On the whole, Light concludes, people have entirely the wrong idea about rape.
It's not the penetration that's the problem. It hurts, yes, and it's humiliating - a searing, tearing intrusion, over and over, as the mob pass him back and forth, a broken, boneless doll, a chicken jointed for the pot. The way they whoop and jeer as one or the other of them fucks him into the dirt, that's sickening, but he can ignore it. All of that, he can endure.
No, it's the beating he knows is going to stay with him, and the terror. The hand over his face when he wasn't expecting it. The stench of tar from some foul smoker's fingers, pinching down, long practice leaving no room to bite or breathe. The way the pack closed in on him. Nowhere to run. No hope of escape. It's the fists that winded him with one blow to his kidneys after the other, paralysing him so he'd lie still of his own accord. It's the first boot that crashed into his face, so that his gasps come through fragments of broken teeth and bone and crushed flesh. It's the way the second kick collapsed his nose with a crunch: his mother shredding celery for salad, back in another life. It's the way they stamped on the fingers of his writing hand, splitting cartilage and splintering bone, just because they could.
It's the way, by now, he's floating outside himself, dreamlike, a silent witness to his own destruction. It doesn't occur to him to wonder if he's dead; he's too dazed, too far away. There's no pain, but not much of anything else, either; no feeling, no fear. Only one thought is still left to him, leading him on through the dark: I destroyed people like you.
It was, he now knows firsthand, something he can be truly proud of.
And then there's me. I'm the ghost Light Yagami doesn't see, though he could, if he wanted to. He never has, to date.
I see him, though. Both of him - the one on the ground wedded to his anger, so the damage and the shame won't kill him. And also the tenuous consciousness that's externalised itself. In a way, for this moment, he is a ghost as well.
I've seen the games he played with Misa Amane - who I know is in a cell like Light's own, now, hundreds of kilometres from here in Hokkaido. She writes him letters, and perhaps strangely, he reads them and responds. The days are long for him, I suppose. Or perhaps, as seems more likely, he expects to still have use for her.
And I was here when the blood pooled from the ruin of his face onto the ground, when he screamed for Ryuk to do something, to make it stop. I heard the shinigami's response: You're not serious, are you, Light? This is the most fun I've had since you got shot. He can't see me, either, which is fortunate. I have no wish to speak with him.
Do you see what you became, Light Yagami, now that your own followers have turned on you? I don't think you will. I don't think you ever will. Will fifty years in prison teach you this? Will you have them at all, or will Ryuk soon tire of you, and release you? I find it unlikely, as long as you can still put on shows like today's. Do you see what he is, now? That cruelty and indifference? Is it a mirror for you?
Some might say you deserve this. Perhaps I should, after you held me in your arms, after your triumph as I died. I do not; justice is many things, but not this. The glazed determination on your ghost's face doesn't harden so much as horrify. What are you thinking? Are you determined to stay outside yourself, not to return to that pulped mess on the floor? I can't blame you. Perhaps you really will die here.
When you do, I'll be waiting.