subversion | [OOC] [AU concept] What if ... Light had paid more attention in class?

It's November 28th, 2003. Bored high-school student Light Yagami is enduring yet another tedious remedial English lesson. Except, that morning, his alarm clock malfunctioned.

With no time to fill out his maths homework before first bell, he catches up in English class. So, carefully filling out a page of binomial expansions (why does the world hate him?), he doesn't notice a small black book, tumbling out of the sky as if it has a right to be there...

Later that week, three girls in year 11 die of heart attacks - two on the same day, then another, three days later. It's shocking. Inexplicable. Light makes all the right noises - it really makes you think about how short life is, any of us could die, just like that - watches the hysterical news reports, looks a bit down for his family's benefit, and never thinks much of it again.

2004

The next year, Light is admitted to To-oh University as the freshman representative. It's whispered that he scored 100% on every exam. He concentrates on his studies, and dates regularly - but not seriously, or with any great interest.

The closest he comes is losing his virginity to Takada Kiyomi: he dates her for a year. She's biddable, naive, and easily convinced of things. He's clinical about it, intellectually curious. He's a late developer, who didn't discover masturbation until he was fifteen and trying to measure it - and finds sex is something he doesn't care for. Light's mind is a constant swirl of ideas and theories, assessments and interpretations. The process of arousal and orgasm, no matter what it does to his body, cripples what he is. It's like being an animal: inhuman, unthinking. It's something Light should be above, he knows. He doesn't like the loss of control, the shutdown of his mind - so he avoids the whole thing. The girls he dates love him for this: he makes very few demands on them that they're conscious of, and appears to be the perfect gentleman.

Unsurprisingly, Light tops the intake year with perfect scores. People's opinions of him solidify further: either they love him, or they hate him, but regardless of which - they do know him.

2005

Light's second year - his last in the general education stream - starts well, just as the last one did. His percentages are perfect: he's popular and liked: he's viewed as someone to look up to.

Except that after the winter break, Light notices that things are becoming ... just a little more difficult. He's doing the same number of courses - more than most students do, but not more than he can cope with - and doing the same amount of study at home after hours. But it's taking him longer. It's not anything noticeable: it's not something he can describe, or plot on a graph and check. Except that one day, the work he should have finished by 8:30 is still going at 9. He shrugs it off - until it becomes a regular thing.

Over the next few months, Light's concentration drifts more and more. He begins to have to pay attention in class, rather than letting lectures wash over him. His homework takes longer and longer to complete. He starts to have trouble getting out of bed - something he would have sworn would never be a problem. His room starts to be, somehow, just a little disorganised. He dumps his current girlfriend, saying he needs to pay more attention to his studies. It's true enough.

By the end of the year, Light is studying until midnight every day, taking frantic notes in class, and looking increasingly tired and worn down. He still manages perfect scores on his exams, but it's close.

2006

In his third year, Light begins to specialise in law, with a heavy focus on criminology. He's always intended to follow his father into the NPA's Investigation Bureau, and that hasn't changed. The workload is heavier: the courses are more intense. Light starts bringing an audio recorder to class and studying until 1am. He's starting to feel as if he lives in mist: as if he's on the top of some lonely tower, telegraphing to the ground below. Not long into the year, his first piece of work comes back marked 99%.

He sits there, for a while, just staring at it. A long while. He looks over the paper - it's marked down for factual omissions. But he'd been sure he'd got everything!..

He argues with the lecturer, but can't get around the fact he overlooked it. "Don't worry too much about it, Yagami-kun. Everyone has off days."

He's now studying till 2am. Every night. Going over and over everything he can, five, six times. Things are slipping, but he can make them up. He can do better, work harder...

His average percentage hits 99%. Then 98. 96. Light is working constantly, grabbing four or five hours' sleep a night. It's all slipping through his fingers, everything he was assured, everything he was promised, and if he just tries a little harder, pulls tighter on the ropes holding him together...

95%. 94. He's still top of the year by percentage, but like vultures, the other students are realising his position is assailable. Light looks sick, now. Teachers are starting to ask him what's wrong. His family are worried.

