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Light had decided he was going to save a life today.
The life in question wriggled in his grasp and nipped him hard on the finger, enough so that it broke skin and drew blood. Ooh. He considered wringing the ungrateful thing's little neck for that, and throwing it back out to the fox that had first snapped it up. But instead, he clamped his hands firmly around the struggling magpie, trying to contain it through his sweater, which was wrapped around it like the confines of a straight jacket. He tried to avoid aggravating the injury to its wing - didn’t need to make this any harder of a job for himself.
Then slowly it went limp and stopped struggling, although he could tell it was still conscious. Could feel its chest expanding in his fingers, breathing rapidly. Finally. Light had been waiting for the shock to kick in. That always made creatures so passive. So much easier to work with. Inside his and Misa’s apartment, he set the bird down on the ground while he looked for something to keep it in. He emptied out a shoebox - one of Misa’s, that had once contained a rather chunky pair of platform knee-high boots, and so the box itself, too, was rather large - and placed the magpie inside, fussing over the sweater so that it no longer restrained the bird, but gave it a comfortable place to nestle into.
This might have been his favourite part. The part where they didn't run – the part where they wouldn't fight. Something weak, and in need of a savior.
This wasn’t the first time Light had saved a small animal’s life, but only the third bird he’d found. He’d been a child when he’d found the first one, a pigeon, and he had been forced to relinquish it to the vet he’d brought it to. That had really irritated him. He hadn’t been quick to make that mistake again. He'd learned a lot more about caring for a bird with the second, a tiny tree sparrow with an injured leg, and he’d done it all on his own. He hadn’t even told his parents about that one.
But it wasn’t just birds. During his youth, he had accumulated a modest, albeit quite impressive repertoire of small creatures extended his salvation over his years. A couple of frogs, a squirrel, three butterflies (such creatures were far too delicate; he was lucky for those and would take in no more), a dormouse, two kittens, two beetles, and even a spider with less than the average number of legs. Sometimes, he had shared these successes with his family, brimming with pride and basking in theirs, but most often they were his own private projects. He needed no thanks for his work. Seeing the creature alive and well was enough.
It was a powerful thing, to have control of the life of something so much smaller than him. For his own whims to be the only thing standing between them and death. Playing, like a god, with their lives in his hands. Certainly, in that time, there had been some creatures he’d come across and ultimately deemed insignificant; their existence not worth the trouble. But it had been quite a long time since he’d felt inclined to take on any creature in need at all. It was a practice he’d rather outgrown around the same time he acquired the power of the Death Note. He rarely had a spare moment for it anymore. No longer did he crave it. But something about this particular creature drew him in, and gave Light the impression it was worth the effort it would take to save it. And so it was decided. He would take pity on it.
A day later, after he had wrapped gauze over its torn and bloodied wing, it had calmed down and regained some sense, but the magpie didn’t seem to have much of an appetite. He tried offering it a few chopped vegetables. He tried nuts. He tried a scrap of meat leftover from the dinner Misa had prepared for them. When he was driven almost to the point of exasperation, it finally picked at a soft strawberry. Each slight movement seemed to thoroughly exhaust it. When it would pause, utterly worn with fatigue, he would nudge the strawberry, and it found a little strength to try again.
“Good,” he urged it on. It was his first catch in a long time. He wanted to see it thrive.
Sitting on the ground beside it, he found that the whole experience was proving quite meditative. Relaxing. Nostalgic. Being responsible only for one tangible life that he could see in front of him was somehow a weight eased from the burden of being the god of the new world. Assuming the role of caretaker was a welcome breath of fresh air in a stifling room. He felt different. A lighter, younger version of himself once more.
Kira. He heard the voice in his memory, breaking through his thoughts with the tentativeness of a hand through spiders’ silk, at once right in front of him and yet distant, both forgotten and unforgettable; a voice quiet, gentle, but wrapped in a determined edge that coated its soft centre like some candy. So you play with innocent lives just as much as guilty ones, do you?
“You’re one to talk,” he retorted. Letting go of his daydream, he realized that he had directed his ire squarely at the magpie. It tilted its head and watched him with keen, dark eyes. The shock or the stress or the injury had made it rather placid, and even when Light reached his hand into the box, it did not flinch. He grazed his pinky finger over the feathers of its delicate throat, and still it did not recoil from him. It hadn’t fought him when he’d patched its wing up, either. Only watched. He figured it must have been a distress response, because otherwise, he would have to admit that it seemed, somehow, at once both curious and defiant.
