When the nothing faded away, Light was overcome by his confusion. He remembered, perfectly, what had happened, and he knew he should be dead. He knew he had failed, and that he had abandoned the human world, but he didn't know where he was now. Now, or maybe it was called then here, or sometime, somewhere else... now, it was white. Light wasn't sure if he was regaining his senses, because he only saw, heard, felt white. Like a cloud, but Light didn't believe in Heaven and knew if it existed he wouldn't be going there. No matter how good his intentions had been, he had probably—both indirectly and personally—killed more people than even the most successful of assassins. He knew any God, other than himself of course, would frown upon that. The average God probably wouldn't understand the idiocy of giving people second chances, so Light's use of the Death Note would be seen as unnecessary. And even with those stupid second chances, Light would have thrown out his second, third... thousandth with his repeated use of the Death Note. Not that he regretted this in any way.
The white was fading. Its sweet, heavy presence was evaporating into this new, dreadfully thin atmosphere so slowly its movement was almost unrecognizable. Light couldn't say for sure how he knew it was fading; it was only giving way to more white, but something in him felt the shadows coming. He felt the shapes before he saw them, and the first to reach him did so as lightly as the buzz of a fly in his ear. When it evolved into a silhouette he was hit by a whisper of recognition, and spoke for the first time in this eternity. "M... Misa?" He gasped, not quite sure why she was here.
"LIGHT-KUN!" She exclaimed, "I was wondering when you'd show up!" As she walked closer, the white mist finally started to fold back into itself, and as soon as he was presented with a two-centimeter view and a sense of 'up', Light stood.
He looked down at the ground right next to his feet—so far it was the only thing he could see—and saw another shadow crawling into view. He knelt down again to pick it up, ignoring Misa, who was standing over him grinning like an idiot, and saw that it was a rotten, shriveled apple. And Light knew where he was.
"What's wrong, Light-kun?" Misa whimpered, leaning over and looking right at him with inhuman eyes.
"Nothing..." Light replied distractedly, too interested in his surroundings to think about his cumbersome and idiotic girlfriend. The mist was receding all around him and more landmarks came into view: expanses of desert and piles of bones that he knew from vague description but not from sight. "Misa," he began carefully, "do you know where we are?"
Misa, eager to help, replied excitedly, "YEAH! WE'RE WHERE REM LIVED AREN'T WE LIGHT?"
"Yes," he whispered. "We are. And do you know how we got here?"
Misa hesitated, very unlike herself. "Well... don't you remember? They said I shouldn't tell you if you didn't remember for yourself."
Light smiled. She was referring to him dying, of course. Whoever 'they' were—Shinigami, he was assuming—they wouldn't want to shock him as soon as he got here by telling him how he'd been killed. Whether they'd had a motive for bringing him here or if the Shinigami realm was just where users of the Death Note went, he wasn't sure. But either way it seemed as if he were a guest.
"Misa," he looked her in the eye and was startled again by how unnatural her Shinigami's eyes looked up close, "May I talk to 'them'?"
"Well..." she shuffled her feet uneasily. "I'm not sure you're supposed to, but if it would make Light-kun happy…?"
"Yes, it would." Light replied slowly. "Very happy."
"Then I'll do anything I can to make it so!" she squealed, very excited at the prospect of pleasing him.
"Thank you, Misa." Light smiled at her as she hurried away. Death hadn't changed her a bit.
Light sat back down, noticing that the mist had completely faded, leaving him with the unpleasant scenery of the Shinigami realm. Piled up bones warn hard and dry by wind and sand lay randomly scattered around him, doing little to break the monotonous wasteland. Past infinite shivering seas of unearthly sand and sheer, slate mountains rose. Their presence did not change the feel of the tedious landscape, nor did it add to the impression of nothingness the dead world bore like perfume. They were simply there, and Light was nearly sure that if he tried to walk to them they would continue to recede into the distance until he was forced to give up and admit that this world was flat and infinite and that he would never escape.
While waiting for Misa to return he held his sad excuse for an apple and thought of Ryuk; his annoying tail, his murderer and almost his friend. He also wondered how a human—if he still was one—was to survive in the world of the Shinigami. He seemed to be sitting under one of the few trees in this world, if you could call it a tree. The branches were gnarled and rotting and the few equally rotten apples clinging to them hung like sad little beetles, almost not caring whether they fell off and got buried in the sand. Light wondered vaguely in his newly acquired spare time in waiting for Misa where the Shinigami were. Ryuk had said that they liked to pass their time gambling, but Light didn't see any. He couldn't imagine anyone—or anything—sitting around to play cards in a place like this, but then again there couldn't have been much else to do. Except killing humans, of course...
He wondered why none of them chose to help him in killing criminals. Did it violate one of their rules, or was it just boring to them? They were rather pathetic, if they couldn't even help him create utopia when it was so easy for them. No one suspects a Shinigami, obviously, and they wouldn't have had to worry about threats from the human world. They wouldn't have to fear being killed, either, like he should have...
Light spent the remainder of the time it took Misa to return envisioning not only his perfect world, but a world in which he would never die, and he wondered if he'd found one.