For the first time, the end-of-year exams give him trouble. He shows up for each one an hour early, sometimes two - even for the ones that start at 9. Hair askew, clothing rumpled, he goes over his notes like the rest of the students. It's as if they're written on water. Shimmering. Unreal. Inconsequential.

When the results are published, he's second.

2007

Second. A girl (Takahashi Megumi: he'll never forget her name, pinned up above his as if she'd beaten him fairly) placed ahead of him. He scored 93.8% overall to her 94.1%. It feels like the end of his sheltered, academically centred little world. He stares at the board until the staff have to ask him to leave - not even looking and relooking, as if it might change if he wishes hard enough. He just isn't there. Nobody can convince him that second place in Japan's top university is still very respectable indeed - for Light, there's only one place worth having, and he hasn't got it.

Sachiko doesn't meet him at the door for his results, as she always has before. Perhaps it's because Light is late home: he drags himself to the park, the same one he ran away to as a child, when everything was so easy and expected: the one with the chattering stream and the cherry trees. A moment of peace in the chaos of the city. Looking at the water and the pebbles it's tinkling over, he wonders, "If I dive in, will I break my neck?" It doesn't occur to him to throw the paper in the water: the results are public knowledge. He doesn't jump. A short, drawn-out life as a quadriplegic is not a choice at all.

Sachiko's face is grave when he finally arrives home, no matter how hard she tries to hide it. Light hands the paper to her with a deep, repeated bow: the kind he hasn't felt the need to make since he was a boy of eleven, since he realised that he had to keep what other people think of him central at all times. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he gabbles. "I don't know what happened. I'll do better." He looks as if he might die on the spot, sounds on the verge of tears, of hysteria - the strain and the downward spiral, the sleep deprivation and the skipped meals, they've lasted the best part of two years. And now that it's all fallen right out of his hands and shattered on the ground, he doesn't know what to do: if there's anything he can do.

His mother tries to reassure him - to tell him that it's him she cares about, not his exam scores: that he's still done exceptionally well - but it contradicts everything Light's ever known about himself and his family. He can't hear it.

Sayu - seventeen, now - takes a cup of tea up to him, later. He answers the door red-eyed. The room behind him is untidy and smells: she's not shocked. It's been getting progressively worse for a year, and she's seen worse boy's bedrooms in her time.

When he takes the cup from her and thanks her, it's as if he's been bled dry of all emotion. She can't bear to see him like this - so pale, so broken, so empty - and as a joke, clumsy and inept, she voices one of her very worst fears. "Don't kill yourself over it, oniichan. Nothing's ever that bad." She can't imagine the world without her big brother in it.

He laughs - sad, but laughter all the same - and hugs her, and sends her on her way with a semi-smile that's gone as soon as she's out the door.

Meanwhile, his father is out of the country again, at another Interpol meeting. They crop up regularly enough. This one concerns a terrorist ring which may have a base in Osaka.

Very carefully, Light pretends nothing is wrong. If he's a little later out of his room every morning, if he comes downstairs with eyes red from another night tossing and turning and fretting over his mistakes, over the blemishes he can't iron out, so what? He's never been a chatterbox at home, and now he sits with newspapers and books on his lap and pretends to read them. He sits in front of the TV, plays video games, stares out of his window. He puts on the perfect façade of overachieving normality that he's always lived by: his mother's attentive concern is deflected with reason and reassurance. He applies for his exam papers, and waits for them to come back. He walks the streets of Setagaya, hands in pockets, ruminating, trapped by his own failure, trying to figure a way out of what's happening to him, the way his mind is rotting away like a bad tooth. Nothing presents itself. Two years of effort he didn't know he was capable of, and for what?

More and more, he's drawn back to the bridge in the park, where he searched for mantises as a child, where he walked beside the babbling stream every day on his way home from elementary school. Where he hung over the rail and thought about jumping. It doesn't feel at all like the wrong thing to do: he's failed. Sitting at his desk - it's cluttered and crowded, not as neat as it once was - he opens a notebook and sketches out a plan: some of the ideas chattering in his head. Something to think about, something comforting. Not something he'd ever do.