He smiled down on the creature, all benevolence.
It looked scruffier than the sleek and stylish magpies he was used to seeing around, but its color was just as striking. And it was clever. It had already learned to recognize Light; watching him, always watching him, with dark eyes, empty of everything except intrigue.
It learned to let itself out. Light had come home one day to find it on his desk, beady little black eyes glaring up at him, the lid of the box askew. He was almost impressed. But if the bird really had been wise, it would have had the foresight to return to the box before Light had had a chance to find out. He put the bird back inside the box and taped it shut.
The next day, he went out and purchased a cage for it, and a small padlock to fix onto its door. Just as a precaution.
If he were going to keep it for a pet, the cage he had chosen would have been much too small. He knew that. But as it healed, its movement would need to be restricted in order to prevent it from hurting itself any further. That was important. And then? Well, he simply wasn’t planning on holding on to it after that.
He transferred the bird from box to cage with the sweater that once used to be his and now kind-of-sort-of belonged to it. At first he did not put the sweater in the cage, thinking the bird would choose to sit up on the singular perch that the cage had any room for. But instead it hunkered down in a corner of the floor of the cage, hunched and tucked into itself, and when it made it clear that that was where it was going to stay, he felt profoundly sorry for it, and he placed the sweater around it.
It had been almost a week now since he’d brought it home. In the evenings, he covered the cage with an old blanket. Sometimes, from underneath, he would hear the bird trying out the new sounds it was picking up in Light’s apartment, babbling and murmuring like it was grasping tentatively at the structure of these brand new, fascinating noises. The first clear imitation it made seemed to be that of some sort of scratching noise. It took Light until the morning, sitting to condemn a few criminals over breakfast, to realize that the sound was that of the determined scrawlings of pen to paper. It was looking at him intently.
Something about it made an impression on him. So much so that it compelled him to walk over to the cage, unlock it, and take the bird out, scooped in his palm. The bird, to its credit, didn’t seem at all bothered. He set it on the desk with him and returned to his work. It got up and pecked with great interest at the Death Note, and then tried to take the moving pen directly out of his hand.
“What? You don’t approve of the work that Kira does?” He tutted. “You’re just like all the rest.”
The implications of the next night were worse.
“Oh, Light, he’s so cute!” Misa had squealed when she’d finally noticed their guest. “What’s his name?”
“Name?” Light seemed bothered by such an inane question, although it went over Misa’s oblivious head. “It doesn’t have one. We won’t be keeping it for long.”
“Oh can’t we? Please?”
“No, Misa. It’s a wild animal. Once I’m sure it’s gotten better, I’ll release it.” Or rather, he didn’t want the effort it would take to care for it as a pet to outlive the ego boost it was meant to provide him. Misa pouted with disappointment, and then wiggled her finger in between the bars of the cage, cooed, and made kissing noises. The magpie hopped backward. It tilted its head back, opened its beak, and repeated, in a strained and uncanny voice that came from the back of its throat, No, Misa. Despite the message, she squealed with sheer amazement and delight.
“He talked! He talked! He likes me. He has to stay.”
Light hadn’t known magpies could do that.
But to his great relief, it didn’t speak all that much. There were intermittent bouts of, no, Misa, usually brought on for good reason, and those did bring him amusement, but otherwise, the bird stuck to ambient noise or its own calls, or really it said nothing much at all. It was quiet most of the time. That was definitely the way Light preferred it. It worked out fine right up until the end of the second week, when it said, in its strange and inhuman little voice,
Kira.
Light’s face was immediately hot with indignance. As though the ungrateful little creature had horrendously insulted him. His expression was screwed up in disgust at its disrespect.
“You don’t even have any idea of the weight that word holds. What you are in the presence of.” The bird tilted its head and said it again.
Kira. To Light, it almost sounded like mockery.
“Yes. Your saviour. Don’t forget it.”
Kira.
“All right, shut up, already,” Light said, his insult giving way to irritation. “Who do you think is going to hear you?”
Kira.
“No one would believe you, anyway.”
