#13 Death

(A/N: Ironically this one was difficult to write, go figure.)

She stared out the window at the slowly falling snow. Hundreds of white specks, beautiful and individual, and at the same time, each one was lost in the crowd.

She wondered if it snowed in heaven. Or did angels throw dust from their wings and that became the snow?

"Sayu-chan."

She turned and smiled at her dear, elderly mother, calmly icing blue frosting onto the cake, in intricate patterns as she wrote his name in block capitals across the dessert.

"We havn't made Light-kun's birthday cake from scratch for a long time." Sayu commented.

Sachiko nodded. "Well, he never was very big on sweets… and once he moved out he just… seemed too grown-up for cakes on his birthd…birth…" the old woman choked a little on the word, lowering the frosting bag to the counter top, refusing to look at the name she'd written.

Sayu hugged her mother as the tears came. "It's okay…" she whispered, feeling the pinpoints of salty tears on her own cheeks. "Light-kun wouldn't want either of us to cry… neither would daddy…"

Sachiko cried harder on her daughter's shoulder. They stayed that way for some time, allowing each other a brief window of time to grieve.

They dressed in their best black clothes, and left for the family plot, ignoring the snow and happy people chattering about the holidays around them.

They stood in front of the two graves and held their hands in prayer, watched the wind blow out the candle on Light's cake, spoke softly to the graves about what was happening in the world, as though someone might hear.

Sayu stared up at the sky.

"Light always said…" She whispered. "That graveyards were for the living, not the dead." She sighed. "I never understood what he meant… until he passed." She held out one hand and watched the snowflakes land and melt on it, such a brief, beautiful pocket of existence. "Graveyards are so the living have somewhere to remember."

That night Sachiko suffered a sudden and fatal brain haemorrhage.

The last Yagami came every year with a cake and snowflakes.