GOLGOTHA
Summary: Near had defeated Light and goes through with his threat of solitary confinement. Through the cold and darkness, Light still clings to Kira as a pillar of righteousness. Alternate ending, one shot.
Rating: T
Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note.
Light, he still doesn't believe that he was wrong.
That pale-haired boy knows this, and he is doing everything that he can to reverse that fact. He was the cause of this incarceration: after he had proven that the Yagami investigator was in actuality Kira himself, that one day that must have been, weeks, months, maybe a year ago, he had him arrested. Coolly and apathetically, those calumniatory eyes, they were watching him with vehement calculation. I have captured you, Kira. This is your downfall and your reign is through.
Back that day at the warehouse, maybe it was true. Rough hands, they seized him like the jaws of Cerebus, he felt as though they were ripping him to shreds with ruthless fangs, reducing him to mangled remains that would be tossed where they saw fit. They locked steel handcuffs around his wrists, slicing into his skin as he struggled. Just to be bastards, they had tightened a blindfold over his eyes, and the world was dark.
Dark...
(In a way, this suited Light Yagami at the time. He had displayed enough weakness when he broke down and begged for someone, anyone to help him. He didn't need anyone seeing the tears in Kira's eyes.)
No one had come to help him. Aizawa frowned, Mogi turned to Near and Matsuda, he whimpered but remained rigid. Everyone who was there had turned the other way, mumbling, "You were wrong, Light-kun, you were wrong..."
Light, he still doesn't believe that he was wrong.
They lead, they dragged, they carried him to some car outside, and they buckled the seat belt when he sat down. Not to keep him safe from a crash, just to keep his flailing body sitting still. No, maybe it was to keep him safe from a crash, because before they blindfolded him, Light saw that emphatic glint in Near's eyes:
"You are a crazy mass-murderer. I want you to live the rest of your life facing real Justice, with only your own wretchedness to keep you company."
Light, he begged the man whose hands felt like Aizawa to ensure that he received a fair trial in Japan, but there was no answer. No answer was its own answer: there was no trial. The pale-haired adolescent was acting independently when he imprisoned Kira, and when the killings stopped no government agency would complain. The bits of rationality still in tact in Light's mind told him that this way, at least he wouldn't be prosecuted and die by lethal injection, maybe.
Kira, the Idealist, He wouldn't fear dying, only sad that He would no longer be there to bring the People to Salvation. Light, just a daydreamer and only twenty-three years old, he was afraid either way.
The aphotic events blurred together, and they were walking. Inside some building now, because there was tile below his feet. The hazy confusion snapped back to cruel-eyed reality when Light heard a door open. Creaky and heavy, the merciless lid of a coffin. It longed for a breathing, pulsing body to choke the life out of, tossing and screaming and struggling against fatal infection. Then, a heavy shove on his back made him stumble into this new room, and he tripped over his own wobbly legs. He hit his head on the hard floor, and if he had been able to see anything his vision might have wavered. He was dizzy, and hardly heard the obstreperous declaration from behind him:
"Stay in here forever, Kira. All the people that you have the right to judge, they're in there, too."
The room was empty, cold and empty except for the half-deity it enclosed. Prisons, they are for trophies, and this one would not relinquish its trembling prize. That creaky, heavy door, it slid closed, and there was the meek scraping sound of fumbling keys. Light could still make a rational deduction, it was that this door would never, ever open again.
The youth, the one still handcuffed and blindfolded, he curled into a tight ball. He quivered and he shook, because this wasn't how things were supposed to be. He hates this, he hates everyone, and he knows that more than anything, they just want him to suffer. It was a sorry ending to this dance-of-death saga. Near, he was the Caiaphas who detested the King of the New World, an intimidated priest who plotted His downfall in the garden of Gethsemane. The investigation unit, they played the role of Judas Iscariot by loving their Chief's Only Son and simultaneously damning him. They wanted to crucify the Messiah, nail his hands to the wood and laugh at his agony. In the last days of his life, hide his crucifixion on Golgotha, the hill where criminals are persecuted. Here they leave the Savior.
At the hill... at the hill, the cold and empty prison where criminals are persecuted. Here they leave their Savior to deteriorate.
