Chapter Text
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
- Dylan Thomas
*
Light Yagami had been the owner of the Death Note for three months when he noticed the first feather.
A spindle of twine and plume, lying innocently on his pristine white pillow on a Tuesday morning after he’d woken up. The spine was tiny, a small, sharp pinprick, the tufts of feathery air hardly visible. A trial run.
He assumed it had come off of his clothes somewhere, a piece of lint. Light picked it up carelessly, tossing it into his bin, and collected his things to go school, picking up his bag on the way out. He didn’t think about it again for the rest of the week. Not when he had better things to do.
God couldn’t spare a single thought.
*
The next was equally as innocuous. Light had finished his prep class, and was heading home in his leisurely, unhurried walk. His mind was reeling; mentally, he was a coiled spring, a loaded gun, a flame which he wanted to burn into the pages of the Death Note. It was slowly becoming an extension of him, its presence a comforting fixation, utterly no where but everywhere at the same time; in his pocket, in his home, festering in his mind. Ryuk served as a permanent haunting of the thing that had allowed him life, given him existence; without it, Light felt like nothing.
It was enchanting, power. Completely intoxicating, and Light had always given himself into his addictions, like a child on too loose of a leash. The reins to the world had been handed to him on a silver platter, and he was high on its freedom. The Death Note, he felt, had morphed him into what he was truly destined to be, on his self-made pedestal, watching the humans move and act on the stage that was the world, and he made them drop dead once he was bored with them.
L would be his puppet. Light would hold all the strings. The Death Note had promised him so.
He continued on his walk, the wintery air biting at him. When he arrived home, he was greeted by the familiar sight of his mother, beaming at him, and it made Light feel sick.
“So? Your results?” She practically stammered, looking at him expectedly, as if anything but the expected was going to happen. Light wondered what would happen if one day he returned and had failed an exam- he wanted to see his parents expectations collapse in on themselves like dying stars.
He sighed, and pulled out his latest set of mock tests for his upcoming college exam. As he reached into his bag to pull out the papers, a small, charcoal black feather tumbled out alongside it. It floated to the floor, inconspicuous and unseen. A predecessor. A paradigm.
Light didn’t notice it, and after the regular few minutes of talk Light allocated to his mother everyday, he returned upstairs, Ryuk’s laugh slowly becoming the soundtrack of of his life.
The feather was laid out in the front hallway. It stayed there all evening, and all morning, and for most of the next day, until Sachiko Yagami noticed it, tutted, and quickly threw it away.
*
Winter had come and gone, but Kira had been born and raised.
He had passed L’s surveillance of him; he knew that nothing would come of it. He had acted perfectly, smoothed over every facial expression and tic into nothingness, had become and worn the skin of straight A high school student, likeable Light Yagami. It was hard to slot himself back into the person he used to be; hollow and subdued. It was as if the container that had previously held him had now become too small, his dreams too substantial, and he could no longer fit into that shell, that husk of a person. The writing of names on his piece of Death Note was a reminder that he was someone else now. Kira. Light Yagami was slowly melting into nothingness, right before his eyes.
It was Ryuk who noticed it. Light was sat at his desk, in his school uniform, listening to the excerpts of newly announced criminals being broadcast on television. The news speaker’s voice was a constant background monotony, but Light treated their word like gold. His hand had started to ache one hour in, but thankfully he had taught himself to be ambidextrous a long time ago, a skill that he had recently become very thankful for.
His writing became scrawls on the lines of the Death Note, his lettering slowly becoming more haphazard, and yet he continued, marching on into the flames of his idealism.
He was shaken out of it by Ryuk., as he too often was these days. Whilst the Shinigami was only useful in certain, selective situations, it served as a constant hindrance. It was one of the only flaws to the Death Note; it kept Light from ever believing it was ever truly his, and only his.
