AfterLife
Chapter 1
----K----
Everything was gray and infinitely boring. The rocks were gray, the sky was gray, the dirt was gray, the bones were gray, even the stunted apple trees were gray. The only thing that wasn't gray was the fresh blood that showed up every so often on the gray bits of metal and chain littered randomly about, but even that succumbed to the monochrome eventually. For as long as he could remember, Kei had been wandering across the gray landscape, so much that he too felt the grayness that permeated through his bones. There was never anything entertaining to do besides sit and gamble, or trek across the unchanging grayness, only to come back again. The most exciting thing was how the rocks towered into mountains at the edges of the wide, flat valley. He preferred sitting up there alone, but found himself coming down from the crags when the overwhelming stream of nothingness caught him.
Kei sighed in annoyance, causing Jastin to glance up from his skeletal hands holding the bone dice and the game they were playing.
"I was just about to toss them," the Jeweled Skeleton replied a little haughtily. "There's no need to be in a hurry."
The Death God released the four dice, two vaguely the shape of animal skulls, two formed like generic femurs, into the large stone bowel. No doubt it was also carved out of the surrounding rock, like everything else was. The bones clattered and rolled around, finally coming to rest with the two femurs touching each other, one of the skulls resting upright, the other on its side.
"Looks like I've beaten you again, Jastin," Kei said with a slight smile. His eyes glowed a deeper red from within their bone sockets. "A T-bone and a standing skull won't beat a pair of sleeping skulls."
"You're too good at this, Kei," Jastin retorted. He stood abruptly from the game and grabbed his own dice, stuffing them into a jewel-encrusted pouch at his waist. He turned and headed along the flats to join a different game where his chances would most likely be better.
Kei sighed again. If the most fun he could get out of life was cheating the other Death Gods at games of chance… he didn't finish the thought. They never bet on anything anyway, but he still found winning compelling. He stood, using his bone guitar-like scythe to help himself stand. Perhaps he would march back up towards the rocky face of the mountains, side-stepping the rib cages and chains that were the flora of this world.
When had life become so uninteresting? Why had he never noticed how unsatisfyed he felt in this unchanging land? The tedious monotony of a dead world, day after day, every one the same as the last….
So what else would Kei do? Was there anything he could do?
Green jewel lenses glinted balefully from the goggles lying above his deep eye sockets, and Kei began walking. Without picking a direction, he found his boots taking him to the edge of the valley, past the hordes of other Death Gods. Looking around at them, Kei wondered if any of them ever felt the same way he did now… although he hardly knew what he was feeling. Some were sleeping, some gambling like he had been, some engaged in various conversations, and a few were simply staring off across the empty land. Were thoughts like his ever passing across their vacant faces?
Kei stepped over a proper-looking scythe that had tumbled from the grasp of a sleeping Death God and found himself facing the lonely trail that led up to the Orchard. He continued on—he might as well, there was nothing else to do—following the twists and turns the thin trail made. Kei supposed he could unleash his wings and get there faster, but the pointlessness of hurrying to a place he didn't care if he ever arrived at stopped him.
His feet continued to carry him along faithfully and he stopped thinking. Sometimes that was just easier.
Having no way to judge time and no interest in doing so, Kei was at the Orchard when he arrived. His mind began churning along slowly again as he walked over to the nearest stunted tree growing out of the rock. There were no apples on it and Kei supposed that was because it was the closest to the trail; any apples that had grown here would be the first ones picked by addicted Death Gods.
Kei had never really understood that addiction. Of course, he had tried the apples before, but never more than one at a time… the taste was too terrible. How anyone could eat enough to gain an addiction, Kei would never know.
The Orchard was not a real orchard either. None of the Death Gods tended to it, the trees growing of their own accord wherever they could manage to crumble some of the rocks into gray dust and implant their roots. Not even the trees themselves were aligned; they bent haphazardly, branches twisting and twining together. When the trees decided to bear fruit, it was a shriveled, nearly dead thing composed of mostly small black seeds.
At last, Kei paused at a tree, its knobby gray clutches trying to ward away thieves of its single wrinkled apple. Kei took it anyway, out of boredom, inspecting the withered fruit. He held it up to his jagged teeth and took a bite.
Disgusting.
