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He liked to watch Misa sleep sometimes. Light was so rarely the voyeur in these games, always the observed: Penber, L, Ryuk, L. Misa herself, because even now she would follow him out to the train station every morning as he left for work like she thought he didn’t know. So, being the watcher rather than the watched for once was a comfort.
Light stood in her doorway. They didn’t even share a bedroom--Light had claimed halfheartedly that he was waiting for marriage, and she’d eaten it like she did with everything he said. Sometimes, he wondered if she thought they had a normal relationship. They didn’t even kiss. Not pointedly, they just didn’t. He had feared Misa might want to, but she never even tried, never mentioned it. He would probably let her, if she got annoying about it. But she never did. She hugged him and grabbed at his hair and squeezed his arm with her sharp nails until he thought he was going to lose circulation, but she didn’t kiss him.
When she was awake, she was a constant barrage of movement and talking and touching. So. Much. Touching. Asleep, she looked almost peaceful--though she still had a little furrow in her brow, and the corner of her mouth would quirk up and down, like she was harassing him even in her sleep.
She even slept ridiculously, tossing and turning, always ending up with her face mashed into the pillow and one leg hanging off the bed. Light felt his mouth curl into a sneer just watching her. She was of no use to him with her eyes closed.
“I like her, too,” a voice said behind him. Light nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Ryuk,” he responded coolly, a second too late, a fact upon which Ryuk did not comment. “What do you mean by that?”
“I like her,” Ryuk said simply. “She’s probably one of my favorite humans. So pretty. And so interesting…”
“That’s one way to put it,” Light said darkly.
“And you like her, too.”
“Ryuk, you know why I keep Misa around. You know it has nothing to do with whether I like her.” God, sometimes Ryuk was such a middle-schooler. “Misa is my eyes. She’s useful, even though she’s stupid. But she’s a bad person, a murderer.”
“You’re a murderer.”
Light just glared at him.
“Right, right. Fine. You’re worried that I think you like-like her or some dumb human bullshit.” Ryuk waved a sharp black hand, grin on his face impassive as ever. “Trust me, buddy, I know you don’t like-like her.”
Ryuk made a lewd gesture that was probably supposed to represent sex, but he had a limited understanding of human genitals and it ended up looking more like some elaborate thumbs down. Light pretended not to understand. Ryuk settled for bugging his eyes out even more than usual, then putting his pointy thumb to his mouth knowingly and biting down on the nail, which Light did not like at all.
“I don’t like that tone, Ryuk. I’m perfectly capable of--why are we even having this conversation?”
“You’re watching her sleep,” Ryuk pointed out.
“L watched me sleep. You watch me sleep.”
“Exactly.”
Abruptly, before Light could figure out whatever the hell that meant, Misa flopped over onto her back and whimpered out, “Just do it. You can do it.”
Light looked back only to find that Ryuk had phased back through the wall and disappeared. Just typical. Misa was writhing in the sheets like she expected to escape some invisible hold, crying unintelligibly and still very much asleep.
“I’ve done enough, you can kill me!” she cried.
He found himself stepping minutely closer. That odd comfort he got from watching her sleep was only increasing, completely without his consent.
“No, no, no,” she kept saying, “no, no, no, no, you can, you can.”
Light was almost by the bedside now, he could reach out and touch her hair, her twitching hand.
Her voice went quiet and soft for some reason.
“It’s okay, it’s okay. You can, you can kill me, please.” She was bargaining now. Light felt his heartbeat pound in his chest for the first time in exactly one year and fourteen days.
“I’ll forgive you for it.” And of course she would, of course she would. His fingers twitched with hers.
“Please. Don’t just keep me.” And that was what he was doing, wasn’t it? Why did he keep her? He didn’t even like her, he wouldn’t feel guilty for killing her, he could find someone to take the eye deal, he wasn’t stuck with Misa anymore, and he hated her. Why?
“Just listen to me,” she pleaded, “Rem, please.”
Light stopped in his tracks.
Rem. Yes.
She probably used to watch over Misa just like this, because she was a sentimental fool. He had beaten her, he thought smugly, he’d figured her out. She’d killed L for him and that had killed her, and Light had won. He wondered how her claw had felt around the pen as it wrote L’s name, how she’d looked knowing it was her last moment. He felt his hand twitch again, aching to have been the one to do it. To have his fingers on L’s pulse again, to watch his eyes close forever. To relive the quirk of L’s lips as Light grinned down at him. To have been the one to collapse into sand as L went limp in his arms.
But I was right, L had been thinking, Light was sure. And L had been right—Light had been more than happy to give that to him at the end.