When Light woke up, still in that same fetal position, he set to work to take off the blindfold. It was difficult with the handcuffs retarding much use of his hands, but logic told him that the task wasn't impossible. It was a thick thing with knotted straps in the back, and eventually, slamming his scalp into the floor, he slid it up and off of his head.
The darkness, it was unyielding. There was still only despairing tenebrosity, not an electricity-ridden bulb to counteract the perception. Freedom from the blindfold hadn't changed a thing.
So awkwardly, he stepped around the small area that was his cell. Empty, except for a bench that he felt up against some wall, and something that felt like a toilet. Everything was cold, really cold and his teeth, they chattered a childish clicking sound. Chills nipped at his earlobes and nose, and his bare feet felt as though they were tapping against ice. This was to be his home now, a dark and frigid trophy case. On display, hidden from the world, a new toy for Near.
Light, he still doesn't believe that he was wrong.
He sat on the bench, trying to roll his shoulders to get rid of the tension that had built up because of the tight handcuffs in front of him. He made a juvenile wish that there was some way to get them off, like he did with the blindfold, but it was physically impossible. His wrists, they were only skin and flesh, and his bones aren't like steel - they hadn't even fully hardened into adulthood yet because he was not that old.
And he knows that he, Light Yagami, is only human. Kira is the one who is a God, because Kira is a Concept - Kira is Justice, and that can be Immortal. That is something that can never be imprisoned or immobilized, if people believe in it. But the goddamned cuffs, they don't break, not off of his wrists. Instead they pinched into his veins, and he winced.
(Perhaps they are the inconvenient Realism that haunts pure-hearted Idealists.)
After what felt like hours, or maybe even a day, maybe two because he just couldn't tell time in this black and wintry room, something happened. A small slot of metal at the bottom of the door slid open, a rectangle that was maybe a foot and a half wide. For a few seconds, Light could see, because the light, it was pouring in from the hallway. He scrambled forward with his fingers outstretched, as if the dim beams from the hallway were some tangible comfort that he could clutch onto like a blanket.
A tray of food was inserted through the slot. Light watched it slip into the cell, dumbfounded because he wasn't hungry at all. Then, the light began to dim as the slot started to close the way it was opened.
"Wait!" he yelled, trying to grab at the contraption and force it to stay open, to force the light stay with him.
But it closed anyway, and it scraped his fingertips in the process. The light was gone.
He is still here.
Light supposes that he must still be alive, and that this was how he is living. At first he had tried to keep track of time by the plates of food, counting them meticulously, but now it has all become foggy shadow. More than a hundred. More than a billion for all he can reckon, more than a billion-million and infinity. He is hanging at the Hill of Golgotha and it is so dark and cold and he doesn't have a comprehensible thought to contemplate. He is sure that Near wanted it this way because Near wants to break him. To shatter the trophy to shards of gold and glass, where he can sweep them into a neat pile and put that on display instead. "Look, see how I am right, I demolished Kira and everything that he stood for..."
Light, he still doesn't believe that he was wrong.
Sometimes he has visitors. The first one to come and see him was L. The detective smiled and sat down next to him on the bench. At first, Light thought that he had come to gloat, and say this is what you deserve for killing people, this is what you deserve for killing me. But L, he didn't say anything like that, he just asked how Light-kun was doing, and said that they should play tennis sometime again. Light said yes, Ryuuzaki, that'd be very nice. I bet you still can't beat me. Ryuuzaki smiled again and said, well, either way after the game we'll go out and have some cake.
Soichiro Yagami, Light's father, he was a little mad at first. He really hated that his son was Kira, because he was a policeman bound by obligatory laws and he had been trying to catch the killer. But Light patiently explained, I know it sounds bad, but don't you understand why I had to become Kira? Soichiro was quiet for awhile, and then he embraced his son tightly. He said, yes, I understand why you're Kira. You've really made me proud. It takes a brave person to go as far as you did to make the world a better place.
Light doesn't know what he looks like now. He doesn't know how long it's been. He knows that he has probably lost weight, because his pants, they don't fit him very well right now. Nothing else is absolute or certain, only himself - and even the beating of his heart is questionable. He can't tell if there are dark circles under his eyes because he can't tell if he sleeps very much. There is no evidence to conjecture a difference between the sleeping and the awake. And sometimes he thinks he might be dead. When that happens, he holds his own arms tightly and bites his lip, sure to draw blood. The warm, metallic taste on his tongue is a gentle reminder. Then he knows, well, at least his body still works, it's not yet a corpse.