Nevertheless, Kei finished with four more bites, eating even the core. It tasted like sand. He stood there, guitar-scythe on his back and wondered why he even bothered. Why not simply eat the tree instead? It wasn't as if Death Gods needed sustenance; they had evolved above that. Perhaps the contorted limbs or parched leaves even tasted better?
Kei snapped off a twig, crunching it between his jaws experimentally. The slivers of wood were rather tasteless and most stuck between his teeth. He swallowed.
"Oi! Kei!"
The Death God turned at the sound of his name. Kinddara Guivelostain landed just behind him, folding his wings behind him until they vanished. Kei nodded in greeting.
"Not getting addicted too, are you?" Kinddara questioned fervently. His black eyes flitted furtively to the place where Kei had just taken the apple. His bandaged hands rubbed together, as if burrowing into each other.
"No," Kei sighed. He didn't really care for Kinddara, finding the smaller Death God annoying in his obsession. But Kei found himself speaking to him anyway. "Why do you eat apples if they don't taste good?"
Kinddara appeared a little confused at the question, but answered anyway, his eyes still darting among the tiny trees. "Because if I don't I'll have to stand on my head."
"But why did you start eating them in the first place?" Kei asked persistently.
Kinddara began smoothing his chain-mail shirt obsessively, ignoring where the bandages caught and hitched in the rusted garment. He didn't look up at Kei as he spoke. "I don't know; I've always been eating them. Why do you write in your Death Note?"
Kei paused, losing all argumentative momentum, even though he did have a very logical answer. He wrote in his Death Note because otherwise his life would run out, just like all the other Death Gods. But Kinddara had just equated apples to Death Notes. Did that mean that Kinddara believed he needed to eat apples to survive?
"Nevermind," Kei replied, suddenly weary. Kinddara was not the God in which Kei would find a kindred spirit. In fact, Kei was hardly sure that he would ever find someone who despised this nothingness quite like he did. Or asked as many questions.
"I think there are some more apples at the other end of the Orchard, Kinddara," he told the black-eyed Death God, even though he had no idea if there were any apples left at all. Kinddara nodded vigorously and scurried off between the trees. Kei watched for several moments, but then tore his eyes away. He did not want to watch someone else who was stuck in the same endless cycle. He felt smothered, like he was suffocating, drowning in the grayness.
But the worst part was that he was the only one who knew, despite how the entirety of existence was adrift in gray.
----K----
Kei wandered through the valley, pausing and listening to snippets of conversation between Death Gods. Vaguely, he considered joining a few, but then it passed and his feet moved again. He felt restless, but had no cause for it, and so just continued to move aimlessly through the horde. At one point, Gekki Yhuusiohuc recognized the skeletal figure with green-jeweled goggles and asked if he wanted to join in one of the many varieties of a game of chance, but Kei just shook his head and allowed his feet to continue its steps. It was mind-numbingly peaceful to simply walk, and Kei stopped thinking, letting his awareness gently slide away.
Everything was gray and infinitely boring anyway.
----K----
He stood halfway up the edge of the valley, the vantage point giving him a peerless view of the camps of the Death Gods below. He liked looking down on the others, and he caught the edge of a stray thought wondering if the King of Death felt like this too. Always above, always in charge, always… better? Kei shook his head and the notion left him. His gaze settled on a graying scythe rested to his right, the hint of blackened blood rusting into its blade.
He sighed, a deep rattling from beneath his worn shirt, realizing that his mind was again too active. It was always so much easier to simply stop thinking. But now his thoughts raced ahead and he wondered why and how the scythe had come to be there. It obviously didn't belong to anyone, but if that was the case, who had placed it there?
And the blood?
Kei suddenly felt sick, his mind whirling. He knew Death Gods did not bleed, could not be killed by any weapons, and so… where had the blood come from? There was no one here but themselves, the Death Gods… no one else….
Kei looked down to find his bone fingers trembling and shaking. Why were they doing that? It was not his blood; he did not have any in his body. He looked up, unable to watch his quivering hands and became fixated by the blood on the ancient scythe.
How did Kei even know what blood was? He could not remember… his head felt too tight, his skull pressing in on him, constricting thought, tendrils of forgotten impressions just out of reach like the dull weight of some large obstacle pinning him down, holding him hostage to the grayness. Yet his sunken red eyes still watched the blood and he could not look away, his brain seizing up and freezing to a halt. What was happening?