Kira. Kira.
Kira, it overlapped with the sweet voice in his memory. Have you gotten yourself in too deep?
He covered up the cage.
Kira. No, Misa. Kira. Kira. Kira? The mimicking of Misa's vexatious, lip-smacking kisses. Kira.
“Chatty today,” Light muttered, offering the bird an overripe strawberry for breakfast. The bird, still locked in its too-small cage. He squished the strawberry in between the bars. Even in light of its developing remarks, Light couldn’t yet bring himself to concede to keeping it and provide it with a new, adequately sized and furnished enclosure. It was still crouched on the floor of the cage, refusing to use the perch. It had been four weeks. By this point Light was sure it should have been feeling well enough to sit properly. He really wasn’t interested in the responsibility and time it would take to keep it - he had an entire world to dedicate that to. But he couldn’t allow it to be set free, either. Not in this condition, and certainly not with the vocabulary it had picked up. He opened the cage and reached in, and it climbed to stand on his outstretched fingers.
Li-ight! it said, arching with the effort of replicating Misa’s buoyant, lilting pitch, with melody in the i. Then a little bark; Kira. It shook its feathers out.
“Stupid bird,” Light chided. “You shouldn’t have started talking. Now what’ll I do with you?”
He had spent a considerable amount of time weighing this dilemma. Whenever he did have visitors, he hid the bird away, and as of yet it had not spoken a single word when it was locked away and alone in a dark, empty room. So maybe he could go on entertaining guests and pretending he did not have this bird in his apartment at all. It was working out fine thus far. Or if a coworker - or worse still, his father - were to visit his apartment, and somehow hear the damned thing, was it at all possible that he could convince them that the bird said Kira because… well, because he talked out loud about his work in front of it? Because he incessantly, unrestingly, obsessively watched the news? Because he’d had a guest over, and this guest had brought the subject up, and the bird just so happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had picked it up, that’s so embarrassing, but you know, you know how these things are… Well. There was a chance.
The clever little thing seemed as though it was politely waiting its turn to speak before it cocked its head and rasped its blunt response. The scratching of pen to paper. Light guessed that must have been its word for kill.
Lately Misa had taken to calling it our bird.
Want me to pick up some seeds for our bird?
It drove Light crazy. Nevermind seeds! The strange little creature only accepted fruit and nothing else, it would never eat that! She clearly didn't know the first thing about his bird. He could tell that she wanted for it to become a stand-in for something they could love together, that would bring her closer to him, but she hardly cared for it at all. Not in the way Light knew how. It sickened him to think about it. He did not want to share his mission with someone who so sincerely misunderstood it.
Light cut up a slice of apple into thin slivers for the magpie, and left the rest to a covetous Ryuk. He’d had the bird in his possession for five weeks now. He’d stopped having to replace the gauze over its wing, which to Light’s best inspection looked to have healed up just fine, but the bird did not fly. Not that he fancied allowing it free reign of his apartment, but it struck him as unusual. He was trying to figure out whether he’d need to expend the effort to clip its wings or not.
The magpie greeted him with a noise that sounded like the quiet ticking of his wristwatch. It was so comfortable with him that he was able to feed it each apple sliver by hand. By the hand of the wrist on which he wore his watch.
Actually, it would only eat from his hand. Not only that it turned up its beak at any offer from Misa, but Light had to learn not to try to feed it by leaving food in the cage. He would only ever come back to find it completely untouched, and the idiot starved. This bird was turning out to be a demanding, needy thing. This wasn’t exactly the glorious undertaking he’d first envisioned.
Stupid bird, it hacked out between bites, a striking impression of Light’s smooth tone, only somewhat garbled through the strange filter of its throat. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid bird.
“Hey, come on,” he said, extending a finger to scratch its head. “You don’t have to repeat that.” He wondered whether he truly meant it, or whether he was just using the same fabricated thoughtfulness he was used to using on human beings.
He asked the beautifully melancholy voice in his head for his opinion, but no answer. Hmph. Figures. He always had been selfish and busy.
Seven weeks after he’d brought home the magpie, he returned home from work to find the cage empty, and Misa snivelling on their couch.
“You liked that bird more than you like me,” she whined, unprompted, nothing but hurt and accusation. “You gave him all your attention.”