Three weeks later he cleans his room from top to bottom. Everything he's left lying around is folded, put away. He dusts and polishes, changes the sheets on the bed, takes the dirty clothes to the laundry basket. He polishes the patio windows until he can't see the glass any longer: tidies himself away as if he never was. Then he showers, dresses in the blue suit he'd worn to his freshman entrance ceremony, and for his coming-of-age, and checks into a large chain hotel. Somewhere he won't be found until the morning.

The room is pleasant enough, decorated in that aggressively neutral style that cheap hotels are. The bathroom is all pristine white enamel and porcelain tile: it appeals to Light's spartan sense of aesthetics. Not bad for the last thing he'll ever see. The tube and the needle and the elastic strap come out of his bag, out of the packaging he's already checked over. He picked them up from a medical supply outlet online, the sort of place you can buy anything at all. The other thing he produces is a wooden rod: it looks like a section of a broomstick, about a metre in length. He strips, hangs up his clothes as if he plans to get into them again. Perhaps one more time, for his funeral. Or not.

Everything he needs, he places on a wicker stool, next to the bath. Closing the door, he showers again, cleaning himself with minute attention. He finds himself tracing over his body, all the outlines of muscle beneath skin, and silk beneath sparse, fine hair. As if, at this last minute, he's trying to see what it is to be alive: how it is to be merely human, and young, and lost in the moment.

Shutting off the shower, he runs the bath.

The water's deep, hints of sea green against the white enamel, and as hot as he can stand it: he flushes salmon-pink up to his waist, and further up as he tightens the strap around his upper arm. The wooden bar sits across the top of the bath. This is all that's left to him: the only thing he can do, and it feels terribly, terrifyingly right. It's surprising. Knowing what to do, knowing it was all over, has calmed and centred him. He finally feels his old self again: suffused with certainty and confidence, with a place at the top of the world. And it isn't even the second place that has driven him to it, really. It's the knowledge, final and undeniable, that he's deteriorating: that he's lost the things that made him special. That the gifts he's juggled effortlessly all his life are falling out of his hands as if they're greased, faster than he can gather them back up. That who he thought he was isn't who he's going to be.

He's covered every eventuality. What he's going to do will work: he has no doubt of that. It will be painless, and quick. He won't be disturbed, and his mother won't be the one who finds him when it's over. And thinking of that, it occurs to him that Sayu will cry when she finds out: she'll wonder if it was her fault. That's when he almost changes his mind - but he doesn't. Better she never realises what a disappointment he turned out to be.

If I'm not perfect - tapping at the inside of his elbow, the vein pops up, with the brachial artery behind it - then I'm not myself. Unwrapping the wide-bore hypodermic, he attaches the plastic tube, drapes it over the wooden bar so that it isn't in the water and won't block up. The scratch is more painful than it ought to be as he drives the needle into the vein: it's hard to push it home in his own flesh. If I can't be myself - taping the syringe to his arm, loosening the belt and placing it on the stool, finally neat again as the blood begins to flow - then I don't want to be anyone at all.

The water doesn't turn pink. Instead, the blood blossoms out of the tube, down into the water like ink from a squid. A restful, trickling sound, and a faint, metallic smell. The bath is so warm that Light closes his eyes. Tiny dots swirl in and out of view. He's tired, all of a sudden: his heart is racing, a fluttering sensation all through him. Resting on his back, he can't see the room spinning. This isn't so bad. It really is like falling asleep.

It's hard to move. Everything is so heavy.

As he sinks deeper into the stupor, as if he's returning to a warm, red womb, he thinks he hears a siren. It doesn't matter. Someone will tell him if it's important...

When he next opens his eyes, he's in hospital. And through the confused mist and the freezing cold he can intuit one sickening fact, poisonous as a lead bar against the back of his skull: I've failed. I've failed again.