He was dimly aware of his chest rattling as he drew in gasps of air, and suddenly he wondered whether the splinters of the apple tree were still there inside him, puncturing whatever lay beneath his shirt and jacket. Could he perhaps bleed if they hit him somewhere? He had felt the apple tree, and if he could feel it, wasn't it possible for it to cause him pain?
Pain. The memory of hurt and agony erupted, and his head throbbed. He shuddered and pulled his hands up to clutch at his skull. He knew he wasn't feeling it now, but the thought alone… his entire body had felt it before, ripped to pieces and maybe, just maybe, he had bled and there would have been liters and liters of—
"Oi."
A deep rumbling voice sounded from behind him as if from a long distance. It hardly registered.
"Kei," it said, but the sound of his name startled the paralyzed Death God and he jerked his eyes away from scythe. The pain fell away and he turned to face the voice, able to push aside his whirling thoughts for the sake of seeming normal. He smiled lightly.
"Ryuk," Kei greeted. The other Death God's face broke into a grin across his entire face, black lips stretched tight. It looked as if Ryuk had come down from somewhere behind the tips of the craggy walls of the valley. He had a large coarse blanket wrapped around most of his figure, but his head and its wild red and yellow eyes protruded out from the fibrous covering. A few bright earrings caught Kei's attention for a moment, but then he looked back into Ryuk's enormous eyes.
"You planning on doing anything interesting? Or will you just rot there like the rest of this world?" The bigger Death God looked at Kei expectantly, but Kei didn't know how to answer him. He realized that Ryuk was behaving very abnormally, and yet at the same time, his natural instincts to assimilate into every situation kicked in.
"No, of course not," Kei said confidently to Ryuk's last question. Ryuk's lips widened, showing sharp teeth, and Kei felt as if his acting had just confirmed something to the dark god. Uneasiness rose into Kei's chest, but he ignored it, keeping all hints off his skull and his body language relaxed. Kei mentally shook himself; everyone knew Ryuk was strange. Just as strange as Kinddara, with a different style. Didn't Ryuk also eat lots of apples? Kei felt himself relax internally and tried not to let the boredom show through his words. "What do you intend to do, Ryuk?"
"Oh, I've already done it, Kei," Ryuk said, his eyes glossy and almost too bright for the surrounding grayness. Kei's attention was suddenly drawn to him like a moth to flame and the uneasiness was back two-fold as if he were close to being incinerated. Ryuk leaned in closely, and Kei forced himself not to take a step backwards.
"Or… don't you remember?" Ryuk asked softly. He paused for a moment, his protruding eyes darting all over Kei's face, and then he pulled back and began laughing hysterically.
Kei felt his himself growing angry. It was obvious that Ryuk was simply messing around. There wasn't a hint of meaning in any of his random words; just the crazy talk of an outcast Death God. Annoyed, Kei turned away from the abrupt and rapid laughter and started back down the trail that had led him up to the side of the hill.
"Leaving already, Kei?" Ryuk mocked between fits of laughter. The god had stretched his wings out so he could float above the ground and his whole body shook and twisted above the air. The urge to somehow prevent the Death God from ever laughing again hardened Kei's hands into fists, but he didn't turn back, knowing that there was nothing he could do.
Kei kept walking until he was out of sight, until the emotion drifted away like it had never occurred.
----K----
Everything was gray and infinitely boring. Nothing never changed.
Kei sat playing a game with Gekki Yhuusiohuc and was cheating, like always. Each god found, bought, borrowed, won, or made their own dice. Naturally, Kei had made his and while all the bones were of the correct size and weight, how the weight was distributed meant the likelihood of getting a better throw. Kei's skull dice were more likely to land both on their left sides, the femurs with one end pointing towards the deep center of a bowel, and he had many different weights of the smaller vertebrae to use depending on the variation of the game he was playing. Kei had also nearly mastered the art of holding and throwing the dice so that they landed in the position he wanted. It was simply a matter of copying exactly the movement he had done previously to get the same throw. He was vaguely surprised that no one ever noticed or caught on to what he was doing. He tried to stay focused on the game, the dice, even the gray stone bowl, but his mind wandered like his booted feet were apt to do. If only he could control his thoughts as easily as he could his physical body.
