Death Note
AU! Everything from the middle of Chapter 53 and up Did Not Happen (Like That)
Spoilers up to Chapter 59
Part 6 of Road Not Taken
He'd had to tell his wife and daughter about Raito's guilt, eventually. There was no longer a way to avoid it, not with an official press release due soon, and the execution scheduled to occur the next day. To their credit, Sachiko and Sayu took the news well as could be expected. Both had cried. He couldn't blame them, for he had also, when he was alone. That his only son, his pride and joy, had turned out to be the master killer who had nearly evaded justice entirely...
He had been unable to continue in the Kira investigation after Raito confessed, his emotions just too conflicted. His resignation, however, brought him no peace. The last time he had seen his son's face was in that room, shortly after the confession. He had never expected to see it again.
He couldn't help but wonder if he'd be happier if he hadn't.
There was something rather ironic, Yagami Souichirou had to admit, about using the recommendation he had acquired from L and the high salary which it earned him to track L down. Progress was slow, but he had information others who had attempted this did not; he knew Watari's face, and he knew that Watari did know the identity and whereabouts of L.
Finding Watari's identity - that was far easier than Souichirou had believed it would be. In a stroke of luck for him, Watari's face happened to be fairly famous. The great inventor and philanthropist Quillsh Wammy, well known for his creations and for the orphanages he had founded and funded all over the world... that this great man was the true identity of Watari was both a shock, and something to be carefully considered for the ramifications. Souichirou knew that he was not as good an investigator as either his son or L, but he felt as though he could trace this. He had clues. He simply needed to put them in order.
That, however, was far more easily said than done. Quillsh Wammy's movements were difficult to track; a man with his sort of money could buy a privacy that was for all practical purposes impenetrable, even to the police. That, combined with a lack of genuine authority behind the search, had slowed Souichirou to a crawl.
Sachiko worried about him, he knew; worried at how he spent all his time when not at work closeted in his study with his computer or out, sometimes for whole weekends. He couldn't tell her that he was tracing the footsteps of two men whom the world refused to admit existed as more than names. No, three men. Souichirou knew that when L and Watari had left Japan, they had taken a third person with them. Sachiko's only son, and his - Yagami Raito.
Kira.
Souichirou couldn't have explained why he didn't report seeing his son leaving the prison alive immediately; after he'd had time to recover from the shock, he told himself that if another Kira murder occurred, he would go straight to his superiors. A few weeks absent of suspicious deaths later, he found himself struggling to remember the encounter on the morgue steps. Did he really see his son? That shade of hair was unusual in Japan, yes, but not impossible, and on the stairs, a person who had seemed to be Raito's height might have actually been a bit shorter, simply given the illusion of greater size.
If he hadn't seen the "janitor" stop in the same sort of shock he'd felt, he might have dismissed the idea. That, however... yes. That had been Raito. He was certain of it. And if that had been Raito, then undoubtedly the janitor ahead of his son, the man with the slouch and entirely non-regulation hair sticking wildly out from under his cap, had been L. No one else would have known.
The first thing Souichirou wanted to do when he found L and his son was to ask the genius detective one simple question: Why? Why go through the difficulties and dangers of the investigation, only to let Kira loose again?
On second thought, perhaps the question wasn't so simple after all.