Much later on, he learns the details of what happened: that just as he was getting into the bath, a generator had overloaded behind the hotel. The fire had spread fast, upwards to the second and third floors before being brought under control. As part of the evacuation, the fire service had checked rooms that were set to do-not-disturb, like Light's: it had been the middle of the day, and there hadn't been many of them. They'd found him near death, grey in the crimson water, and there had been some question of whether he'd survive; he'd come closest to death when they had to move him from the hotel before emergency transfusion could commence. So close, so close to getting what he'd wanted. But nobody had died in the fire, or even been injured, and the media had made a huge thing out of the one-in-a-million chance.

However many strings his father pulled to keep his name out of the public arena, Light is grateful.

The walls of the hospital are green: school meals, long-ago fogs, as if being on an emergency ward isn't depressing enough. His father flies back into Japan, and stands at Light's bedside with Sachiko. It's been so cold since they pulled him out of the pool of blood and water: however many blankets there are over him, they aren't enough, and the lead weights on his limbs, the IV, they're more of a chain than the nurses at the door. Like the paint on the walls, Light's mind is all pea-soup, infected and blind. Is he sedated? Drugged? What's passing through the needle in his hand? It doesn't keep him from summoning up everything he's got left, to look into their eyes and beg: formal, distant language, shockingly polite, no way he's ever spoken to his parents. He's so dazed and frightened it doesn't occur to him that he probably can't walk out of the hospital. He'll use everything he's got left, say and do anything to get out of here and get it right, this time - and he does, slurring and mumbling with pinprick pupils. I can't stand this. Tousan - kaasan - please, please, please don't leave me here. I want to go home.

In the end, it's Soichiro who explains, with grey, professional calm, that they can't risk letting him leave until they know he'll be safe. That they're going to commit him. Sachiko is weeping behind her hand, and Light can't help it: he collapses into broken sobs, terrified and abandoned and more alone than he's ever known how to feel, and the tears are acid, making it all a hundred times worse. That's when they leave, and the nurses come over, and one of them holds him - it's a precaution: he's not going anywhere - while the other injects him with - something: the liquid in the syringe is clear, and later they won't tell him what it was, and his notes aren't pinned to the end of his bed where they'd be useful to him.

He never forgives his parents.

It takes a week for him to realise he won't die of shame. A month for his body to semi-recover from the shock he's put it through. While he's on suicide watch, Sachiko comes in to sit beside his bed, all night, every night. Light always makes the same request - Please, kaasan, take me home - then refuses to speak to her further, or even look at her. Part of it's childish hate and sickening ingratitude: part of it's the heavy sedatives they insist on keeping him on. He's too out of it to argue: like most Japanese mental hospitals, the one Light is in tends towards overmedication. Towards the end of the month, they taper him off the tranquillisers: the anxiety that bounces back threatens to send him screaming up the walls. After that, all they leave him on, for reasons he can't fathom, is an antipsychotic. It makes his eyes twitch and lean sideways: he hates it. Light knows he doesn't need to be taking them, and argues, and refuses. After the first few times he's pinned and injected, he just swallows the damned tablets. When I get out, they can't make me do a thing I don't want to.

The hospital is private and modern, and Light has never been so bored. He loses weight, and adopts the same loose uniform the rest of the patients tend to wear: ill-fitting trousers and shirts, hooded tops he can hide inside. It's camouflage: he doesn't want people to notice him. He sits in the day area, in corners and windows, and keeps a journal in English, obscured with rot13. He doesn't estimate the patients or staff highly, but still doesn't write down anything of consequence: the things in his head are for him alone. He has insights, plans and theories, just as ever - sometimes he remembers them, but forgetting them stirs all the issues up again.

Three times a week, he sees a psychologist. At first, Light does what he's always done with prying adults: he spins her a pretty little story tailored to get the result he wants - that being, him out of the hospital, free to pursue his goal again. The woman watches him, and listens to his glib patter, and takes notes. Light is not released, so he falls back to answering her questions with minimal information, and quietly refusing to get involved.

