A Learning Experience
Title: A Learning Experience
Authors: speaky_bean
Characters/Pairings: Kiyomi, Teru, Light, Misa, Light/Misa, Kiyomi/Teru, various OCs (their children).
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,239
Notes: This is a story set in the same future AU as another fic of mine called Leaf, and it deals with a future in which Light won, and he tried to set up families so that there would be pro-Kira children. He has four daughters with Misa (one called L, who he insists wear jeans and a white shirt and eat nothing but cake), and Kiyomi and Teru have a daughter and a son. The son is anti-Kira, and Light is willing to go to somewhat extreme lengths to teach him some respect.
Warnings: Light is a bit more of an asshole here than I think he is in canon. I personally believe that achieving his goals would warp his personality significantly, so this is IC in the context by my judgment. I’m not sure how others will feel about it, but I did my best.
Tsuki Mikami and Himiko Yagami are both born on July 7th, 2015. Their mothers, Kiyomi Mikami and Misa Yagami, go into labor at approximately the same time, though Misa believes she’s in labor four hours before she actually is, and Kiyomi doesn’t realize she’s gone into labor until her husband, Teru Mikami, has already hopped a train to the hospital where Misa will be giving birth. When she calls him, panicking and wondering how to get to the hospital and where her overnight bag is, Teru calmly gives her instructions, and walks into Misa Yagami’s brightly lit hospital room. Kiyomi gives birth to her first and only son while her mother holds her hand and her father demands to know where the fuck his precious daughter’s deadbeat sonofabitch husband is. Misa gives birth to her first daughter while Teru shrieks commands at the obstetrician and Light, Misa’s husband and the father of the baby, sits in the waiting room writing names down in the Death Note. Everyone sees what he’s doing, everyone knows who he is. And no one says anything, because those left alive worship Kira as if he were God.
Misa is able to absorb herself fully in the act of childrearing, chauffeuring her ever-expanding passel of girls from daycare to doctor’s appointments, from piano lessons to play dates. At Light’s request she dresses her second daughter, Elle, in jeans and white tee shirts, but she spends hours in Harajuku finding just the right outfits for Himiko, Aoi, and Kotori. Misa’s daughters are sweet, breakable dolls taught to look for and latch onto true love. Their father has entirely different lessons for them, of course. Himiko is his princess, his heiress-who-won’t-be-his-heiress-because-Kira-needs-a-goddamned-son, and Elle is his punching bag. Aoi and Kotori are afterthoughts, failed attempts to gain a son. Light lusts after Tsuki Mikami, the only boy born into his artificial, pro-Kira families. When Light realizes he won’t have a son of his own, he wants to take the child into his own home, but his mother Kiyomi won’t allow it. “Are you crazy?” she asks, an incredulous look knitted into her features. “Do you honestly expect me to just hand over my child like that? If you want him to be the next Kira that’s fine, but Tsuki will live with me.”
And so, aside from several ill-fated attempts of Teru’s to hand the child over, Tsuki continues to live with his parents in a hilltop house in Yokohama. They are joined by Hikari, a sweet, nondescript girl who garners almost no attention from her parents or the Yagami family. She will, they assume, serve as a vessel to make more Kira-babies, and though Kiyomi bristles when she hears this theory, since no one tries to take Hikari away from her, she thinks little of it. It’s in the future, which is largely abstract and irrelevant. Kiyomi’s main concerns right now are her career (rapidly dwindling to nothing as Light forces her to dedicate more and more of her time to his glamorous but poorly paying cause) and how she’s going to get her husband to stop reorganizing the cabinets for the hundredth fucking time. She’s shouted at him, bribed him with sex, threatened him with divorce, and everything else she could think of, but right now she’s about ready to give up. There are dishes to be done, and (more interestingly) a book that combines rabies and time travel. The children are gone, at the Yagamis for Kira education training. Kiyomi had grown up assuming that when the kids were gone, sex happened, but Teru can’t be bothered with Kiyomi. He has a cabinet to reorganize.
