elegy a lament
It is Light's first funeral. He's five years old.
Between the ceremonies, family members and friends and awkward co-workers attempt to form a line in front of Light's aunt and uncle without appearing to do so. One after another, they murmur their condolences to the couple, who look horrible, aged and tired and beaten.
Every so often the two of them shoot bitter glances at Light's family. Light's mother says that people who are grieving sometimes act strangely, and that they don't truly mean it, but Light thinks this is stupid. Even if they won't mean it later, they mean it now.
It's not his fault, or his parents', that he's alive while his cousin is dead. If it's anyone's fault, it's Light's aunt's, for not thinking her genetics might result in a sick child. This is not the sort of opinion one voices, though, so Light keeps silent and watches his aunt and uncle wilt a bit more every time someone tells them, "I'm so sorry about your daughter."
Why do people keep saying it, he wonders, if it's clearly depressing the people they mean to comfort. Perhaps they can't tell?
And no one, not once, has mentioned anything about what happened. Oh, the illness, that's been brought up, but no one's breathed a word about why they're here. About his cousin's death.
It won't go away if they tiptoe around it forever. He's only five and he still knows that.
People are very strange.
As the tiny coffin disappears into the crematorium, someone nearby releases an unsteady breath, and Light's uncle makes a small, wordless noise.
It would be horrible to burn to death, Light thinks. And he wonders if anyone's ever been falsely presumed dead, and woken up to the sound and the heat of rising flames. And then he decides that it's pointless to wonder about questions he'll never be able to answer with certainty.
(He's almost sure it's happened. Statistically speaking, it almost has to have happened, back before reliable autopsies. But he won't think of it.)
Light is given over to one of his second cousins during the bone-picking ceremony.
He's not surprised. Human remains are the sort of thing adults would want to keep away from children. And he doesn't mind, really; his cousin is too busy cooing over Sayu to pay him much attention and he's free to scour his aunts' house for hidden candy stashes. Much better than picking at a little girl's bones.
It makes no sense, then, for him to find himself on the bone-picking table, surrounded by somber family members.
I could have fit in that coffin just as well, he remembers, and he tries to struggle, or to speak, but he can't so much as move his eyes. He stares up at the ceiling as his family closes in, as his mother reaches into his chest with her chopsticks and pulls out a fragment of a rib, cracked by the heat of the fire. She drops it into the urn, and as it clatters against the bottom like a coin, Sayu burbles with laughter as the pieces of her mobile chink together, and Light's eyes fly open.
It takes him a moment to catch his breath. He doesn't have that sort of dream, as a rule, and doesn't know what to make of this one. The fact that he's a child faced with death for the first time doesn't occur to him. He's not a child, he's Light.
Nonetheless, it feels as though something vast and dark has reached out of the sky for him and missed him by inches. Unsettled, he rolls over and pulls Ducky up around him.
He feels better with the (protection) warmth, and is asleep again in minutes.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This chapter is for twinklestar148, who encouraged me to get off my ass. I didn't realize it'd been so long, wow.