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It takes Light twenty years to use up both Death Notes.
He tries again, just for completeness' sake, to see if he can manage to kill another few people by writing names in the inside covers, or by writing on top of pages he's already filled out. It doesn't work.
"I guess that's it, then," Light says, putting down his pen.
From beside him, Ryuk chomps noisily on an apple. "Huh. What are you gonna do now?"
"I don't suppose I'd be able to get my hands on another one," Light says, more for formality's sake than anything else. He eyes the Death Note kept safely in Ryuk's hip holster.
Ryuk grins at him; pointed yellow teeth with a few bits of chewed up apple sticking between them. "Not really."
"Are you going to leave, now?" Light asks. He remembers what the Death Note says. Has opened it, so many times, enough that every single rule written in the book is burned into his brain, along with every detail Ryuk has let slip, along the way, about the Shinigami. He needed to stay here, on earth, with the note, until either Light was dead or the notebook was used up. Whichever came first.
Ryuk ponders for a moment. He floats almost sideways, limbs as unwieldy as a stick insect. One long arm reaches out for another apple from the basket by Light's desk. He holds it in his palm for a long moment.
"Nah," he says at last. "It's still more interesting, down here with you."
Light is still the owner of the Death Notes, although they can no longer be written in. He keeps his memories. And he keeps the notes, which are and have been the diary of his life more fully than any other words he's put to paper. There are names in there that he would not remember if he saw them written again, somewhere else; and there are names he will always remember. Nate River. Mail Jeevas. Mihael Keehl. Shuichi Aiuzawa. Kanzo Mogi. Touta Matsuda. Misa Amane. … L Lawliet. The name is written in Rem's careful hand, and that page of her Death Note is worn smooth from the amount of times Light has opened it, just to look at the words.
Perhaps it's because he's been expecting this for a while; had learned how to crunch his writing down into a pin-length as he feels the unused pages grow shorter under his left hand. (The right one still aches in the cold, and his fingers, where he had been shot, are stiff and twisted like a claw. Matsuda, you idiot. But he was the one who'd acted, in the end. Light has, to his surprise, come to respect that.) The fact that he is no longer Kira—it should change something, shouldn't it? He has, literally, outlived his own godhood.
Sometimes the thought makes him smile to himself on the street; uncanny, too wide. (No one really notices, but if they did, they'd say it was the smile of Death). He is thirty-nine years old; he has had power beyond the scope of human imagining; he has changed the world.
He is in the supermarket buying a bag full of red apples. "How's it going, Riyuzaki?" the cashier asks.
"Good, thank you. And you?" (His eyes linger on the nametag. There was a time when these words would have given him the power to end life, and he has never gotten out of the habit of looking for them. He is not sure he will ever sleep again without seeing lists of names, without the feeling of a phantom pen in his hand.)
They don't notice at first that Kira is gone.
It is the news that notices first, accustomed as it is to the recitations of Kira's judgment; it is the governments that notice first, accustomed as they are to finding prison cells with heart-attack victims contorted on the ground and factoring it into their calculations for beds to fill. It is Kira's worshippers who notice first, and they wonder if the world has displeased him.
"Is Kira dead?"
"Has he ascended back where he came from?"
"Has the lesson been taught?"
"Did we not heed his lesson?"
"Was it an arbitrary matter?"
"Where did he go?"
"Can we get him back?"
These are the questions that fill the streets. The news. The whispers between friends. The gossip at lunchtime. The talk on the subway. The perfect crime, perhaps, was never Kira's existence but his disappearance. As quickly as he leaves, crime wells up again. Though Light had been careful to weed out those he thought prone to criminality; though he has taken such pains to leave only good, law-abiding citizens behind. Kira's worshippers riot on the streets, attacking criminals and hanging them. Policemen take the initiative to shoot when perhaps they shouldn't. Crimes of passion still occur; robberies grow more bold. It is as though Kira's perfect world existed only as long as he could keep them in line, like it was a cult of personality and not a grand experiment. A grand experiment that, at this point, has only one answer: you cannot change human nature. Not really.
(Even Matsuda had shot him, when it came down to it. Must he get rid of the whole world to cleanse it?)
Twenty years ago it would have made him rage. It still does, perhaps; but now he can appreciate the irony.
Light Yagami has been dead for twenty years. He died in the Yellow Box Warehouse, along with the rest of the Kira Task Force. The man who pulled his broken body through the industrial district, afraid he was going to pass out on the concrete and die of blood loss, was nameless when he entered the emergency room. Probably a gangster, the doctors thought. They did not want to treat him, but were afraid not to. Mikami had waited beside him, glaring them into submission and speaking about the injured's legal rights while Light slipped in and out of delirium, sure in one moment that he'd seen his high-school self walking past him on the way; sure again that he'd seen L, that it was L's hand resting on his shoulder. That he was dying already. He must be dying, because Ryuk had left.
"I was trying to decide if you were finished," Ryuk had explained later. (If I should write your name down, he didn't add. They both knew, anyway.)
As the world moves out from under Kira's iron-fisted rule, it descends into chaos. Wars break out. Small ones, usually; he has not overturned everything, but still it amuses Light to hear of what has been done in Kira's name. (You're wrong, he adds; but only to himself. Kira would as easily kill you for war crimes. For the torture and the hypocrisy.) Governments and individuals and desperate conglomerates knock at L's door, needing the help of the greatest detective. In times such as these, his already wide leeway yawns wider. Access to prisons, granted. Access to equipment, no problem. Interrogated a suspect a little too much? …Well. He solved the case, didn't he?