~`~`~
Tsuki and Hikari Mikami sit at the kitchen tables, flanked by two of the four Yagami daughters. Hikari is chatting happily with Aoi, telling her about how middle school differs from elementary school, and how the differences really aren’t as scary as they seem before they get there. Tsuki is swiping angrily at his nose with a tissue, snorting loudly into it and growling about having to do so. Himiko, twirling light brown hair around a moisturized finger, asks him why he came here if he’s just going to be bringing germs into the house. “My father will not be pleased if any of us fall ill because of you.”
Tsuki groans, shoves plastic-rimmed glasses up a pink, chapped nose. “I’m not sick,” he snaps. “If I were though, I certainly wouldn’t mind giving it to you. Anyway, I have allergies, and you fucking know that Himiko. You’ve known I was coming over for over a week now, couldn’t you have cleaned up a little bit? Would that have been so hard?” He coughs into a tightly-clenched fist, and Himiko rolls her eyes.
“I’m not going to clean just for you,” she snaps. “I am not your maid, Tsuki. If you have a problem with my house, you can leave.” Despite her older sister’s petulant response, Aoi immediately heads for the kitchen, wets a paper towel, and rubs it ineffectually on the table underneath Tsuki’s twitching nose. He leans away from the little girl’s hands, sneezes harshly into a tissue. Thanks her and then continues to glare at Himiko. She sighs, pushes her hair back. Doesn’t say anything more, because she’s glad she’s tolerant of her environment, glad that she’s superior to Tsuki in this way.
They sit for a little longer, Tsuki silent and sniffling, Hikari and Aoi still conversing amicably. Himiko doesn’t speak, save for when she encourages a fat, waddling tabby cat to leap into her lap. Because she hates Tsuki, they clash terribly, and Himiko feels a constant, needling desire to fuck him over however she can. She knows, though, that he feels exactly the same way about her, and if there were anything he could do to make her uncomfortable, he would. So she stokes her kitty, coos to him, lets his fur come loose in her hands. This makes Tsuki sneeze, cough, and take a frustrated drag from his inhaler. “Oh for fuck’s sake Himiko, would you put the cat down already? I know, I’m not welcome in your precious house, but you know what, I don’t want to be here either. I have better things to do, but my dad says I have to come here and listen to propaganda every week, so I have no choice. Even though you seem to be trying to kill me with your fucking cats!”
“No one is trying to kill you,” Light Yagami says, silky voice announcing him without anybody having to look. He is an hour later than he said he’d be, but no one cares except for Tsuki, and Tsuki is too busy draining his nose into a tissue to say much. Light sits soundlessly down at the kitchen table, and asks Aoi to get her sisters so they can begin. Himiko straightens her back, stares expectantly at her exalted father.
“What are we going to talk about today?” Tsuki sniffs, attempting to inject some venom into his scratchy, stuffy voice. “Did you alter the list of people who need deleting? I mean, you’re really not a very good evil dictator if you haven’t got Jews on there, so you’d better get on that, Yagami. Hitler would be spinning in his grave.”
Light cocks an eyebrow, delicately. Leans forward, looking so flawless and graceful that Tsuki wants to punch him in the face. But he just coughs a few times, cups his hands around his face in a vague attempt to protect himself from the cat hair. And Light says, “you know Tsuki, you might think that that sort of commentary is amusing, but it could get you into a lot of trouble. If I didn’t have such high esteem for your mother and father, and if I didn’t know that you were truly a good person in spite of your snarky and defiant attitude, I might have to take action against you. I might be forced to view you as a threat to our cause.”
Tsuki rolls his eyes, snaps that he’d better be looking at his as a goddamn threat. “Sorry Yagami, but you know I think this whole thing is bullshit. There are so many reasons why it doesn’t work, and you know what? I bet you know every one of them. You’re a smart guy, you couldn’t have overlooked the fact that new people are born every second and you can’t possibly get rid of all the ones who are criminals! You just don’t give a shit that your idea makes no sense, because you want to believe you’re God! And that’s it!”