A lot of the patients are girls his own age or younger, reclusive and starving and bleeding - not only vital fluid from delicate cuts, but self-confidence that seeps out of them as fast as the authorities can put it back. They like him; he's pretty, still mostly personable despite all his defences, and not obviously sick, or damaged: he doesn't describe impossibilities, or shout random obscenities, or threaten them. They flock like hungry crows, and giggle as he passes by, and Light ignores it, just as he did at university when he was too busy to date. Just as he did the younger girls at school.

The day areas aren't well-observed or secured, let alone the hallways and cupboards, let alone the private rooms. Light likes the privacy of being off the ward, so it seems perfectly normal to keep going into the corridor when one of the girls follows him. They escape, and walk, and his attempts to send her back metamorphose into talk, and Light is making the same conversation he always does with girls, giving her the same looks, the same noncommittal phrases. She's giving all the right responses. Except then they're in an empty office, and somehow Emi ends up on her knees in front of him, and laughs when he tells her to stop. And then she's doing it, and he's so lonely and afraid and numbed with drugs and boredom that it's easier to twist his fingers into her hair and let her. And he's always been so put off by this sort of thing - the way it blanks him out, shuts off his mind as it's waking up his body. Except that now it's different.

Since it all happened, Light's thoughts have ceased to be his identity, and his reasonings have given up their role as his companions. He can't trust them any longer. They lie to him. They accuse him. They tell him all the ways he's failed, and so often, he finds himself not wanting to know. To shut it all off for just a few minutes. And that's what happens: as he holds her in place, and his back arches and twists against the wall, as he finally comes to a shameful, shuddering halt, it does stop, and it's quiet, and it's peaceful, and afterwards nothing matters at all. Almost addictive. Almost.

That first time, as she's giggling on the floor, he lifts her to her feet and kisses her on the nose - he can smell himself on her, and it's offputting - and thanks her, brushing her hair back into place. It's short and untidy: soot piles and crow feathers. She seems happy, and they talk quietly on the way back to the ward, and despite the hideous feeling Light has about how it will work out, he's still riding the endorphin rush and doesn't regret it.

Except that he's spot on: after that, she won't leave him alone. She follows him. Watches him. Talks to him about nothing at all when he's trying to write, or picking his way through insultingly easy books, or the stupid fluff magazines they pile up on the table. It goes on for days: she comes up, and he smiles and sweettalks her and promises to take her for a walk later - and even does, once or twice, trips out of the ward that finish up in empty rooms and corners. And it's on one of those trips, as she continues to stress him, with all of it rattling in his head and refusing to be silenced, that his mouth opens on its own and words escape, plaintive and quick and completely involuntary, unrelated to anything except the pressure in his head, not even sounding like him. "No, you didn't, oh, no you didn't, make it stop."

"I didn't know Yagami-kun spoke to himself!" He's never wanted anyone to notice; it's why he hides his face, seeks out corners, escapes off the ward. Her voice grates, a knife blade against the knobs of his spine. "Who'd have thought? You're one of us after all!"

His humiliation's complete, and the linoleum floor's nothing he can dig down into and bury himself - in fact, it's inconceivable that this could be about him. "No, Emi." Looking at her stupid, beaming face, something snaps. "I'm nothing like you. Do you want to know why? Because I'm going to get out of here, and you never will." Glaring, he steps right into her face; he wants to see her cower. The shock on her face - it's laughable, isn't it? She's nothing, is she? Nothing. A stupid, airheaded girl. One hand flies out, grabs her arm, lifts it to flash the livid scars around her wrist. "See? See? Even if they do let you out, everyone will see it, what you are. You're broken, and you can't hide it; you're marked. And you couldn't even get it right, could you?" As her face cracks, he sneers at her, and as she throws herself on him, kicking and slapping and swearing and accusing, he pushes her away, hard. That gets her off him; he walks away.

After that, he's in trouble; he's moved to a different ward, which is higher security and single-sex. They watch him more closely, and his psychologist wants to know all about it, of course. "What happened with Maeda-san, Yagami-kun?" Light manages a cool stare, and replies with nothing more than, "A difference of opinion."