The first time he kills a suspect by hand, pulling the trigger of a gun, he wonders, will they see through it now? (Self defence, he says.) He is forty years old and he has picked up a few martial arts skills along the way; he knows how to take someone down, move with precision. A gun is the epitome of imprecise. The furthest thing from Kira's kills possible, though fuelled by Kira's rage. Messy. Blood shooting out in gouts, the air struggling clear from the body; bowels emptying. He sees the eyes go glassy within the space of moments, and it is like the first time he picked up the Death Note and realized his hands held such power. He laughs, there in the darkness, laughs until he doubles over with the force of it, until it scares him; he comes back to himself clutching the gun, curled into a corner on the floor. The single bulb above him is pitiless, and he is still shaking with the aftermath of the adrenaline rush.
Of course, he can't kill all his suspects. That would get suspicious. Mostly, he just catches them, and sends them to jail, where they might rot the rest of their lives, waiting for the death penalty to arrive.
"Light, it's good of you to come," Sachiko says. She is frail in a way that still surprises him; though her eyes are surrounded by laugh-lines it's been a long time since she smiled. Even this is a pale imitation of what she had once given so unselfconsciously. Funny, how he never valued it until it was gone.
"Hi, Mom. I had some time off so I thought I'd drop by." He smiles, just as practiced and charming as it had been back then. "Where's Sayu?"
"In the garden," Sachiko answers. "If she'd known you were coming—"
The back door bangs open.
He has enough money to support his family for the rest of their lives; more than enough. The house outside the city seemed the way to go. Peaceful, quiet, something Sayu needed. His sister stomps inside, pulling off gardening gloves, and stops when she sees him. A frown passes over her face.
"You've been avoiding us," she signs, walking toward him. (You don't wait around to attack, do you? Light thinks with a kind of fond annoyance.) "I know it's because of Kira. You're L, you've got to know. He's gone, right? For good? He's dead?"
"Mom," Light says, "you shouldn't be playing the news so much, it's getting to Sayu's head—" Sayu smacks his arm.
"Just tell me."
"No one knows. He just disappeared."
"I know that. Officially. But he's dead, right?" Sayu's movements have gotten more frantic, her gestures expansive but frenzied. "You can't keep this from me, not me! I was there, the notebook—what they did in the—you caught him, right? You killed him?"
"Sayu, I don't know what happened," Light says.
"No. No, come on, Light, tell me Kira's dead, tell me it's over…" she's breathing too fast; she grabs onto him for support.
"Sayu, calm down."
"Don't tell me to calm down!" she signs. She's sobbing. "He has to be dead. Light, he has to be dead. I don't want to be afraid anymore."
He holds her, tightly; makes sure she doesn't crumple to the floor like a faded leaf. He says nothing.
When Sayu starts taking trips into the city, when she comes back with a ring on her finger and a quiet, sharp-eyed girl at her side and says, "this is my partner," with an expression belligerent and somehow vulnerable, Light looks at the woman who stands politely beside his thirty-eight year old sister and feels a momentary disdain. This kind of lifestyle is something he doesn't approve of. (Worse than that—something about the look on her face reminds him of Naomi Misora, like she's seeing through all his barricades, even though she's not sure how to piece together what's behind it.) Then he looks back at Sayu. He notices the way she's standing, he notices the glimmer of something like settledness in her shoulders that has not been there before. This is Sayu, Light realizes. And, whatever the occasion, whatever the choice, when it comes to Sayu, he does not judge.
He turns to the woman at his sister's side, and bows in welcome.
He is sixty years old, and he's been Kira for the middle third of his life. Just as they now separate years into Before Kira and After Kira, his life is made of such befores and afters. He is spry, still handsome, but old; he is not the charming, childish student; he is not the god. He feels not just his mortality, which he had felt since he was twenty-three and bleeding out of a hole in his side, but his age; when he visits the children of Wammy's House, with their sharp, mischievous eyes; some studious, some playful, some lost in their own rules and their own world, he sees L everywhere and nowhere. It is like calling on ghosts. Someone will succeed him, eventually. He cannot predict who.
Down in the basement where all truths go to hide, a suspect will die of a heart attack. A little amusement, a private joke known only to two. Ryuk laughs enough for both of them when Light presses the air-filled syringe into a vein. Some criminals, the world is still better off without, and Light is still happy enough to oblige. The crackling cackle fills the dank air; and he puts the syringe back into its case.
He has assistants, bodyguards, partners aplenty; he is L, after all, and his work is righteous. When this young woman wearing a false name (he knows her real one; and, once, it could've sent her to her death but now, it is just a piece of a secret like all his others, stitched into the fabric of his heart) peers over at the dead man, she quirks an eyebrow. Says, "the heart attack. I assume it's purposeful. Do you support Kira?"
"You could say that."
She nods. It is not unusual. Half the world still worships him. The day of his first murder is a national holiday in five countries. "Ironic, though."
"How so?"
She shrugs. "Kira wouldn't approve of you, I know that. His worldview was always quite black and white. People are criminals, in which case they deserve to die; or they're upstanding members of society. I suppose it makes sense a god of divine punishment wouldn't care about motive. Killing suspects… even someone as despicable as that piece of trash… going outside the law, using criminals to do the necessary work… it's something Kira couldn't condone, L. I mean you must know that he would kill you, if he could; if he were still around."
He pulls the chain on the empty bulb, leaving the cell in darkness, and walks out with his assistant behind him. Someone else will come to pick up the trash.
With his left hand he presses the elevator button leading them up to the ground floor, and as they are waiting, Light answers. "It's true," he says. He smiles; and two humans and one shinigami step into the lift.