By this point the boy is panting hard, fingering the near-empty inhaler that bulges angrily out of his jean pocket. It won’t last him through an asthma attack, and getting worked up like this won’t help him avoid one. But Yagami is a smug and infuriating monster, even worse than pretty pretty princess Himiko. Both of them have written names in the Death Note, after all, and so has Tsuki himself. They’re all murderers, so it’s not that, not exactly. It’s something about the way Yagami turns his normally proud father into a slobbering sycophant waving his ass in the air, waiting for God’s mighty cock to penetrate him. Okay, not literally. Tsuki isn’t thinking straight, he’s hazy from the antihistamines, sick as fuck. Light chuckles quietly, strokes the cat on his daughter’s lap. “Oh dear,” he says. “And to think, I once thought I could make you my heir! If only your mother had let me take you in when you were young, maybe you wouldn’t be so needlessly rebellious. I’ll have to speak with her about putting such ridiculous thoughts into your head.”
Of course, Yagami doesn’t even attempt to address Tsuki’s criticism. He merely calls him an uninformed child. This makes him furious, makes his chest feel tight. Coughing harshly, he tells this smarmy man with his sickly smile that his thoughts are not ridiculous, that they come from his own mind and not his mother’s. But he can’t get the words out, not while he’s being strangled by cat fur, not while it feels like someone’s stomping on his chest. He coughs more, using the last of his medication. It helps a little, and he keeps going, croaks, “you’re so obnoxious. You just, you won’t even listen to anybody else’s opinion, and y-yours is…yours is…” He stops again, collapses into a coughing fit.
“Are you quite alright?” Light asks him, quickly figuring out just how far he will let this go to prove a point. “If you aren’t, then perhaps that’s for a reason, Tsuki. Perhaps speaking out against God has more consequences than you thought it did.” Light’s youngest three daughters are cowering in the doorway (afraid of Light? of Tsuki?) and Elle, his poor despised daughter who stands straight and tall in spite of Light’s attempts to wreck her posture, speaks.
“Dad,” she says in a small, piping voice. “Dad, seriously, I think he might be having an asthma attack. You can lecture him later, just please, just do something about it, okay? Please? Because he’ll die, and he’s not someone who deserves to okay, he’s not a criminal, he’s just mad that you won’t listen. I get mad that you won’t listen, too. Please Dad, let’s help him, okay? Please?”
Light lets Tsuki choke a while longer, then reaches with a sigh for his cell phone. “I’ll call for a doctor,” he says. “Thankfully, I’m respected worldwide as Kira, so I can easily get a doctor to come here and save your life. Maybe one day you’ll realize what you’ve got to do to make it worth something.” With that he calls the doctor, and nods to Elle in the hopes that she’ll take her cue to do something. She stands for a while, fidgeting with her threadbare white tee shirt, but in the end she walks up to Himiko and hefts the chubby cat into her arms. “I think this is the main problem,” she says, bowing nervously and taking the cat out into the hall. Kotori squeaks joyously, “kitty!” and the two of them disappear into the hallway, Elle’s head held as high as possible.
~`~`~
Tsuki survives his asthma attack without a trip to the emergency room. And in a move that would have earned her a lengthy grounding if her father had any regrets about what he’d done, Elle calls Teru and tells him how long his son had been allowed to choke and gasp for air. “It was because he said something bad about Kira,” she explains, knowing there was more too it but not sure how to express it. “He’s okay, but it got pretty bad before my dad got a doctor. He wanted to teach him a lesson. I just thought that you should know.”
If Elle had reached Kiyomi when she called, there might have been a fuss made about it. Kiyomi might have called Light and screamed at him for endangering her child’s life over him being a dumb, rebellious teenager, for not cleaning up the house before he mandated that Tsuki come to visit. But Teru merely states in a terse, clipped voice that God’s punishments are always just and appropriate. Elle remembers being yelled at for wanting to eat miso soup instead of cake, and isn’t so sure.