Near comes to visit him, too.
"Kira," the mocking voice of the white-haired youth says. He speaks apathetically, peeking his head through the food slot, silhouetted by a tunnel of light that races into the cell beside his ashen locks. "You haven't eaten anything in awhile, are you dead already?"
He squints and he shades his eyes. "How long has it been?" he asks, the words sound choked and hoarse as they whisper out of dry lips.
"How long?" Near repeats Light's question, his mouth curves into a smirk to contrast against his otherwise impassive expression. "No, I think living in dark ignorance suits you very well, Light Yagami."
Light stares, and Near stares, and then Light says, "I'm not dead yet, Near." It is quiet defiance, the defiance that he can't let wither because it sustains him.
It is a declaration, the martyr's reply to persecution.
"Suit yourself." And then that boy, he's shutting the little door. He's cutting off the light like a kinked hose of oxygen. But his eyes, they dart back into the cell as he does this, with a morbid curiosity. "You're pathetic if you can't even express remorse now."
Remorse? Light's lips are still parted as he hesitates, and Near smugly begins to turn away. But then, sudden and abrupt, the soft words find freedom from the prisoner's mouth: "The crime rate has gone up again, hasn't it?"
Near, he doesn't exactly answer. His blank face comes the closest to a scowl as far as Light can see that he remembers. And then he slams the little gate closed, and it seems like he's irritated.
So it's true.
The pale-haired boy, he could say what ever he wanted. He could blame Kira and he could justify himself. And then, he could become the new L and solve a handful of cases every month, and he could say that he was stopping crime in a free world.
That kind of justice was a phantom in the night that a criminal, he thinks about, he doesn't believe, and commits the crime anyway. But Light's kind of justice was golden and booming, as vast as the atmosphere. A Justice that embraces the world like a God, one so powerful that it was there for everybody. One that could silence the evildoers with the stroke of a ballpoint pen. The one that the People loved, so many Kira supporters because it was Kira who lowered the crime rate. It was Kira who stopped war and it was this Savior who promised a shining new world.
A world where young women didn't have to be afraid to walk down a city street at night and not fear the brutal rapists. A world where the children could play in a park without child molesters stealing them away. A world where the old weren't beaten and murdered, a world where little girls weren't sold into the sex slave trade and villages weren't burned in another bloody battle. A world free from unjust pain and suffering. A utopia. A heaven.
Light knew that there were sacrifices. When he picked up the Death Note, he knew he had to dedicate every cell of his being to the cause, and he knew that he would have to do things that were unsettling. If he wanted to change society he had to be strong; there was no room for hesitations. He even knew from the beginning that the People, they might hate him.
They might damn him to Golgotha.
But... even if they didn't understand...
The dream was Idealism. The results were Reality.
Light, he lays on the hard floor of his cell. The cold bites into his back, his thighs, his ankles. His ribs are aching, and his head is dizzy in some acidic intoxication. Everything of him that isn't numb, it hurts, and everything that isn't him is a veil of looming darkness. However, beyond his frail, young and trembling human body, there is something that he holds on to. He holds the hands of a God, the one who still loves the world and has no regrets. Even if on his death day he has to meet Lucifer. He will look the devil in the eyes and be unwavering in his resolutions.
Do your worst.
Because even if only for six short years, He knows that He made a difference.
And Light, he still doesn't believe that he was wrong.
He never will.
-fin
Author's Notes:
1. Golgotha: The hill where Jesus was crucified. Crucification is a punishment for criminals, so also on Golgotha were murderers, thieves, etc.
2. Cerberus: The three-headed dog that guards the underworld.
3. Caiaphas: in the New Testament, the Jewish high priest who organizes the plot to kill Jesus as he sees him as a threat. After the arrest, he also interrogates Jesus.
4. Judas Iscariot: the apostle who betrayed Jesus and aided in his arrest.
5. This story is a philosophical devil's advocate, if you will, and obviously did not actually happen in the anime or manga. This is just a one-shot, please assume that Ryuk did not kill Light because his life had not yet reached its end (as in the manga, Near voices his desire to incarcerate in solitary confinement and had no intention of killing him).
Thank you for reading! -Serria