January 8, 2004. "If they're going to send in all those detectives, they should keep quiet about it and let them work in secret," you say. "Those FBI agents were here on a top secret mission, and look what still happened to them. If Kira knows about these guys, he's gonna get them too, for sure. …That's why I bet it isn't even true. This is just a ruse to put pressure on Kira. But it's pretty obvious, so I bet Kira's figured that out, too." « Are you watching me, L? you think. I bet you're looking for clues right now. But you can't find anything. I'm just an ordinary high school student. You don't have a shred of evidence against me, L, and you never will. » The only thing this announcement would be good for, if Kira is as smart as he seems to be, is not to make the killer slip up, but to gather information for some kind of psychological profile. Does he already have a suspect? you wonder. Is L watching Kira right now?
You've thought a fair amount about Kira's profile yourself. And, if only you could work with L, you're sure you could help him far more than whoever he's relying on at the moment.
April 7, 2004. "What kind of person do you think Kira is?" Ryuga, L, asks you. "What's your image of him?" You are sitting at your father's bedside, and there's a terrible irony to the fact that he's in the hospital because of a heart attack. But just because of stress. Not because of Kira. (Probably…)
Anyway, right now you are Yagami Light, concerned for your father; and so as much as you feel a spike of glee that L is asking for your opinion (this is just what I wanted—) your response is measured.
"I think Kira is…" You don't look at him as you speak. "An affluent child." You know exactly what, in your opinion, Kira's criminal profile is. You've been working on it since the case first came to your attention. And you're aware that with every word you speak, you're just digging your own grave. But you have to tell him the truth.
"An affluent child?" L asks. He's turned a little in his seat to glance at you, you catch his expression in the corner of your eye, and you don't need to hear his next words to know you're on the right track. "I like it. Go on…" There's a spark of interest in his eyes, something that makes him look eerily human. But why should that be eerie? He's as human as anyone else. But until this very moment, somehow, you've never felt it.
"If, as assumed, he can kill people by just willing it…" you weigh your words carefully, but everything you say is only exactly what you believe. "If a human being had that kind of power—using it to get rid of criminals, and at the same time making it an example to others to make the world a better place, is something only a child would think of doing." You continue, quietly, "I'd say he's anywhere from a fifth-grader to a high school student… if it was anyone younger than that, they'd either be too scared by that power to use it, or they'd use it to kill people they knew, people they didn't like… and if it was anyone older than that, an adult, they'd only use it for their own personal gain. You could think of tons of ways to use that power and become really rich." You look down at your hands as you finish with the rest of the details, knowing all the while that the perfect suspect you're describing is none other than yourself. "Kira still has some purity about him," you say definitively. "He's an affluent child, who already has everything he needs. I'd say he's probably a junior high student who has his own cell phone, computer and TV."
"So, according to your profile, Yagami-kun…" L says, and you force yourself not to tense, breathing in and out regularly. You are unconcerned. You are Yagami Light, and you know you are not Kira. "The most suspicious of our present targets would be… your sister, Sayu," L finishes, blandly.
All thoughts of acting unsuspicious and of keeping your cool evaporate. Before you know it you're on your feet and yelling, your folding chair clattering to the floor. "What is the matter with you?" you're seeing red and seething. "Did you come here to wish my father well, or to finish him off?"
It's one thing for you to be a suspect. You can handle it. You're prepared for whatever might happen to you, as much as you tried to convince L earlier today that you were worried about Kira finding and killing you. But Sayu—? Not only is the idea preposterous, you know L only brought it up to needle you. As though this were some kind of game. But Sayu is your sister, and as long as you have the power, you will keep her off this game board. If I were Kira, I would want to kill you, you think. But since you're not, you'd settle for punching that innocent look off his face.
Your father interrupts, sternly telling you both to calm down or take the fight outside, and that's when you remember yourself.
I am Yagami Light, Soichiro's son. I'm here because I'm concerned for my father, not to defeat L. "This might just sound like a fond father talking," Soichiro explains, "but I'm absolutely certain that Sayu is not Kira. If anything, she's the type who'd kill someone she didn't like, and then cry her head off about it…"
"You're right…" L agrees.