Authors: speaky_bean
Characters/Pairings: Kiyomi, Teru, Light, Misa, Light/Misa, Kiyomi/Teru, various OCs (their children).
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,239
Notes: This is a story set in the same future AU as another fic of mine called Leaf, and it deals with a future in which Light won, and he tried to set up families so that there would be pro-Kira children. He has four daughters with Misa (one called L, who he insists wear jeans and a white shirt and eat nothing but cake), and Kiyomi and Teru have a daughter and a son. The son is anti-Kira, and Light is willing to go to somewhat extreme lengths to teach him some respect.
Warnings: Light is a bit more of an asshole here than I think he is in canon. I personally believe that achieving his goals would warp his personality significantly, so this is IC in the context by my judgment. I’m not sure how others will feel about it, but I did my best.
Tsuki Mikami and Himiko Yagami are both born on July 7th, 2015. Their mothers, Kiyomi Mikami and Misa Yagami, go into labor at approximately the same time, though Misa believes she’s in labor four hours before she actually is, and Kiyomi doesn’t realize she’s gone into labor until her husband, Teru Mikami, has already hopped a train to the hospital where Misa will be giving birth. When she calls him, panicking and wondering how to get to the hospital and where her overnight bag is, Teru calmly gives her instructions, and walks into Misa Yagami’s brightly lit hospital room. Kiyomi gives birth to her first and only son while her mother holds her hand and her father demands to know where the fuck his precious daughter’s deadbeat sonofabitch husband is. Misa gives birth to her first daughter while Teru shrieks commands at the obstetrician and Light, Misa’s husband and the father of the baby, sits in the waiting room writing names down in the Death Note. Everyone sees what he’s doing, everyone knows who he is. And no one says anything, because those left alive worship Kira as if he were God.
Misa is able to absorb herself fully in the act of childrearing, chauffeuring her ever-expanding passel of girls from daycare to doctor’s appointments, from piano lessons to play dates. At Light’s request she dresses her second daughter, Elle, in jeans and white tee shirts, but she spends hours in Harajuku finding just the right outfits for Himiko, Aoi, and Kotori. Misa’s daughters are sweet, breakable dolls taught to look for and latch onto true love. Their father has entirely different lessons for them, of course. Himiko is his princess, his heiress-who-won’t-be-his-heiress-because-Kira-needs-a-goddamned-son, and Elle is his punching bag. Aoi and Kotori are afterthoughts, failed attempts to gain a son. Light lusts after Tsuki Mikami, the only boy born into his artificial, pro-Kira families. When Light realizes he won’t have a son of his own, he wants to take the child into his own home, but his mother Kiyomi won’t allow it. “Are you crazy?” she asks, an incredulous look knitted into her features. “Do you honestly expect me to just hand over my child like that? If you want him to be the next Kira that’s fine, but Tsuki will live with me.”
And so, aside from several ill-fated attempts of Teru’s to hand the child over, Tsuki continues to live with his parents in a hilltop house in Yokohama. They are joined by Hikari, a sweet, nondescript girl who garners almost no attention from her parents or the Yagami family. She will, they assume, serve as a vessel to make more Kira-babies, and though Kiyomi bristles when she hears this theory, since no one tries to take Hikari away from her, she thinks little of it. It’s in the future, which is largely abstract and irrelevant. Kiyomi’s main concerns right now are her career (rapidly dwindling to nothing as Light forces her to dedicate more and more of her time to his glamorous but poorly paying cause) and how she’s going to get her husband to stop reorganizing the cabinets for the hundredth fucking time. She’s shouted at him, bribed him with sex, threatened him with divorce, and everything else she could think of, but right now she’s about ready to give up. There are dishes to be done, and (more interestingly) a book that combines rabies and time travel. The children are gone, at the Yagamis for Kira education training. Kiyomi had grown up assuming that when the kids were gone, sex happened, but Teru can’t be bothered with Kiyomi. He has a cabinet to reorganize.