Over the months, his boredom grows, sprouts thicker, sharper tendrils that hook into his mind, his soul. The games he plays with the patients - he never thinks of them as the other patients - develop and shift, become more overtly cruel on damp bat wings. He uses words like weapons, finding out the secrets of the loose-tongued and gullible and turning them back on them, just because he can, just to make himself feel better. He does the same thing in therapy, carving through that woman and her questions as if with a scalpel. And sometimes he looks into the bathroom mirror behind its wire frame, and wonders, What have they done to me? Is this who I was all along?

In the end, he's there six months.

He's not as he was. The determination to end himself, to blot out his shame with blood, has faded. In its place is a greyness: a pool of mercury inside, poisoning him. It leaches his motivation and his memories, and shoots out tendrils at odd angles - irritable responses and harsh words. Fits of bad temper and emotional outbursts that seem to come from nowhere. Nagging doubts and fears that are almost, almost voices: so intense they seem external. They threaten to overwhelm him, and sometimes do. Sometimes he still finds himself calling out to silence them.

He feels something he's never known: disgrace. Every time he shows his face, his family's eyes trail him, pretending everything's still all right when even a blind man could tell they weren't. Lying to people who call - "how is Light?" "Oh, he's fine, he's fine.". Every time he overhears it, the shame washes over him again, and the hypocrisy chokes him. Did they say the same things all the time he was gone? They don't know what to say to him, or how to comfort him when he's always been so isolated and self-sufficient. Sayu tries hard, but Light can't help feeling his failures might contaminate her.

After a few months, he suggests that he move out. His parents protest; they don't like the thought of him being out of their sight. Light hears them as token protests, driven by responsibility. He knows what he is, and he knows what he's done, and what he wants is to be somewhere that none of them can see him, or watch him, away from anyone who knows who he is or what he was. While money's no object, they refuse to have him live alone; the risk of what he might do, left alone, is too much for his parents to live with.

Aged twenty-one, he's out on his own in the world, living in a single room in a shared house, coping with a mental illness that nobody wants to identify for him, with his bubble of superiority and privilege close to popped, and his hopes and aspirations shattered on the ground around his feet. Sometimes he tries to pick them up and glue them back together, but mostly the thought of how ugly the pasted-together result would be keeps him from trying. For the first year after he moves out, he takes occasional phone calls from his family. Sachiko tells him she worries, and pleads with him to come home. Sayu writes him letters on convincingly girly pink paper: he stores them in a box in his wardrobe, unopened. After a year, the phone calls trail off. Light tries not to object: they were uncomfortable for all concerned, after all. The letters keep coming each week, every one stored away unread. Soichiro continues to pay his rent and his bills directly: a small allowance is transferred to Light's bank account each month. It feels like a bribe: this is how you can best fulfil your duty to us: stay out of the way, pretend you don't exist, and we'll pay you to do it. It sickens Light to be so dependent, and so tied to his family: he suspects part of the price of it continuing is for him to stay put, so they know where he is.

We pick him up three years later.

What's your justification for this?

Whether Light's Kira or not, he's still a narcissist with a ridiculously inflated superiority complex, and little appreciation of others. And he's still been brought up with hopes and aspirations that I don't think the mundanities of everyday life can fulfil - in fact, becoming Kira is probably the only thing that can fulfil them. The theory goes that the power rush he gets from being Kira, and from using the notebook, holds him together: he's remarkably stable for someone who clearly has batshit going on beneath the surface. So take that away from him, and what I'd expect to see would be the emergence of a mental illness of some sort, possibly genetic, possibly driven by the progressive failure of the world and its people to meet his expectations, possibly a combination of the two - perhaps a personality disorder, or something on the schizophrenic spectrum.

Random additions

His reasons for being so involved with what he wears probably stem from the hospital: a certain reaction against blending in, combined with typically Lightish vanity.

Because he never becomes Kira, he never really finds out who he is before he gets sick; he's fluid, a chameleon. He takes on local colour - without ever really meaning to, he becomes the people and places around him.

[OOC] [AU concept] What if ... Light had paid more attention in class?

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