Death Note Fanfic!
Going to Bangor for a few days to celebrate my birthday, meet friends and run a Trigun game. I've been planning this game for ages, I hope it goes well...
At any rate, I'll be back next week. I was kinda hoping to do a Death Note Fanfic, and what do you know I sorta managed it!
This is hot off the press. I would have asked someone like user to beta it, but to be honest I'd like to get it up before I go so... and it's only a quick sketch anyway. I'm not even sure it's good enough to deserve betering... heh.
Anyway, here's the Death Note fic.
Comments would be welcome!
Familiarity Breeds…
(AKA Death List.)
Familiarity Breeds…
Yagami Light wants to kill L.
It’s not a flippant desire. He finds himself slipping into long fantasies where he tries to divest himself of the sloppy detective in various ways. His favourite, at the moment, is strangling him with the long, unyielding, chain that binds them together.
Of course his daydreams are always cut off when L turns his blank, wide eyed stare upon him, a gaze that seems to look right through Light’s skull and Light, inevitably, turns away.
Light has started to compose a list in his head, a sort of Death List. A list of all the things he hates about L. All the things he wants to kill him for.
Those eyes are on the top of his list, right now.
If the eye is the window to the soul then L’s dark orbs are two holes in the head, looking out upon an empty, dark, room. A derelict shack full of musty cobwebs, broken bottles and forgotten memories.
Light likes to think he had mirror eyes, eyes which showed people whatever they wished to see, or whatever he wants them to see. But L’s eyes were merely holes in his skull. They hardly widen or narrow with pain or surprise, don’t sparkle with amusement or dim with pain. They gaze blankly into Light, or else into thin air, burrowing into things unknown.
They are eyes that, one moment, are as old as time and another are as open as a babe’s.
Sometimes Light likes to think that he can read the detective, sometimes he is correct but most of the time he is reduced to sheer, crass, guess work.
If Light truly knew himself to be Kira, he is sure he would have killed L long ago, if only for those eyes.
Number 2: L’s insomnia.
Normally this would be placed down to fifth or sixth on the list. It might not even figure at all, if Light wasn’t spending every waking hour with the man. If this little fact didn’t combine with his eating habits. (see issue. 3)
They’ve set up sleeping quarters so that there are two beds and a computer. Light sleeps in one bed whilst L works, or very occasionally sleeps, at the computer, curled up like some gigantic, freak crow.
Light has yet to see L use his bed at all. He thinks they only have it in there for appearances and, he must confess, he isn’t about to complain.
He dreads to think what Misa would say if she thought the room they shared had but one bed.
Light sometimes wonders if it would kill L not to eat at night, just once, just for a while, just for that intermediate time when Light is trying to rest.
He has never seen L eat a real meal. He munches on sweet snacks all day long. Sometimes Watari smuggles more savoury food amongst the sugary treats. A slice of bread here, a lump of rice there, a single strawberry, a scrap of meat hidden or a piece of carrot. Most of these are casually discarded for the sugar beneath but sometimes they are consumed and L does, at least, eat some fruit. That influx of vitamins is probably the only reason L’s body hasn’t fallen apart.
L takes no main meal, not the way Light does. Instead he grazes at odd intervals though out the day.
The sound of L’s chewing has become such a fixed point in Light’s life, such a familiar thorn in his side over the last few weeks that he can tell what the guy is eating without looking.
A soft crunching marks sugar, a crinkling of paper; chocolate, the whisper of bread and bean paste, he’s learning them all.
He’s also learning that it’s very difficult for him to rest when his captor is eating. The wet chomping keeps him awake and it’s only his pride that prevents him from getting up and yelling, begging L to stop snacking for an hour, just one hour or two, whilst Light can go to sleep.
Light is also coming to realize that, for all his much lauded social skills, he would rather spend another year in solitary confinement than another week in L’s company.
At seven AM, each morning Watari enters and removed the handcuffs first from L and then from Light.