~`~`~
Tsuki and Hikari Mikami sit at the kitchen tables, flanked by two of the four Yagami daughters. Hikari is chatting happily with Aoi, telling her about how middle school differs from elementary school, and how the differences really aren’t as scary as they seem before they get there. Tsuki is swiping angrily at his nose with a tissue, snorting loudly into it and growling about having to do so. Himiko, twirling light brown hair around a moisturized finger, asks him why he came here if he’s just going to be bringing germs into the house. “My father will not be pleased if any of us fall ill because of you.”
Tsuki groans, shoves plastic-rimmed glasses up a pink, chapped nose. “I’m not sick,” he snaps. “If I were though, I certainly wouldn’t mind giving it to you. Anyway, I have allergies, and you fucking know that Himiko. You’ve known I was coming over for over a week now, couldn’t you have cleaned up a little bit? Would that have been so hard?” He coughs into a tightly-clenched fist, and Himiko rolls her eyes.
“I’m not going to clean just for you,” she snaps. “I am not your maid, Tsuki. If you have a problem with my house, you can leave.” Despite her older sister’s petulant response, Aoi immediately heads for the kitchen, wets a paper towel, and rubs it ineffectually on the table underneath Tsuki’s twitching nose. He leans away from the little girl’s hands, sneezes harshly into a tissue. Thanks her and then continues to glare at Himiko. She sighs, pushes her hair back. Doesn’t say anything more, because she’s glad she’s tolerant of her environment, glad that she’s superior to Tsuki in this way.
They sit for a little longer, Tsuki silent and sniffling, Hikari and Aoi still conversing amicably. Himiko doesn’t speak, save for when she encourages a fat, waddling tabby cat to leap into her lap. Because she hates Tsuki, they clash terribly, and Himiko feels a constant, needling desire to fuck him over however she can. She knows, though, that he feels exactly the same way about her, and if there were anything he could do to make her uncomfortable, he would. So she stokes her kitty, coos to him, lets his fur come loose in her hands. This makes Tsuki sneeze, cough, and take a frustrated drag from his inhaler. “Oh for fuck’s sake Himiko, would you put the cat down already? I know, I’m not welcome in your precious house, but you know what, I don’t want to be here either. I have better things to do, but my dad says I have to come here and listen to propaganda every week, so I have no choice. Even though you seem to be trying to kill me with your fucking cats!”
“No one is trying to kill you,” Light Yagami says, silky voice announcing him without anybody having to look. He is an hour later than he said he’d be, but no one cares except for Tsuki, and Tsuki is too busy draining his nose into a tissue to say much. Light sits soundlessly down at the kitchen table, and asks Aoi to get her sisters so they can begin. Himiko straightens her back, stares expectantly at her exalted father.
“What are we going to talk about today?” Tsuki sniffs, attempting to inject some venom into his scratchy, stuffy voice. “Did you alter the list of people who need deleting? I mean, you’re really not a very good evil dictator if you haven’t got Jews on there, so you’d better get on that, Yagami. Hitler would be spinning in his grave.”
Light cocks an eyebrow, delicately. Leans forward, looking so flawless and graceful that Tsuki wants to punch him in the face. But he just coughs a few times, cups his hands around his face in a vague attempt to protect himself from the cat hair. And Light says, “you know Tsuki, you might think that that sort of commentary is amusing, but it could get you into a lot of trouble. If I didn’t have such high esteem for your mother and father, and if I didn’t know that you were truly a good person in spite of your snarky and defiant attitude, I might have to take action against you. I might be forced to view you as a threat to our cause.”
Tsuki rolls his eyes, snaps that he’d better be looking at his as a goddamn threat. “Sorry Yagami, but you know I think this whole thing is bullshit. There are so many reasons why it doesn’t work, and you know what? I bet you know every one of them. You’re a smart guy, you couldn’t have overlooked the fact that new people are born every second and you can’t possibly get rid of all the ones who are criminals! You just don’t give a shit that your idea makes no sense, because you want to believe you’re God! And that’s it!”