Next time he killed L, it would be with his hands, he thought. Maybe the time after that he’d use a knife. He’d hold poison in his mouth and spit it back into L’s. He’d smother L in their bed. He’d push L off the building before that horrible question could fill the air. He saw it every time he closed his eyes.
He felt deranged. You can only kill someone once, after all.
“I’ll do anything! I don’t want to—” Misa’s thrashing was starting to grate on him, really. That was the only reason he reached out and perfunctorily combed Misa’s bangs out of her eyes. To his horror, she sighed into the touch, bringing a hand up to hold his fingers to her forehead.
Her eyes blinked open slowly, squinting at Light in the dark.
“Light?” She was just sleepy enough that her genuine confusion seeped into her voice.
“You were having a nightmare. It was pretty loud. It woke me up,” he lied. He cringed at his own clipped tone. He let so much slip around Misa, lately. He kept forgetting to sound like Light Yagami. Not that she ever cared. He’d dropped mask after mask in front of her, been as cruel as he was capable of being, and she still loved him, more than Light thought anyone should love someone, certainly more than anyone had ever, or would ever, love Light. It was disgusting.
“Oh.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll go back to bed now. Just don’t do that again.”
“Doesn’t Light want to know what the nightmare was about?”
He really, really didn’t. He typically tried to know as little about Misa’s emotions as possible, and she was always having them, loudly, which made that very difficult. But her hand was still clasped tight around his wrist like a handcuff, hot from being under the covers. He had no doubt that if he walked backwards now, she’d be dragged out of the bed and onto the floor like a ragdoll rather than let go.
Instead, he sat down at the edge of the bed and pretended that this was his idea.
“Rem was there and Ryuzaki was there. Watching me again, and he was saying that he knew everything and he knew Light was Kira and I’d given everything away.” She gave a weak smile. “But I knew I’d be okay, because Rem was watching me, and Rem wouldn’t kill me but I asked her to, and she--” Her voice broke off.
“Misa.” He said her name firmly, without an edge of anger. It was his best approximation of comfort, because he had to make up for his slip earlier. She met his eyes.
“Well, she’s gone now. She told me how to kill her, and I killed her.” Her voice had hardened, somewhere in that break. “No one looks at me anymore.”
He wanted nothing more than to look away, but he couldn’t. Not after that admission, not while he still remembered L’s eyes at his back, still had Ryuk. And Misa. She didn’t have him, but he had her, as much as he tried to get rid of her.
“Oh, Light,” she sighed, some of her typical manic joy making its way back into her voice. She wrapped her arms around his waist and started dragging him down to the bed, half on top of her. “At least I have you, right?”
Right.
He let her take him down, landing haphazardly on the bed and rolling off of her sprawled-out body onto what would presumably be his side, if he ever slept in this bed.
“That’s how it should be, isn’t it, Light? Doesn’t it feel better?” She moved her arms up to circle his shoulders and nuzzled her face into the crook of his neck. He could feel her hot breath on him like a brand.
“Misa, stop.”
She just hummed.
Misa was the only person who ever touched him like this, like she loved him. There was a friendly clap on the back from Matsuda on occasion, maybe, or his father placing a firm hand on his shoulder. Sayu used to reach up and ruffle his hair, because she knew how much it annoyed him. He didn’t think she’d done that in a long time. He hadn’t seen her in a long time.
L used to hit him--or kick him, as was L’s preference. Light had been so careless without the Death Note, swanning around, putting his hands on L’s shoulders, gazing into L’s owlish eyes, slapping L across the face. He’d let L think that he could touch him; he’d made it so L felt like he could offer what he’d offered, just before--
L’s hair was--had been--thicker than Misa’s, coarser. Light hated that he knew that. He hated that before brushing Misa’s bangs away earlier, there was only one other person he’d done that for.
Misa, who was now playing with the hairs at the nape of his neck where one of her hands rested. Her body was curled up against his side, head resting on his chest. Against his will, he sank deeper into the mattress.
“I’m serious, Misa. Quit it or—”
“Or you’ll what?” She only wrapped her arms tighter around his neck. He heard the smirk in her voice as she continued, “You’ll kill me?”
She giggled like she knew something he didn’t, warm breath tickling his bare skin. “Mm… Light…”
By the time he opened his mouth to respond, eyes tracking the path of Misa’s undyed roots in the low light of the bedroom, she was already fast asleep and breathing heavily. A dark presence in the corner of the room told him that Ryuk had returned, though what about this was entertaining, Light could not say.
Resigned to his fate, he laid his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes, confident that he would not get a wink of sleep.