You don't miss the fact that Soichiro defended Sayu, and not you.
« "Notice he doesn't say "I'm certain that Light isn't Kira," Ryuk says, with a cackle.
Like you could've possibly missed it. »
The truth is, whether you agree with Kira's morals or not, whether you remember killing one thousand and twenty-nine people or whether you know for a fact you're innocent, you are capable of being Kira. When it comes down to it: yes, if you had decided to be Kira, "Kira" is who you'd be. You wouldn't have waffled around. You wouldn't have killed someone you disliked and then cried about it. You wouldn't give up your killing power—if, indeed, there even was a way for Kira to give up his killing power—and you wouldn't break under pressure. You would've calmly experimented to discover the limits of what you could do. If you were going to be a criminal, you would've been the perfect one.
Soichiro is your father. He knows how smart you are; he knows how you hate to lose. He knows enough about you to understand the hypothetical Kira-Yagami-Light, even if he hates it, especially when pushed by L to do so. Because L is pushing the issue. Telling Soichiro that you're a suspect? Bringing up Kira's criminal profile, even when your father's in his hospital bed? It's all calculated. Not just to see what you'll do, but to accustom your father to thinking about you as a suspect, and not a son.
(If L were Kira, he would also be the perfect criminal).
It's jarring to realize that, in the absence of any other viable suspect, with the circumstances pointed toward you—in a sense, you are Kira.
Guilty until proven innocent. Innocent until proven guilty.
June 16, 2004. Day sixteen of confinement. Two weeks and two days, precisely.
You are really uncomfortable.
In fact, you're wondering, absently, what exactly delineates severe discomfort from actual pain. You've always assumed there was some kind of hard line between the two states, and yet, right now, you cannot quite pinpoint whether the best way to describe your situation would be discomfort or pain. Maybe it's an unusual mix of the two. Maybe your pain threshold has grown enough, or you've become habituated enough to the constant chafing against your ankles and wrists, or your back and shoulders have tired of protesting at their unnatural contortion and have subsided into grumbling… maybe you've been bored out of your mind and gone entirely mad. Maybe you are Kira, or were Kira, or maybe you only wished to be. Maybe you hate him. Maybe he is L.
In the famous thought experiment, Schrödinger (Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger) once wrote:
One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
The thought experiment is simpler than it seems. In essence, it takes a premise (that two quantum particles can be in a state of superposition, can be "multiple things at once" until acted on by outside forces—until, that is, it is observed) and brings that premise to its logical and most exaggerated conclusion. The important part of the thought experiment is not the gruesome image of the living and dead cat, dead of being poisoned by hydrocyanic acid and never poisoned in the first place, because the counter never measured radiation and the attached hammer never fell. It's the fact that there was a substance that, at the atomic level, might or might not have decayed. The real importance of the thought experiment, you think—though your mouth is as dry as sandpaper and you feel as though you're in a delirium—is that if you (Kira and not Kira) are the cat, then the thing that caused your ridiculous case is the offending atom. The substance. The "killing power." What caused the kiras' powers to kill? What is it, and how does it act? If only you could figure out what it was…
But still. You disagree fundamentally with L; there is no way to drag quantum logic all the way up to the macroscopic state of cats and killers and gardens with forking paths. You can't be Kira and not Kira, and so because you aren't Kira, you aren't Kira. You didn't kill and you never have, and the sheer complexity of anything that could have rewritten your entire memory of the past five months is entirely unbelievable. The one thing you have never lost faith in, this entire time, has been yourself.
Except that…
That is not true. Not quite.
You'd put yourself in here, after all. You'd been afraid enough of what the evidence suggested to consider the scenario in which L 'proved' you were Kira. Oh, you know why you did it: Misa, the circumstantial evidence, everything piling up on itself. At the time, going into confinement had seemed the best and surest way to prove your innocence. The doubt you claimed you felt about your own mind was entirely false, that 'doubt' that you might have been Kira after all. And yet if anything would be enough to make you doubt yourself, it would be that single action of putting yourself in a box: if you had not been afraid of a worse alternative, you would never have done it.
Another paradox. I don't doubt myself. So… why did I?
.
.
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