For five minutes, closely watched by cameras and comrades, they massage their wrists, check for signs of chaffing, and change their shirts.
That’s something most people would never think of, how to change shirts or tops when handcuffed to another person. Showers and toiletries and dates are all very inconvenient but no where near as bothersome as all the small, delicate details of daily life which are ruined by the continuous presence of another.
How to scratch yourself when someone else is around? How to apologise for a bout of wind? How to excuse yourself for other more… disgusting elements of the human condition?
It bothers Yagami Light far more than it bothers L (damn him,) who, Light is learning, treats is body only as a wrapping for his mind. He doesn’t seem to care what it looks like or how it acts so long as his mind keeps on ticking along.
It’s mildly annoying at the best of times but when faced with them on a continuous, unrelenting basis it’s positively maddening.
Especially when mixed with all those little, tiny habits that make their way down to further, smaller articles upon the list of reasons why Light wishes to kill L.
He dislikes the way L fiddles with his feet, dislikes the way he sucks his thumb when he’s thinking, dislikes the way he picks thing up with only two fingers, dislikes all those little, annoying habits the man has that make him so strange, so inhuman.
Light has learned to read people by their social habits. Understand the inherent laws of society and study how people diverge from some, cling closer to others and one often sees the true measure of a man. Understand the culture and the rest is easy, as childish as a dot-to-dot game.
But L is a man who has hardly brushed past society. So locked in his own head Light feels like he might as well predict the emotions of a computer.
But L has emotions, feelings, urges which he constantly evaluates and measures and analyses. That self doubt, that utter introversion is the tool Light uses. L has learned to listen to his head, but listening to his heart is… more complex.
Light’s list of hatreds run to over a hundred articles now and it remains written only upon his mind because he dare not take a pen to paper whilst the detective is around.
Light considers himself a mature person but even he is not entirely above a little childish revenge occasionally.
And he has learned that there are things about L he would never have guessed otherwise.
Things that he can use against him.
Things that L dislikes about Light.
For example; within his first few days he learns that L does not, in fact, wear the same clothes all the time.
He’d picked up on this fast enough, had suspected it even before their self-enforced companionship. The worn patches on L’s jeans changed their position from day to day, a slightly puckered or stained mark on his white pull-over slipping into a different place, or disappearing entirely.
When they change their shirts Watari presents L with an exact, clean, duplicate of the dirty top he previously took away and L’s draws are filled with identical jeans and underwear. He owns no socks that Light knows about.
‘Why?’ Light had asked him, one day early on into their sentence.
L paused, chewing on his thumb thoughtfully before answering, ‘It is because… different clothes make different people, but L should always be L.’
Light considered the answer, filing it away it for further contemplation later.
That was how he noticed some of L’s subtler idiosyncrasies. For example: he doesn’t like it when the people around him dress differently.
Shortly after Light’s father had left the police force he came into the building, one day, wearing a shirt and jeans.
L had been tetchy with him, more closed mouthed and almost distrustful, tense even.
The next time he visited, Soichiro Yagami wore a suit and tie once again and L was significantly more relaxed.
After this Light had kindly asked Misa to do some shopping for him. The foolish girl had been more than glad to comply and, as he had known she would, Misa bought him a wonderfully fashionable, expensive and over all slightly eccentric array of clothing.
It was a wardrobe entirely different from his usual attire and it contained socks. Many, many sets of socks.
Light wonders if Misa has been paying as much attention to L’s freakish ways as he has, as if she supports him in this.
Sometimes he thinks that Misa is much smarter than anyone gives her credit for and to her credit they all look excellent on him, all give him a subtly different look.
He was wearing one of her choices, a dark black, vaguely gothic style top, when he and L had their fist-fight.
It’s amazing what a simple change of clothing can do.
Now each morning he spends almost quarter of an hour carefully selecting clothing whilst L watches on impatiently. Once, after he’d spend almost ten minutes carefully laying out and selecting what pair of socks he wear the detective simply dragged him out of the room.