“You’ve certainly gotten passionate, Light.” Was all it said, in its scratchy, coarse voice. It was sat on his bed, in its usual position, watching Light at random intervals. Light could feel its eyes boring into his back.
“Yes, Ryuk.” Were the only words he offered back to it, too lost to remember language, only the letters that spelt out names, that were tied to people, that meant death, that sated his thirst like warm blood spilling down his throat-
“Every human, eventually, gets like this. Even the ones that don’t really use it that much. Pretty sure its supposed to be like that.” Ryuk’s clawed hands created divots in Light’s sheets.
“What do you mean by that, Ryuk?” It had stilled him a little. For a few moments. His pen stopped on the paper.
“Like this, y’know. Obsessive, and stuff. Like they’re addicted to it. I understand, I’m like that with apples, but the Death Note affects humans differently than it does us. I never feel like I have to use the thing, out of enjoyment. You’ve grown to love it Light, haven’t you?”
The words settled on him like a heavy, weighted blanket. It made his lungs feel sluggish, almost comatose. He knew he had created an attachment to the Note; but it was a piece of him, a part of him, as if over these months the names had become stitches that had allowed the Death Note to become woven his heart and mind, a permanent fixture. He loved the growing, building power it had given him; it had gifted him life, purpose, existence. In return it had given him ambition; festering, unkillable hunger for names, death, more-
“Even the ones that don’t want to use it fall eventually, I’ve seen it. They give in, and for some reason, it hooks them in.” Ryuk said this almost jovially. It couldn’t care less, that much was obvious, for the effect of the supernatural Death Note on the shatterable human mind. It just made the game more interesting; the humans couldn’t resist playing.
“Are you saying that… The Death Note is compelling me to use it?” Light didn’t care that much either. He was going to use the book whether it wanted him to or not. But it would be an interesting piece of information to have for the future. And also, the idea of this… object infiltrating his mind and his decisions was a deeply unpleasant one. He did not want to be controlled and used by this thing, wanted to control and use it instead.
“More than that. It changes you so you want to use it, always. Though that isn’t a problem for you, Light, I told you that the Death Note will change you. You will constantly feel the need to use it. You will not be able to have a human afterlife. I once heard someone say that the Death Note has the ability to change humans so much that they slowly become Death itself. But that was just a rumour, of course.” Ryuk had the ungainly ability to speak as if the words it were saying were nothing more than comments about the weather. It was said casually, without stopping, a normal speech from a thing like Ryuk.
Light’s breath hitched. He hadn’t, really, thought about the Death Note itself all that much. He was surprised when it worked, obviously, but he had just accepted the role of Shinigami and murderous notebooks easily. Now he wondered if it was the Death Note itself that had quelled the blow for him; that had soothed his queries, that had urged him on.
“Is it sentient?”
“No. At least, I don’t think so. It’s kind of unexplainable. It just sort of exists.”
Light nodded, all of a sudden feeling light headed. He decided that that was enough for the day. He put the leather bound book back into his secret compartment, closed the drawer, and stood from his desk, stretching out his back. Even now, he could feel the whispering in his ear. An itch in his neck. A feeling curling in his fingertips.
“Ah, Light. Theres a feather in your hair.” Ryuk was gleeful, jumping up from the bed to pluck the errant feather out of Light’s brunet hair, with taloned claws and stained fingernails. Its smile was stretched wider, its unblinking red eyes crinkling with its grin, turning to look at Light, chuckling.
This time, it was larger. Black wisps still encircled the central spine, forming plumes, longer and more defined. Still virtually invisible, unremarkable, and yet it had wound its way into Light’s hair, stuck between the strands, trapped like a fly in a cobweb.
Light snatched it out of the Shinigami’s talons. It was weightless, but existent, and starting to spin its ribbons into Light’s life. A charcoal black feather, this time a warning. An ominous caution.
“A feather.” Was all he remarked, because in the moment, thats all it was for him. A singular black feather, spun in his slender hands and gifted fingers, like an exhibit.