“I thought you liked the bird.”
“I like you more. You should feel the same…”
“Misa, where is it?” Light asked tersely, in no mood for her temper.
“I let him go.” She turned up her nose and sniffled. “You said you would, anyway. I don't know why you won't. You liked him too much.”
“Misa,” Light said, as evenly and amicably as he could muster, “This bird says things like “Misa”, “Light”, and “Kira”. I would have been an idiot to let it go like that.” Indirect, but it hit its mark and Misa hung her head. Then, figuring it would be hopeless, but asking all the same, “Where did you take it?”
“I just… put him down in some grass outside…”
Immediately, Light strode over to the window and leaned out, in the futile, desperate hope to catch a glimpse of the creature flitting around through their suburban surroundings. Dancing around, and squawking, Kira, Kira, Kira. Li-ight is Kira. He had to adjust his expectations, and lower his gaze, but to his relief and astonishment it was actually there - the bird was sitting on the ground, supposedly having not moved a single inch from where Misa had placed it. Small, and lost. Light hurried downstairs.
At the sight of his approach, however, the bird took off to a nearby tree. Light almost swore. Not once had it seemed to be afraid of him since he’d first found it. No… it must have been that this stubborn bird didn’t feel quite like giving up its newfound freedom just yet.
“Healed up just fine then, have you?” The bird shook its feathers out, dipped its head, and croaked, Kira!
And then, all at once, it consumed him. He was overcome with the insatiable, bodily desire for nothing more than to have the stupid thing in his possession again. The feeling spread through his chest and into his extremities like an infection. It would be impossible to capture it again now that Light had done a great job and it had healed up well. Maybe if he were to somehow injure it again… Then he'd heroically, once more, take the role of savior, but this time he wouldn't give it the chance to be let go. He would do more than just clip its wings, he'd amputate them. He'd keep the magpie locked away forever. He looked around for a rock.
But the bird then ducked back down to the ground and hopped right in front of him. Light found himself confused. What exactly was it doing? Back to the tree, ground, tree. Li-ight! A ticking like that of his watch. Then he realized. The damned thing was playing with him. Toying.
Kira. Kira.
Mocking. He was sure of it.
He didn’t have time for this. The next time it swooped to the ground, he threw his jacket over it like a net and grabbed it. It struggled, so he held it tighter. He wrapped it in the fabric and tried to muffle its trills of protest - and its incessant Kira, Kira. He needed to get it back to the apartment. Didn’t know what was where - he couldn’t see the bird itself. “Shut up.” Bolting to the stairs. Kira? Stupid bird. Praying not to run into a neighbor. He held it tighter still; clutched it to his chest as he ascended back to his apartment. Kira. “Stop. Squirming.” Grit teeth. Tightened grip. Tighter. “Stop.” Kira. Kira, stop.
And suddenly the bird quietened. Stilled.
So too did Light.
He knew.
He knew. He’d heard the snap. He’d heard it. He’d felt it in between his fingers. The pop of bone. Unnatural movement. Nauseating motionlessness. He wouldn’t have to look. A sick pit in his stomach. He loosened his grip into a cradle like it would do any good now. Stood rooted to the spot, one foot on either step. Gaze only forward. I’m saving it. I’m saving it. I was saving it.
He loved the things that were innocent with his whole heart and his whole being. He hated only those that were evil. That deserved to be condemned; that deserved to be killed. So which one was this magpie? This magpie that called out to him with accusations, saying Kira, Kira, but could never have had any true comprehension of what the word really meant. Was that what he was going to call justice? He swallowed thickly, feeling an all-too-familiar, long-forgotten chill; recognized it as the same fresh and gut-wrenching dread that had taken over him the first time he had ever used the Death Note. That feeling he had, as he always managed to, twisted into a faultless power. That had melted away, quickly overtaken by reasoning, logic, and righteousness. Justified. Excused. Virtuous.
Was this what you were hoping for, Kira? The soft voice asked him. It only asked, it didn’t judge - but it sounded all too much like somber regret. Did you get what you wanted?
Misa would find him sat on the stairs a half hour later, his hands threaded into his own hair, curled over the unmoving parcel laid carefully, reverently, in his lap. His knees to his chest; and it made her think of someone who hadn't crossed her mind in a long time.