The chance conversation he had had with the outcast Death God drifted to the forefront of his mind. He had the instinctive feeling that there was something he had missed in it, a very odd sensation to have considering it had only been a conversation with Ryuk, a Death God none really liked. So… why was his mind delving back into it, suggesting a hidden meaning or greater importance in his words? While he was glad someone had snapped him out of… Kei gasped and promptly pulled back into reality before he could recall whatever had occurred that had left such a deep residual of fear. At first, he didn't notice his opponent looking up at him oddly, Gekki's burning eyes questioning. Kei suddenly remember he was still playing a game, and quickly realized that his behavior was causing Gekki some mild concern and irritation. He looked down at stone bowl and realized that it was his turn. He flashed a sheepish and apologetic smile to Gekki and tossed his dice.
He returned back to the vague sensation of unease left in his mind. While he was glad that Ryuk had first appeared for… some reason, Kei felt a lasting irritation at what the other god had done. Kei did not appreciate being laughed at, being made fun of, and even getting a hint that he was slow and stupid. Ryuk had said something about how he, Kei, was rotting like the rest of the world, but of course, Ryuk had already done something to prevent himself from being dragged along with it.
Kei felt the world shift on its axis as the thought clicked gently into the place it rightfully belonged. He felt dizzy, yet with a clarity unlike what he had ever felt before. His red gaze didn't show him the throw he had just made, and his ears didn't pick up any of the indignant sounds his opponent was making.
Thoughts swirled and coalesced like smoke in a drafty room. Kei was not the only one to see the world as gray, dead, and boring. Ryuk had somehow known that Kei was of a like mindset, and asked what he was willing to do. But if that was the case, what was it that Ryuk had already done? Kei didn't know the answer, but suddenly knew he needed to search it out. The need for discovery burned in him, and he stood abruptly from the game, his eyes flashing a dark crimson.
"Kei! Where the hell are you going?" Gekki yelled angrily. He continued shaking his dice, prepared to throw.
"The game isn't interesting if there aren't any stakes, Gekki Yhuusiohuc," Kei bit out caustically as he reached down and snatched up his dice. He didn't want to waste this moment playing asinine games with obtuse Death Gods; he had to find the outcast, learn what Ryuk had done. Perhaps it meant Kei would become an outcast as well, but it would at least be better than rotting in this forsaken realm of gray with the semblance of existence.
He left Gekki with an angry snarl still plastered across his gaunt face and fiery eyes flaring brightly under sticky strands of black hair.
Kei managed to get thirty meters away before he realized he had nowhere to look, and no one he wanted to ask.
----K----
Kei was in the Orchard, yet something was different. He walked the familiar path, winding between the stunted trees and their clawing branches. He was looking for something, he was sure, but he couldn't really remember what it was. It didn't matter, as he was positive he would know it when he saw it… so he continued to inspect each tree he passed and when nothing caught his attention, he continued on.
Kei reached the end of the Orchard, and knew he had reached his goal. He stepped off the little trail of sand and walked to the rocky edge. The last tree was there.
Just like it had been waiting for him to find it.
Kei plucked the round red apple off the tree and wondered what Ryuk would do for it.
He woke up, the wisps of the dream still cloying to his senses.
Everything around him was still gray and infinitely boring. The rocks were gray, the sky was gray, the dirt was gray, the bones were gray, even the stunted apple trees were gray.
Except he knew that apples were supposed to be red.
----K----
First of all, thank you for reading! If you were one of the people who read the prologue when it was first posted, thank you for coming back, and I'm sorry if you believed it was a one-shot. But now it's not simply a different portrayal of Light's death... the plot thickens and to clarify, this is going to be a multichaptered fic and there's no real end in sight. Sorry if this chapter is confusing, but let me know what you think anyway. I've done WAY too much searching on these sorts of things, but if anyone knows of anywhere I can find pictures with names of other Death Gods in the Death God Realm, I would really REALLY appreciate it. I can get names, I can find pictures, but finding the name and face together is a bit more difficult than one would suppose. And then go read Tobi Tortue's chapter 1 of AfterLife... It's L's pov, and I already knew what was going to happen and it still brought tears to my eyes. It's that good. Anyway, if you already read it, good for you. Cookies if you left a review for it.
Please leave a review if you like this story too, or in fact, especially if you don't like it. Tobi Tortue is my beta, but we miss things all the time... if you see a typo, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE let me know. Maybe I'll hand out cookies to people who find mistakes or leave really intelligent reviews...?
Oh, and feel free to guess where this is going... I think it's rather obvious, but then again, I'm the author, so let me know what you think.
anja-chan