. . .
Light was buried.
He had the sense of being deep underground, in some cavity carved just for him. The weight of the grave dirt pressed heavily down on his chest. He could just barely breathe around it. It was dark and claustrophobic in his hovel and the air was thin, but Light’s limbs were more relaxed than they ever were normally, as if he was under a heavy blanket. His fingers were dug into the cool earth beneath him like he’d fall upwards if he let go.
His eyelids drifted, up and down. For some reason he was certain that if he closed them fully, he’d never open them again, and that caused hot panic to curl up his spine and tighten his throat. This was not a grave, he told himself. There was something to be had here, some reason to keep his eyes open.
“Turn around,” a low voice said, inexplicably from somewhere below him. Light didn’t hear it so much as feel the vibrations of it rumbling through the dirt, but he still recognized the voice. He turned his best approximation of it over in his brain every waking moment, though it mingled with his own lately. It was a compulsion, a scab he couldn’t stop picking at. This, though, was definitely its original form--less smooth than he remembered it, Japanese slightly accented in a way that he never could really replicate because it was so unpredictable. In his silence, the voice began laughing at him a little, shaking with near-silent breaths. Light had never known this voice to laugh the loud, raucous laughter of a normal person, but this laugh was its most genuine, the equivalent of rolling on the floor and crying tears of mirth. Light was decidedly irked by this development.
When it caught its breath, the voice said, “Ah, don’t get annoyed with me already…You don’t want to think my name. Possibly, you can’t right now. It doesn’t matter anyway, Light. You never really knew it, did you?"
Light’s body tensed at being addressed. His fingers clenched in the dirt like he could dig his way down to the voice’s origin, but as they filled with soil he felt the thing he was holding harden into long, bony fingers, cold--not in the way these fingers were usually cold, but in the way Light thinks they must be now in the chill of death. The fingers intertwined with his like links on a chain.
“I heard your little speech at the funeral, by the way. I’m honored. Won’t you turn around, Light?”
Light grit his teeth.
“Don’t be like this, Light. We had a moment then, didn’t we?” Coarse hair tickled the back of Light’s neck, damp. “You know, I still have all of my vital organs. I have to say, it’s nice of you to leave my body intact.”
Light felt like he should feel someone’s breath on his shoulder, but instead he felt dry, hard lips ghost across his ear as they moved, still talking, without once exhaling. This voice, this body, it never did shut up, but being dead he supposed it didn’t need to breathe, unless it was trying to make a point by laughing at him. Light sneered. “You could take them if you wanted, Light. Just to make sure I don’t come up there and disturb your holy mission.”
“Turn around,” the voice breathed out. Was there ever a point in your life--It’ll be lonely, won’t--I think I wanted you to be--I wanted to tell you--A whisper: “Kira.”
Light whipped his head around--impossibly, as if he wasn’t laying on the ground at all--and came face to face with dark, round eyes alight with victory. The name was there, at the back of his throat, but…
“Light!”
He snapped awake to Misa’s shrill voice, her fingers running through his hair.
She was laying directly on his chest, which explained the burial. He could barely breathe like this, but he didn’t shove her off. Her face was right in front of his, with an expression that was half concern and half vindicated glee.
“You were having a nightmare. It was pretty loud. It woke me up.” She affected a stupid deep voice that did not at all sound like him, but he got the message. “Is Light okay?”
“I'm fine. You’re just kind of crushing my lungs, that’s all,” he lied.
“And you’re crushing my arm,” she pointed out. It was at that moment he realized his fingers were digging into her forearms like he was afraid she’d roll away, which was ridiculous. He’d like nothing more than for her to roll away. He slowly unclenched his grip, trying to be casual about it.
“Sorry.” He tried to put a sort of nervous laughter into the apology.
“Ah, Light isn’t used to cuddling,” she said knowingly, rolling off to retake her spot lying next to him. “But that’s what people in relationships do! I’ll have to teach him like a beginner.”
Sure. Whatever. Fine.
She nudged his shoulder until he was on his side, facing away from her. He went willingly--at least he didn’t have to see her face. Then, he felt her slowly slot herself behind him, snaking one arm over his waist and holding him tightly.
Her hair tickled the back of his neck as she pressed her forehead between his shoulders.
Her body was warm, moving with slow, even breaths that betrayed the fact that she was alive--regrettably, he told himself, but he couldn’t put any real fire behind it.
He let his eyes fall shut, disgustingly comfortable. It was from the distinct lack of sleep, maybe, or the uncanny resemblance to the dream. He could kill her, he reminded himself. He probably should.
He didn’t dream again that night.