(This is another article on his list. L seems for forget about the chain binding them together more often than not. The amount of times he has been forcibly tugged hither and thither, the amount of times he has been awoken from deep sleep by the detectives sudden need to the lavatory are enough, just on their own, to provoke homicide.)
Another time L forbade Watari from taking the handcuffs off just to prevent Light from wearing a particularly loud shirt.
It was the closest Light had seen L to being angry and it pleased him so much he had given into the detective’s demands, cherishing that little victory whilst he could and wearing his usual, cleanly pressed, white shirt.
There is a more than small amount of satisfaction in knowing that their enforced partnership chafes as much at L as it does Light.
Sometimes Light wonders if it bothers L more but that L is better at hiding it.
He’d be almost surprised if it didn’t. Being in the constant companionship of Light must surely be irritating to the aloof man. But then again there is always Watari who is, in as much as Light can figure, always at or near L’s side.
So perhaps L is more used to this sort of situation, after all.
Approximately seven on the List is L’s hygiene, or lack of it.
Hygene is a preliminary matter for L. Light thinks he would hardly wash at all if it were not for the insistences of Watari and, now, Light himself.
Watari looks after the body which L would, if left to his own devices, most likely neglect entirely.
L is, however, conscientious about his teeth. He brushes them once very six hours using child-friendly, strawberry toothpaste that makes Light wince to look upon. Light wouldn’t mind this accept he’s stringent upon the timing and, unless caught in crisis or in one of his rare periods of sleep, will drag Light away from whatever he’s doing to attend to his damn mouth.
The rest of his body is another matter.
Now that they are bound together L showers every day and that bothers him too, Light can tell. Because he thinks he has so many better things to do, because the sound of water drumming on tiles annoys him, because he can’t think straight when wet and naked. Because it just does.
Another little victory of Yagami Light.
Each morning, before the ceremony of the Hand-cuffs, one boy or the other drags his companion to the shower stall, at which point one of them would enter, passing the other his shirt, and the other would wait outside until finished.
This is the pattern.
L likes patterns though he deals well enough with chaos.
He is, after all, a genius.
L’s manipulation of Light, and all those around him, is not on the list, because it encompasses so much hatred that it demands a list all of its own.
And that is the list of reasons why Yagami Light wants to kill L.
However.
However…
There is another article.
It’s written at the top of the list in faded pencil, hard to read, sloppy, sketched tentatively, almost childishly.
It encompasses the moments when the two sit quietly together looking at the monitor screens and stretches to those spent talking about this and that. It touches upon the moments of L’s genius, grasping at amazing feats of realization and rumbles past the underbelly of the pure naivety of the man. It is written with thoughts of his kindness, and his strange innocence sharpened by lightning wit and cutting observational skills.
It echoes words that L has spoken himself.
It is the highest reason on the list.
“Because L is my first Friend.”
Yagami Light is not sure he isn’t Kira. He would like to be but he cannot deny that there is a possibility that he is a murderer, that L is right.
He oftain wonders how he killed those people, but he never wonders why. Because the reasons he can recognise, even agree with at some level.
Light likes to think of himself as a restrained person, a rational man, a professional man. He doesn’t act on pure emotion or passion. He likes to think that whatever he does is motivated by reason, first and formost.
If this were truer of more people, Light thinks, then the world would be a better place.
But he cannot deny that his reason is faulty when it comes to L.
Light makes friends because they are useful to him. He imagines that it is the same for most people.
And, if Light is Kira, (unlikely, but let us assume!) then he had clear, rational reasons for killing those people. He had a goal. He was not a psychopath but a… soldier for a cause. Which, when one thinks about it, is really something to be lauded.
But that is another matter.
The point is… the point is…
Sometimes, at night, when he is kept awake the sounds lf L’s typing of munching he wonders what the detective is to him and what he is to L.
He runs down all the articles on his Death List until he looks guiltily at the top, at that frail, childish article written highest of them all in a hand Light can hardly recognise as his own.
When he does he is more confused than he can recall ever being in his life.