He didn’t keep this one either. Ryuk took it back, blowing it away with large gusts of air from its neverending mouth, causing the feather to twitch and shake and move around the room.
Light left to go downstairs and get something to eat. His stomach was begging him to. Ryuk stayed, laughing to itself, eventually causing the feather to float away out into the open balcony, the wind claiming it for its own. It fluttered away, into the sky.
*
“You know Ryuk, I might have seriously considered the deal if you’d offered me wings instead of eyes. Just the idea of flying around freely in the sky sounds very godlike. After all it’s been mankind’s dream since antiquity to be able to fly.”
“You’d stand out if you sprouted wings and flew around. Not to mention the police would have no trouble finding you.”
“I was only joking. Anyway, if I keep bargaining for eyes and wings and whatever else, next thing you know I’ll end up becoming a real Shinigami. Though who knows, I bet that could be pretty interesting."
“I wouldn’t worry. Even without the eyes and the wings, you are already a worthy Shinigami.”
*
There was a rolling drum beat pounding in Light’s head. It was a rhythm, a chant, and a calling.
When he slept, he could hear it. Like the sea rushing against his skull, the waves crashing against his eardrums, overflowing into his head. There was no humanity in it; it was as if the noise was drawing out every voice, even his own, and all that was left was the want. It sunk into him like a parasite, biting and gnawing at him, living off of his brain, his unshakeable intelligence.
Light Yagami was the singular flame, the spark, and currently all the moths were suffocating him.
*
On the four month anniversary of Light discovering the Death Note, it greeted him with a feather needle stabbed into his back.
He convulsed, shot up in bed, immediately pulling his shirt over his head. It was the middle of the night, his hair falling into his eyes in disarray. The sharp pain in his back had jolted him from his sleep; whatever it was, it was slowly sinking into his skin the more he had laid in bed.
Hardly lucid from sleep, he reached around his back to feel for the thing that was causing spikes of pain to shoot up his spine. In the darkness, he was unable to locate it; scrambling to turn on his lamp, Light got up entirely out of bed, walking quickly to his mirror in the low light.
Light prided himself on appearance. Every morning he preened over his hair, his uniform, his features, preparing his mask for the play before setting out to school. Every hair must be in place, to secure the illusion, as to not shatter the mirage.
Now, however, was a different experience entirely. He spun around, glaring at his back in the mirror.
A small trail of his own blood was moving down his back, leaving stained red chasms in its wake. The stream of blood was slowly advancing towards his waist band. Its source was a singular puncture wound near his nape, and jammed inside it was a black feather, its spine coated in crimson.
Light grimaced, his back muscles twitching with each movement. The pain flared down his back periodically, as if reminding him of its presence, translating its motive into human terms such as pain. This was a stubborn deterrent. This was a threat.
Wincing, he clutched the needle of the plume in his fingers, and after taking a few shallow breaths, pulled it out of the flesh in his back. It came out uneasily, leaving a jagged wound, and immediately Light dropped the thing as if it burned. His hands wrapped around his neck, trying to stop the bleeding from the puncture, feeling his own hot blood dribbling down his fingernails and onto the palms of his hands. A twisting, gnarling feeling became tangled in his chest, the parasite having moved, and struck.
“What…” The words tumbled out of his mouth involuntarily, said in a rushed whisper, utterly in disbelief.
The feather at his feet was almost double the size of the last. The black wisps had become knots, defined braids that lanced out from the central spine, now sharp and pointed. Light’s blood was thickening on its knitted threads, dripping down the needle and onto his floorboards. It had become bold, confident.
With one hand still pressed against his nape, he bent down to pick up the offender with his now blood-stained hands. The bright rivulets adorning his palms were a stark contrast to the ebony black of the feather, warring with each other, clashing bitterly.
He gripped it with anger as well as annoyance, letting his confusion bleed through. He was at a loss for words, lost looking for an explanation, because he didn’t know what he could possible think to describe what was happening.
