a glass with water, he measured the weight of a piece of the note and put it in the glass of water.
"If the theory holds true," he said, "then this will still work despite having been submerged."
"What then?" asked Ryuk, still chuckling, but curious.
"You'll see," said Matsuda.
When Light had submitted to imprisonment to clear his name, Matsuda had almost applauded. L and Light shared a sense of theater. This was before anyone but Light (and Misa and Ryuk and Rem – but they were pawns) knew of the notebooks' existence. Matsuda was just as taken by surprise as L was, but he appreciated good theater. Light had a plan, of course. The only reason he would ever turn himself in would be to 'prove' his innocence, which is to say, come up with a tricky reason to keep doing whatever he was doing in a way that made it seem like he wasn't doing it. Like with the potato chips, for example. He kept sneaking furtive glances at his chip bag and it thunk'ed when he dropped it in the trash. But you only noticed it if you hacked the computer for the files and watched it once in slow motion and once with the audio turned all the way up. And you would only think of that if you came up with a crazy hypothesis like, "That guy's Kira and he's hiding a screen in his chip bag."
But this time there were no chips. And sure enough, the killings stopped, just like that. Had he grown tired of the chase? No, he couldn't. The cat-and-mouse game was his entire life at this point. It wouldn't be that odd neurosis that causes fugitives to turn themselves in, either. No, if it looked like he was guilty now, then it definitely wouldn't turn out that way. The fact that he actually was guilty was a minor detail.
Right before Light arrived, Misa had snapped and started rambling. Matsuda suspected Light at once, but, as having Misa go insane would not have helped the situation at all, he had to conclude it was an external factor. Matsuda began to feel anxiety, and he seized the microphone from L and yelled at Misa to stop the crap about the stalker. The look L gave him afterwards – he tried to bury the memory, bury L's face as it looked across the years, seeing right through him and out the other side.
Matsuda emerged from the basement.
"I have extended the potential of the Death Note by a magnitude of about fifty," he crowed, "and eliminated its most worrisome factor."
"Really?" asked Ryuk. "Even Light didn't try something like that. I think you really will be more entertaining than him."
"Relative entertainment values aside, I'm never going to lose the way he did," said Matsuda, glowing with triumph. "Here's the end result."
He held up a ballpoint pen.
"That's a pen, Matsuda," Ryuk offered, chuckling. "You use it to write the names in the notebook."
Smiling, Matsuda began his explanation: "Soaked in water, the note worked perfectly. And, by the way, my 'test subjects' can't be traced back to Kira. They were all in hospice – the place where we send old humans to live their last weeks."
"Then how can you be sure if the note worked?" asked Ryuk. "You might have picked someone who was about to die anyways."
"Well, no thanks to you. But I double- and triple-checked. Now, after confirming the success of that test, I blended a piece of the note and tried writing on that. I tested it four times and it worked all four times. So now I've mixed the paste in with writing ink. I wasn't sure about the concentrations, so I wrote Misa's name with the word 'suicide' once per day with a higher and higher ratio of notebook to ink. I lucked out – the first working concentration got her on Valentines Day and they won't suspect a thing. So, the result of this process is a pen that, when you write, ends up pasting incredibly tiny pieces of the Death Note to the paper – or plastic or wood or maybe the back of your hand – in the exact shape of your handwriting, then puts the ink on top of it. So now technically all the blank space on the page, including the stuff on the inside of letters and between them, is being used. No more Death Note. Just a harmless-looking, normal pen."
"Impressive!" Ryuk said. "I think now you're even more paranoid about hiding the Note than Light was!"
"What did he do?" asked Matsuda out of curiosity.
"He kept it in his desk drawer and set it to blow up if anyone ever opened it."
Both of them laughed together.
Some days, it became difficult to talk to the ex-members of the task force. Matsuda found himself desiring other company, trying to stay away from the people who had been his only companions for years. They seemed to him more cowardly, more venal, more duplicitous than he remembered them last. Was it only because he had seen their true faces? If certain philosophers were correct, then every stinking member of the human race was two-faced like what were once his closest friends.
Is this how Kira felt, right before he picked up the notebook? Was the world really capable of justice? Even in the Old World, (in which by accident Matsuda had found himself again) they needed L to solve their crimes, L who was not moral or ethical, L who was a sociopath and denied all of society's customs, L who screwed with everyone else's head's for his own amusement. L, who demanded, "Matsuda! More coffee!"
Light, Kira, undoubtedly had the right idea. Self-interested humans – how interesting they were when you watched them from above! – could not be persuaded, could not be reasoned with, to abide by laws or customs. Ultimately they broke whatever laws they needed to for their own goals. Underneath, they were all like L – they sacrificed other people for their own ends, they used the people around them for their own amusement. The only way to ensure cooperation from a self-interested, petty human was to attack their self-interest. Follow Kira, you must say to their heart of hearts, their second face, or wrath shall rain down upon you for your transgressions. This was not a new idea. Draco of Athens had been the first to pronounce it, long before notebooks or even technology. They had hated him for it, but justice was done.
And that was all that mattered, at the end of the day. Justice was done.
"Is that how they will remember me? Like they remember Kira?" he asked to the empty night.
"Why should you care?" responded Ryuk from behind him. "Heh-heh! Humans are soooo interesting!"
The biggest threat at this point was Near. Near, the brat from Wammy's house who had made his debut wearing L's mask and had never been able to take it off . . .
It would be easy to kill him, especially now that he had the new device. But suddenly he knew the curse of that brand of genius, the thing that had done in both L and Light. They all had a sense of theater, and they wanted to see their opponent broken right before they died. It was L's need for proof that got him killed, and Light had immediately knelt over the body so that the last thing L would see would be the face of his opponent, victorious at last . . .
And it was Near's need for proof that stopped him from just having Light killed, and he had been rewarded with Light's final breakdown. That was the thing about rewards – oftentimes they got handed out to people who didn't deserve them.
How to kill Near? Matsuda wanted him crushed, broken, writhing in a pool of his own blood just like he had done to Light. He must know that he had lost, and not through any stupid mistakes made by his underlings, but because he wasn't good enough, had never been good enough . . .
He had to know that he had never surpassed L.
The question was really about how to drag him into the game in such a way that he could never figure out the real secret until too late. Preferably, he would never figure it out until Matsuda told him. In the end, it would have to be a heart attack. No other end was as fitting. But before that, he would suffer as Matsuda explained to him how he had lost.
The anniversary of the scene at the warehouse was approaching fast. Near would arrive on some pretense or other without a doubt. And he would bring with him the memory of the L-mask and the knowledge that, underneath his act, he could never measure up to the face he wore.
A plan began to form in Matsuda's mind. His face gleamed with the fires of revenge. He smiled, and the smile was Kira's smile.
"Ryuk," he said, "are you ready for the biggest piece of theater yet?"
As always, the Shinigami laughed.
Misa really did die on Valentines day, according to Book Thirteen: How To Read.
So, I kinda went over the same time period as the last section in the previous chapter, in case I didn't make that clear enough. Like many Hollywood trilogies, the first chapter stands alone, while the second chapter is obviously setting the stage for the third. That said, write me more reviews and stay tuned.
Why do we say things like "stay tuned" when the radio is nearly defunct as a communications medium? I leave you with that thought.