But this he knows…
Friend or foe, with L, it is personal.
End
At any rate, I'll be back next week. I was kinda hoping to do a Death Note Fanfic, and what do you know I sorta managed it!
This is hot off the press. I would have asked someone like user to beta it, but to be honest I'd like to get it up before I go so... and it's only a quick sketch anyway. I'm not even sure it's good enough to deserve betering... heh.
Anyway, here's the Death Note fic.
Comments would be welcome!
Familiarity Breeds…
(AKA Death List.)
Familiarity Breeds…
Yagami Light wants to kill L.
It’s not a flippant desire. He finds himself slipping into long fantasies where he tries to divest himself of the sloppy detective in various ways. His favourite, at the moment, is strangling him with the long, unyielding, chain that binds them together.
Of course his daydreams are always cut off when L turns his blank, wide eyed stare upon him, a gaze that seems to look right through Light’s skull and Light, inevitably, turns away.
Light has started to compose a list in his head, a sort of Death List. A list of all the things he hates about L. All the things he wants to kill him for.
Those eyes are on the top of his list, right now.
If the eye is the window to the soul then L’s dark orbs are two holes in the head, looking out upon an empty, dark, room. A derelict shack full of musty cobwebs, broken bottles and forgotten memories.
Light likes to think he had mirror eyes, eyes which showed people whatever they wished to see, or whatever he wants them to see. But L’s eyes were merely holes in his skull. They hardly widen or narrow with pain or surprise, don’t sparkle with amusement or dim with pain. They gaze blankly into Light, or else into thin air, burrowing into things unknown.
They are eyes that, one moment, are as old as time and another are as open as a babe’s.
Sometimes Light likes to think that he can read the detective, sometimes he is correct but most of the time he is reduced to sheer, crass, guess work.
If Light truly knew himself to be Kira, he is sure he would have killed L long ago, if only for those eyes.
Number 2: L’s insomnia.
Normally this would be placed down to fifth or sixth on the list. It might not even figure at all, if Light wasn’t spending every waking hour with the man. If this little fact didn’t combine with his eating habits. (see issue. 3)
They’ve set up sleeping quarters so that there are two beds and a computer. Light sleeps in one bed whilst L works, or very occasionally sleeps, at the computer, curled up like some gigantic, freak crow.
Light has yet to see L use his bed at all. He thinks they only have it in there for appearances and, he must confess, he isn’t about to complain.
He dreads to think what Misa would say if she thought the room they shared had but one bed.
Light sometimes wonders if it would kill L not to eat at night, just once, just for a while, just for that intermediate time when Light is trying to rest.
He has never seen L eat a real meal. He munches on sweet snacks all day long. Sometimes Watari smuggles more savoury food amongst the sugary treats. A slice of bread here, a lump of rice there, a single strawberry, a scrap of meat hidden or a piece of carrot. Most of these are casually discarded for the sugar beneath but sometimes they are consumed and L does, at least, eat some fruit. That influx of vitamins is probably the only reason L’s body hasn’t fallen apart.
L takes no main meal, not the way Light does. Instead he grazes at odd intervals though out the day.
The sound of L’s chewing has become such a fixed point in Light’s life, such a familiar thorn in his side over the last few weeks that he can tell what the guy is eating without looking.
A soft crunching marks sugar, a crinkling of paper; chocolate, the whisper of bread and bean paste, he’s learning them all.
He’s also learning that it’s very difficult for him to rest when his captor is eating. The wet chomping keeps him awake and it’s only his pride that prevents him from getting up and yelling, begging L to stop snacking for an hour, just one hour or two, whilst Light can go to sleep.
Light is also coming to realize that, for all his much lauded social skills, he would rather spend another year in solitary confinement than another week in L’s company.
At seven AM, each morning Watari enters and removed the handcuffs first from L and then from Light.
For five minutes, closely watched by cameras and comrades, they massage their wrists, check for signs of chaffing, and change their shirts.
