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Thanks to Ray Bradbury, it was fairly common knowledge that a fire needed to reach 451 degrees Fahrenheit to burn a book. Or, 232.778 Celsius, since I was living in Japan for my third life. I didn’t know if that held true for a Death Note, but since I was now Yagami Light, I was probably going to get a chance to find out.
I don’t think the butterfly effect would have managed to reach the shinigami realm, but I don’t know how much me being Light might have changed things. Sure, I was still an uber genius and very pretty, but that was about all I shared with the original.
My parents were reluctantly accepting of the fact that I wanted to be an astrophysicist instead of a police officer. However, I didn’t tell them that on weekend nights I snuck out to play electric bass in a band that did covers of English rock ‘n’ roll music while wearing a dress, a brightly colored, long haired wig, dramatic make up, and a choker over my adam’s apple so that I looked like a girl. I didn’t want my father to have a heart attack even without the stress of Kira, after all.
I was considering telling Sayu, though. Maybe if she scored well on her next English test I would bring her along with me to one of our gigs.
It was as I was contemplating ways to sneak Sayu out of the house without our mother noticing in my last class of the day that I saw it. I thought it was a little black bird at first, tumbling out of the sky after dying on the wing. Once it hit the ground, though, I recognized it for what it was and knew that I would be indulging in some light book burning tonight.
People said things to me as I passed them, and I definitely said something back because manners were important, even if most of my attention was focused on the incredibly dangerous murder weapon just sitting on the ground where anyone could pick it up and use it. I was so anxious, in fact, that I almost picked it up with my bare hands like a dumbass.
I didn’t actually know if the Death Note would corrupt humans, but like hell was I going to even try to experiment with only myself as the test subject. Maybe I could use some of the fuckboys in my grade…?
No, no, that was bad. That was the sort of thinking that led to mass murder and dealing with all of L’s bullshit. I wasn’t going to go there no matter how tempting it might be to study the effects of a magical murder weapon on the human psyche.
Anyways, I was not going to use the Death Note, not even once, no sirree, not even if there were some people who the world would definitely be better off without. I had already decided that I didn’t want to be Kira and didn’t trust anybody else to be Kira, so the only choice was to burn it.
Even knowing that, I was still a little sad as I watched the pages of the Death Note blacken and curl in the flames. I could have killed so many people who were contributing to climate change and, if the mind control part worked like I thought it did, made plenty of criminal billionaires donate all of their funds to charity.
It was thinking along those lines that led to the original dying before he even got to thirty and turning the world into a hellscape, so I didn’t do anything to put out the fire as the Death Note slowly but surely was consumed by fire.
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