#i wrote this in like 2 hours bc i got stuck on a math problem for a while and suddenly i thought of this

[straightlightyagami]

decided to make a separate poast too. Um hi I was inspired by this post about how there are not enough Death Note fics about Light being scary/the average person's view of Kira so I decided to do that. but it's about like, a criminal's view of Kira. decided to post on tumblr too. um yeah as I said. it's short (~1.5k words) and (probably not) sweet. i made sure to include a lot of Themes and Literary Devices and stuff like that hope u notice them. (ao3 link)

content warning for a lot of murder (same as canon) also religious themes

There were whispers. Rumors. Even in a facility designed to keep society safe from its worst, its inhabitants were not truly sequestered. Nor cut off enough to be shielded from forces outside it. They did not expect to ever leave – escape is impossible, there are always eyes watching – but once, in another life, they had lived in the shadows, and so could see things others would miss, hidden from the light.

The first time he heard about the thing no prisoner dared to say aloud was from a guard. The guard was new on the job, and young, even younger than himself, barely old enough to be a man. The guard had hesitated a moment after passing him and his cellmate their food through the slot, then said the words quietly. They say God is passing judgment on the scum of the Earth. Like you. Over a thousand dead in the past week. All around the world. Killers, rapists, corrupt officials and executives. All cardiac arrest. Then the guard turned abruptly and left, not waiting for a response. The prisoner shared a look with his cellmate. He may have been stupid to end up with a life like that, but not stupid enough to believe such a story. Yeah, and poorly behaved children get eaten by Baba Yaga.

The scum of the Earth. A fitting descriptor for himself, and for most of the prison’s residents, the staff included. For a member of mainstream society at least. They lived by their own code of honor. But he did not lie to himself.

A fitting descriptor for most of them, but not all. His cellmate, a political prisoner, was such an exception. He was a quiet man, in his early 30s, polite and soft spoken, rather short, just shy of a meter and sixty. He did not speak often, but his few words were eloquent. This and his demeanor and dignified way of carrying himself appeared more characteristic of someone you would find lecturing in a university auditorium, not rotting away in a prison cell. The guards seemed to afford him a greater degree of respect than they did the others. On his part, the man did not outwardly appear to judge the other prisoners for their heinous crimes (though the prisoner suspected this was more of a wise decision made in the interest of self preservation and he had to feel at least a little sick finding out what the other inmates had done). All in all, he was a decent cellmate, if a little boring due to his withdrawnness, mostly opting to spend his days writing letters. It was in the letters received by his cellmate that the second news of the Judgment came.

He was not a religious man, but the day his cellmate wordlessly passed him the letter, he spent the whole night praying. What for, he was not sure. There was nobody left who would care if he died (surely not himself). His cellmate had a wife and a child, but he didn’t need prayer. God would spare his cellmate. The same could not be said for him.

Was it too late to repent? God would not think him worthy of life, surely, if he prayed only to save his own life (did he want to save his own life?). The fact that he hadn’t done so earlier would mean he didn’t truly regret what he had done. If he lived, he would go back to his old ways (he didn’t want to. But not even he himself believed that).

Could this god even hear him? He didn’t know a lot about religion, but maybe this was not God the way the Christians thought of Him. Maybe it was a god of another religion. Why did God wait so long to interfere in human affairs? Maybe it was the work of an angel tired of the evil that plagued this world.

(He was evil.)

***

He was just about to be taken on his daily hour-long walk when the Judgment came to the prison. There was a commotion, guards running down the hall, shouts. His cellmate was sitting and looking around agitatedly.

It must be time. He wanted to die peacefully, so he lay on his cot and closed his eyes. He was struck by a vivid memory of being barely four years old, lying in his bed in a dark room, the branches on the tree outside his window swaying in the night wind, his mom brushing his hair from his forehead and singing a lullaby, her voice clear in his memory as if she was there, in that cell, sitting on his cot a few centimeters away. He wanted to follow that voice.

A minute passed. Five minutes. Half an hour. He was still alive. He opened his eyes.

The door creaked open and a guard came to take him on his walk.

In the courtyard, the bodies were arranged in neat rows and columns. It could be his turn at any moment. He looked away and at the gray sky beyond the barbed wire, breathing in the air. It could be his last time to ever go outside and stand beneath the sky. He thanked God, or whatever this power was, for giving him the chance to say goodbye.

***

Thousands of kilometers away, a seventeen-year-old boy (a person with a very different life, who always ate three meals a day, went to the best schools, had the newest computers, and washed his soft, shiny brown hair with the highest quality shampoo) was sitting at his desk in his two-story suburban house, awake far past midnight, and writing names in a black notebook. After finishing the last line on the page, he glanced at the clock, rubbed his eyes, and put the notebook into his desk drawer. The last judgment could wait until the morning; his sleep was more important. He turned off his desk lamp, climbed under the covers, and quickly fell asleep.

***

Every cell on his floor of the prison was empty. The unusual quiet was unsettling, and it felt even more cold than the usual winter. The prisoner could not sleep that night. He probably did not need to anyway. He decided to pass the time by sifting through more of his memories instead of blankly staring at the ceiling.

He thought of the day his father died. It was in early September of 1989. He had just started third grade. Again. He had received failing grades in almost all subjects the previous year, but was determined not to fail again. He spent all of that afternoon studying for his upcoming math quiz. Sometime around nine in the evening, he noticed that the apartment was eerily quiet. His dad should have been home by then. It was never quiet when his dad was home.

His mother was standing in the kitchen, leaning on the windowsill and smoking. The lights in apartment blocks were turning on and from the distance they looked like stars that had come down to Earth. The wind was still warm and gentle that time of the year, making the curtains billow into the room. His mother was still in her work uniform. Despite the premature graying of her hair and wrinkles on her face, she was beautiful.

“Mom? Will dad come home tonight?”

She turned around. The tears on her eyes were still fresh. “No. Not tonight. Not ever.”

“So he will never hurt you again?”

“Never. He can never hurt us again.” She smiled. “You are his son. But I bore and raised you. So promise. Promise me that you will be a better man than your father. For me.”

“I promise.”

What would she think of him now? He opened his eyes and stood up. If he stood at the correct angle from the tiny window, he could see a bit of the night sky. The sky was clear that night, so he could see a few stars. He hoped that there was no afterlife so his mother could never see who he was.

He shook his cellmate awake. “Promise.”

The latter groggily opened his eyes. “What? Promise what?”

There was a sudden pain in his chest. He tried to gasp for breath. Through his cloudy vision, he could see that his cellmate had gotten up and caught him, gently helping him to the floor.

I’m sorry, mom...

***

Still in pajamas, the boy wrote the name with no hesitation or change in his expression, neat black letters on the first line of the first empty page.

A gangster. Guilty of multiple counts of murder, taking hostages, and who knew what else. 

Finishing the last stroke, he clicked his pen. He leaned back in his chair and looked at the clock as he counted down 40 seconds. Then smiled with satisfaction.