That’s something most people would never think of, how to change shirts or tops when handcuffed to another person. Showers and toiletries and dates are all very inconvenient but no where near as bothersome as all the small, delicate details of daily life which are ruined by the continuous presence of another.
How to scratch yourself when someone else is around? How to apologise for a bout of wind? How to excuse yourself for other more… disgusting elements of the human condition?
It bothers Yagami Light far more than it bothers L (damn him,) who, Light is learning, treats is body only as a wrapping for his mind. He doesn’t seem to care what it looks like or how it acts so long as his mind keeps on ticking along.
It’s mildly annoying at the best of times but when faced with them on a continuous, unrelenting basis it’s positively maddening.
Especially when mixed with all those little, tiny habits that make their way down to further, smaller articles upon the list of reasons why Light wishes to kill L.
He dislikes the way L fiddles with his feet, dislikes the way he sucks his thumb when he’s thinking, dislikes the way he picks thing up with only two fingers, dislikes all those little, annoying habits the man has that make him so strange, so inhuman.
Light has learned to read people by their social habits. Understand the inherent laws of society and study how people diverge from some, cling closer to others and one often sees the true measure of a man. Understand the culture and the rest is easy, as childish as a dot-to-dot game.
But L is a man who has hardly brushed past society. So locked in his own head Light feels like he might as well predict the emotions of a computer.
But L has emotions, feelings, urges which he constantly evaluates and measures and analyses. That self doubt, that utter introversion is the tool Light uses. L has learned to listen to his head, but listening to his heart is… more complex.
Light’s list of hatreds run to over a hundred articles now and it remains written only upon his mind because he dare not take a pen to paper whilst the detective is around.
Light considers himself a mature person but even he is not entirely above a little childish revenge occasionally.
And he has learned that there are things about L he would never have guessed otherwise.
Things that he can use against him.
Things that L dislikes about Light.
For example; within his first few days he learns that L does not, in fact, wear the same clothes all the time.
He’d picked up on this fast enough, had suspected it even before their self-enforced companionship. The worn patches on L’s jeans changed their position from day to day, a slightly puckered or stained mark on his white pull-over slipping into a different place, or disappearing entirely.
When they change their shirts Watari presents L with an exact, clean, duplicate of the dirty top he previously took away and L’s draws are filled with identical jeans and underwear. He owns no socks that Light knows about.
‘Why?’ Light had asked him, one day early on into their sentence.
L paused, chewing on his thumb thoughtfully before answering, ‘It is because… different clothes make different people, but L should always be L.’
Light considered the answer, filing it away it for further contemplation later.
That was how he noticed some of L’s subtler idiosyncrasies. For example: he doesn’t like it when the people around him dress differently.
Shortly after Light’s father had left the police force he came into the building, one day, wearing a shirt and jeans.
L had been tetchy with him, more closed mouthed and almost distrustful, tense even.
The next time he visited, Soichiro Yagami wore a suit and tie once again and L was significantly more relaxed.
After this Light had kindly asked Misa to do some shopping for him. The foolish girl had been more than glad to comply and, as he had known she would, Misa bought him a wonderfully fashionable, expensive and over all slightly eccentric array of clothing.
It was a wardrobe entirely different from his usual attire and it contained socks. Many, many sets of socks.
Light wonders if Misa has been paying as much attention to L’s freakish ways as he has, as if she supports him in this.
Sometimes he thinks that Misa is much smarter than anyone gives her credit for and to her credit they all look excellent on him, all give him a subtly different look.
He was wearing one of her choices, a dark black, vaguely gothic style top, when he and L had their fist-fight.
It’s amazing what a simple change of clothing can do.
Now each morning he spends almost quarter of an hour carefully selecting clothing whilst L watches on impatiently. Once, after he’d spend almost ten minutes carefully laying out and selecting what pair of socks he wear the detective simply dragged him out of the room.