He found the shirt he had been wearing that night; similarly stained crimson, as if he was stabbed with tiny pinpricks whilst he slept. Light pressed it against his neck, trying to soak up any last remaining dregs of blood. Silently, trying to even out his breathing, he went to his bathroom, his hands shaking as he wet a damp cloth and began cleaning off blood from his back.
He watched himself in the mirror in a slight trance, the pain very real but also very far away. The feather watched from the sink where he had placed it, running it under the tap to purge it of his blood, the blackness now wet and in disarray. Hurriedly, he washed down the skin of his back, the dark stains of blood slowly disappearing under his fingertips, but the image remained etched in his mind. Being punctured, not seeing the culprit, bleeding out-
Light’s hands had stopped shaking by the time he found a plaster to cover the wound. By that time it had ended its stream of blood, now seemingly quenched, but every few movements he could feel it twinge, sending sparks down his back, sending messages to his brain.
He returned to his room. In the low lighting, Light placed the feather down onto his bed, staring at it, as if it were about to come alive. He didn’t feel like he was imagining the malice emanating from the thing. He couldn’t be. How would a feather have gotten stuck in his neck in the first place? Was Sayu playing a practical joke of some sort, involving feathers? It couldn’t have been her; he doubted his sister would stab him forcefully in the back with a feather, allowed him to bleed continuously in his sleep.
He was exhausted. Light felt his brain stir sluggishly, but it was the middle of the night, and he was feeling light headed. There was a haziness to his eyesight, the sides of his vision becoming blurry, the feather morphing and expanding and disappearing all at once.
Feeling a wave of repulsion whilst holding the thing, Light took the pinion and placed it in one of his desk drawers. He felt the urge to slam it shut, never look at it again, burn it.
He took the blood-soaked shirt and placed it on the back of his chair, the only piece of evidence that proved Light was still mortal; that it was still blood that ran through his veins, that Light was still a teenage boy whilst Kira was the immortal God.
He slipped back into bed, breaths falling heavily. He was deeply unsettled, shaken, and the movements of his back muscles caused blooms of pain to ripple into his skin. As soon as he closed his eyes, the familiar rush of the drum beat began between his ears; not as loud, now a whisper, slight tapping and a melodious promise.
It seemed satisfied.
*
Light had tried to write off the event as a result of his greatly heightened work ethic lately that had caused him stress, combined with some sort of hallucination or tweaking of his mind due to the Death Note. Now that Ryuk had pointed it out, he was becoming increasingly suspicious of the things affect on his mental state; he needed to know just how much ‘change’ Ryuk meant. He couldn’t afford to sacrifice his sanity or stability for the Death Note. He could not accomplish his goals if he was going to be driven to insanity by them. He could not live whilst hallucinating feathers being jammed into his neck.
The day after, he had a small mark, almost like a bruise, where the wound had been. He traced his fingers over it; only the last dregs of pain had stirred and risen to the surface. When writing in the Note that night, he could’ve sworn that he had felt it awakening again, the beast rearing its head, and he had to stop writing for a few minutes as his hand seized whilst writing names. As a result, he killed a few people less that night. Once he had stopped, hidden away the book, he had felt the pain suddenly dissipate, melt back and settle down.
Two days after the incident, the mark was gone, his neck unscarred.
About the blood-ridden shirt, he told his mother that he had had a nosebleed and used his shirt to clean up the blood in a moment of desperation. She had tutted, shaken her head, said some benign comment about how blood was impossible to get out of clothes, and Light had promptly left.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to concentrate in his room when the Note was there in his desk drawer. Sometimes Light felt that his thoughts bled into each other, the letters and words mixing until none of it made sense, and he couldn’t steer his thoughts straight. His emotions reached a peak whenever he was closest to the object; suddenly being overcome by greed, his mind racing, heart rate quickening. At some points, he became incredibly nauseous.