By this point the boy is panting hard, fingering the near-empty inhaler that bulges angrily out of his jean pocket. It won’t last him through an asthma attack, and getting worked up like this won’t help him avoid one. But Yagami is a smug and infuriating monster, even worse than pretty pretty princess Himiko. Both of them have written names in the Death Note, after all, and so has Tsuki himself. They’re all murderers, so it’s not that, not exactly. It’s something about the way Yagami turns his normally proud father into a slobbering sycophant waving his ass in the air, waiting for God’s mighty cock to penetrate him. Okay, not literally. Tsuki isn’t thinking straight, he’s hazy from the antihistamines, sick as fuck. Light chuckles quietly, strokes the cat on his daughter’s lap. “Oh dear,” he says. “And to think, I once thought I could make you my heir! If only your mother had let me take you in when you were young, maybe you wouldn’t be so needlessly rebellious. I’ll have to speak with her about putting such ridiculous thoughts into your head.”
Of course, Yagami doesn’t even attempt to address Tsuki’s criticism. He merely calls him an uninformed child. This makes him furious, makes his chest feel tight. Coughing harshly, he tells this smarmy man with his sickly smile that his thoughts are not ridiculous, that they come from his own mind and not his mother’s. But he can’t get the words out, not while he’s being strangled by cat fur, not while it feels like someone’s stomping on his chest. He coughs more, using the last of his medication. It helps a little, and he keeps going, croaks, “you’re so obnoxious. You just, you won’t even listen to anybody else’s opinion, and y-yours is…yours is…” He stops again, collapses into a coughing fit.
“Are you quite alright?” Light asks him, quickly figuring out just how far he will let this go to prove a point. “If you aren’t, then perhaps that’s for a reason, Tsuki. Perhaps speaking out against God has more consequences than you thought it did.” Light’s youngest three daughters are cowering in the doorway (afraid of Light? of Tsuki?) and Elle, his poor despised daughter who stands straight and tall in spite of Light’s attempts to wreck her posture, speaks.
“Dad,” she says in a small, piping voice. “Dad, seriously, I think he might be having an asthma attack. You can lecture him later, just please, just do something about it, okay? Please? Because he’ll die, and he’s not someone who deserves to okay, he’s not a criminal, he’s just mad that you won’t listen. I get mad that you won’t listen, too. Please Dad, let’s help him, okay? Please?”
Light lets Tsuki choke a while longer, then reaches with a sigh for his cell phone. “I’ll call for a doctor,” he says. “Thankfully, I’m respected worldwide as Kira, so I can easily get a doctor to come here and save your life. Maybe one day you’ll realize what you’ve got to do to make it worth something.” With that he calls the doctor, and nods to Elle in the hopes that she’ll take her cue to do something. She stands for a while, fidgeting with her threadbare white tee shirt, but in the end she walks up to Himiko and hefts the chubby cat into her arms. “I think this is the main problem,” she says, bowing nervously and taking the cat out into the hall. Kotori squeaks joyously, “kitty!” and the two of them disappear into the hallway, Elle’s head held as high as possible.
~`~`~
Tsuki survives his asthma attack without a trip to the emergency room. And in a move that would have earned her a lengthy grounding if her father had any regrets about what he’d done, Elle calls Teru and tells him how long his son had been allowed to choke and gasp for air. “It was because he said something bad about Kira,” she explains, knowing there was more too it but not sure how to express it. “He’s okay, but it got pretty bad before my dad got a doctor. He wanted to teach him a lesson. I just thought that you should know.”
If Elle had reached Kiyomi when she called, there might have been a fuss made about it. Kiyomi might have called Light and screamed at him for endangering her child’s life over him being a dumb, rebellious teenager, for not cleaning up the house before he mandated that Tsuki come to visit. But Teru merely states in a terse, clipped voice that God’s punishments are always just and appropriate. Elle remembers being yelled at for wanting to eat miso soup instead of cake, and isn’t so sure.