(This is another article on his list. L seems for forget about the chain binding them together more often than not. The amount of times he has been forcibly tugged hither and thither, the amount of times he has been awoken from deep sleep by the detectives sudden need to the lavatory are enough, just on their own, to provoke homicide.)
Another time L forbade Watari from taking the handcuffs off just to prevent Light from wearing a particularly loud shirt.
It was the closest Light had seen L to being angry and it pleased him so much he had given into the detective’s demands, cherishing that little victory whilst he could and wearing his usual, cleanly pressed, white shirt.
There is a more than small amount of satisfaction in knowing that their enforced partnership chafes as much at L as it does Light.
Sometimes Light wonders if it bothers L more but that L is better at hiding it.
He’d be almost surprised if it didn’t. Being in the constant companionship of Light must surely be irritating to the aloof man. But then again there is always Watari who is, in as much as Light can figure, always at or near L’s side.
So perhaps L is more used to this sort of situation, after all.
Approximately seven on the List is L’s hygiene, or lack of it.
Hygene is a preliminary matter for L. Light thinks he would hardly wash at all if it were not for the insistences of Watari and, now, Light himself.
Watari looks after the body which L would, if left to his own devices, most likely neglect entirely.
L is, however, conscientious about his teeth. He brushes them once very six hours using child-friendly, strawberry toothpaste that makes Light wince to look upon. Light wouldn’t mind this accept he’s stringent upon the timing and, unless caught in crisis or in one of his rare periods of sleep, will drag Light away from whatever he’s doing to attend to his damn mouth.
The rest of his body is another matter.
Now that they are bound together L showers every day and that bothers him too, Light can tell. Because he thinks he has so many better things to do, because the sound of water drumming on tiles annoys him, because he can’t think straight when wet and naked. Because it just does.
Another little victory of Yagami Light.
Each morning, before the ceremony of the Hand-cuffs, one boy or the other drags his companion to the shower stall, at which point one of them would enter, passing the other his shirt, and the other would wait outside until finished.
This is the pattern.
L likes patterns though he deals well enough with chaos.
He is, after all, a genius.
L’s manipulation of Light, and all those around him, is not on the list, because it encompasses so much hatred that it demands a list all of its own.
And that is the list of reasons why Yagami Light wants to kill L.
However.
However…
There is another article.
It’s written at the top of the list in faded pencil, hard to read, sloppy, sketched tentatively, almost childishly.
It encompasses the moments when the two sit quietly together looking at the monitor screens and stretches to those spent talking about this and that. It touches upon the moments of L’s genius, grasping at amazing feats of realization and rumbles past the underbelly of the pure naivety of the man. It is written with thoughts of his kindness, and his strange innocence sharpened by lightning wit and cutting observational skills.
It echoes words that L has spoken himself.
It is the highest reason on the list.
“Because L is my first Friend.”
Yagami Light is not sure he isn’t Kira. He would like to be but he cannot deny that there is a possibility that he is a murderer, that L is right.
He oftain wonders how he killed those people, but he never wonders why. Because the reasons he can recognise, even agree with at some level.
Light likes to think of himself as a restrained person, a rational man, a professional man. He doesn’t act on pure emotion or passion. He likes to think that whatever he does is motivated by reason, first and formost.
If this were truer of more people, Light thinks, then the world would be a better place.
But he cannot deny that his reason is faulty when it comes to L.
Light makes friends because they are useful to him. He imagines that it is the same for most people.
And, if Light is Kira, (unlikely, but let us assume!) then he had clear, rational reasons for killing those people. He had a goal. He was not a psychopath but a… soldier for a cause. Which, when one thinks about it, is really something to be lauded.
But that is another matter.
The point is… the point is…
Sometimes, at night, when he is kept awake the sounds lf L’s typing of munching he wonders what the detective is to him and what he is to L.
He runs down all the articles on his Death List until he looks guiltily at the top, at that frail, childish article written highest of them all in a hand Light can hardly recognise as his own.
When he does he is more confused than he can recall ever being in his life.
But this he knows…
Friend or foe, with L, it is personal.
End