His damage control was to spend as little time as possible in his room, where he had to keep the Death Note. Taking slips of it was manageable enough; its power seemed to diminish if it was just the piece of paper he carried with him in his wallet. He would, instead, take as many excuses as he could to be out of his room, take long walks where he would finally be able to organise his thoughts and create ways to combat L, memorise names and faces outside of his room so that he could quickly write them down in the Note and then promptly shut it away again. He took to going to the library, his excuse to his parents that it held better material for him to study, when really he was simply cherishing a space where he didn’t feel as if the parasite inside him was rotting away and taking chunks off his brain.
Ryuk watched in a sort of rabid fascination. It would take to harassing Light rather than just annoying him, a constant observer to the affect the Note was having on the human, croaking out jeers and taunts and comments about what was happening. Light got the impression that it was enjoying, or at least, interested somewhat in how Light was acting now. The appearance of the feathers had definitely intrigued the Shinigami, and it seemed to constantly be on the hunt, looking for tufts of feathers that would mysteriously appear out of no where.
Light did not like living in this new state of paranoia. It was not like him, and it also distracted him from what was really important; his dream, and capturing L, and creating schemes to rival the others. Light had not been expecting the Lind L.Taylor incident; it had left him furious, livid, ready to tear and write and kill-
It was the end of March, and spring was in full bloom. The flowers suddenly budding along the street and on his kitchen table at least gave Light the stability of time; that it was passing, it was blooming, and that one day he will reach his goal, will flourish and lead the world as his own.
That was the thought currently turning over in his mind as Light Yagami smoothed down his hair in the mirror, perfectly arranged it to his taste. The morning was bright, bright compared to the dismal winter that had just passed, and the trees were already expressing a verdant green. It was the day of the To-Oh University Entrance Ceremony, and Light was dressed to perfection, his mask sealed, his face taut. Even inside he felt little.
He reached in to feel the piece of the Death Note in his blazer pocket. Just tracing his fingers around the edges, to feel the grooves, gave a sort of balance, cohesion.
He felt his slender fingers brush against something else. The familiar tufts of a sable black feather, his fingertips scraping against the hard spine, now recognisable by texture and touch alone. An observer. An eyewitness.
He had spent too many nights feeling the ridges of the pinion that had ended up in his nape, had twisted the thing in his hand, trying to understand more from it. He waited as if the thing would give up its secrets, confess in Light’s presence. To no avail.
Light sighed, scowling at the return of the object. This time it had just appeared in his blazer pocket- was it somehow bound with the Death Note, in that feathers would appear close to where the book was? He needed to find out how he could-
At that moment, Sayu and his mother bounded into his room, both with equally matching expressions of hopefulness and excitement. They urged him on, Sayu with her large eyes, beaming smile and good nature.
“Good luck, Light! I’m sure you’re gonna be perfect, as always!”
The black feather in his pocket stayed there for the whole day. It lasted throughout the ceremony, twisting itself closer to the piece of paper in Light’s pocket. Both lay innocently above Light’s heart, the Note murmuring to it, the feather watching. This one was just here to observe.
By the end of Light’s first day at To-Oh University, he was ready to sell his heart to either one of them.
*
Fury. It burned him hot and cold, furious and bitter, a churning inferno that rose from his stomach.
Light had been utterly humiliated. He hadn’t expected L to appear before him, like a haunting ghost, dressed in slack jeans and an oversized shirt, and say something absurd like “I’m L.” As simple as that. It had completely shaken him, thrown off his inward poise for a second, his mind rearing in uproar, because what? Whether it was truly L himself or a stand-in, it still presented a great threat, and Light felt his plans shatter like broken glass.
He threaded his hands through his hair in frustration, ruining his immaculate appearance. The anger had been simmering within him the whole ride home, and as soon as he’d stepped inside his room, he’d felt it boil and overflow, completely consuming him. The fury was enveloping him, causing his hands to shake, his grip tightening on the roots of his hair, just to feel his anger come out on something, just to feel something other than the burning rising from his stomach.
“Fuck!”
Ryuk was staying strangely silent, watching from his corner of the room, eyes wide, tracking Light’s movements across the room.
“He got me! He completely humiliated me! I can’t do anything!”
Light’s voice was rising in tandem with his emotions. His hair was now in disarray; his suit creased; his natural calm mask shattered. Light was usually at home in his stoic assertiveness, his true emotions hidden completely in the shadows, and yet Ryuk was watching him snap. The man was unravelling, hands shaking on his desk, his emotions written plainly on his face, in every twitch in his body.
“If L dies now, even if this isn’t L, the police are going to suspect me. I never even… considered the probability that he would reveal himself to me on purpose. I thought we’d be chasing each other until I’d eventually be able to uncover him myself.” Light voice was bitter, heavily coated in frustration, the man gesturing wildly as he spoke.
The exasperation of the day was fuelling him. The sight of L, the man with the disorderly black hair and sunken in eyes, draped in those oversized clothes that hung off his thin frame. Just being sat next to him during that time in the hall- having to sit there knowing that L had caught him off guard, had broken him for a few moments with those few words coupled with his absurd appearance and ridiculous way of sitting, relit the anger inside him.
On auto-pilot, Light reached into his desk drawer, opening the compartment to pull out his Death Note, flipping open the book without pause. Blank, tidy lines stared back at him, just begging to be filled, to cry out names that spelt out another's demise, and just seeing the empty pages made him think of failure, made him see that he could have more, and he wanted it. He wanted it more than anything else, to see the world collapse around him, to leave it dry and empty, completely ruined by Light and Light only. A husk of Earth, his beautiful achievement, a trophy that he could keep. Everything gone. Everything dead. He could have everything at his fingertips, if only L would die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die.
His fingers were taut in an enraged grip on his pen, as Light scrawled down a single letter, etching it harshly into the page until it was on the edge of ripping, his teeth gritted together-
L.
Forty seconds of staring at that letter, that symbol, the thing that stood for everything that was getting in his way. Not just the police- having to keep up his image, an act he had performed for years before the Death Note, having to act as Light Yagami, something he barely recognised. He was sick of subduing himself, having to chain down his ambition- of being controlled and stoic in the way he has forced himself to be. Surely, the Death Note was supposed to give him the opportunity to rip free of everything that was holding him down. Thats what being God is- all powerful, all mighty. So why was this happening?
Light felt nauseous, and the feeling mixed and swirled with his anger, though just writing down L had strangely given him some comfort. To at least be able to have the illusion that he had killed L, to see that man written and carved into the Death Note.
His thoughts clashed with each other, like symbals bashing in his ears, the feeling almost audible. His senses were a calamity, a dysphoric sensation where thought and feeling and touch and sound bled into one, horrific mess. It made bile rise in his throat, the nausea increasing, and still dressed in his crisp suit, Light raced to the bathroom, immediately collapsing against the sink.
Something coppery and burning was filling his mouth. It was raking against his tongue, dragging long, dark claws against his teeth, forcing out hisses of pain and agony. The liquid was vile, felt alive, and Light spat it out into the sink with disgust.
Red. Blood. Streaming down his mouth, into the porcelain sink, devouring his lips. Coating his teeth.
Light Yagami was throwing up blood.
It pooled, mixing with itself, creating paintings and patterns on the tiles of the bathroom floor. It was still writhing on his tongue, a searing pain in every corner of his mouth, and Light brought up one of his shaking hands to his lips, as if trying to convince himself it wasn’t happening.
He looked up into the mirror ahead of him. He saw himself; completely unravelled, blood pouring down his face, staining his face in a bloody murder scene. His hands were painted red.
Behind him, he saw a pair of jagged, black, feathered, wings.
The punishment.