Light Yagami? Oh, he made them uncomfortable, he did; the surviving members of the Kira investigation. (Oh how the mighty have (had) fallen: from turning the world on its axis and killing millions from afar—from almost-God to unnerving nuisance, that was just sad.) He made them curse and shiver and sigh and lie 'it's nothing' five, six, seven times a day. –Damn him. …Well, he was already as damned as anyone could get, and don't think that didn't occupy their thoughts. Their golden child! Hardworking and diligent and smarter than all of them combined, and he'd been brilliant enough to…be…Kira. And they hadn't seen it.

--L had, even back then, much-missed and frightening L who (Light had swallowed hard and said he was the best of us) had been absolutely right.

What an awful business.

Matsuda thought, so he must have known L's real name, and wished he'd had the chance to ask and then felt stupid for thinking of a thing like that.

Names: didn't make any of this any easier, because what could they say? Retreating to impersonal Yagami only made them think of Soichiro and that made them wince. No need to explain why. So it was 'Light'—Light who they—and that name, that sounded almost an alias in itself, simple and it should have been simple to see light as divine, godly dispenser-of-justice—not really, obviously!—so best really, best to stick with 'Kira' from now on.

It was over, anyway. Years of their lives and years measured and paid for in lives but it was over, damn it.

I will say this only once. Near—no, L's—no, Near's distorted and childlike voice had told them calmly. I expect every one of you to give as much energy to the future as you did to the Kira case. I expect the Kira case not to be dwelled on. I expect to meet with success. Whatever Near expected always occurred, and that was why Near was L. Why Matsuda found him more unnerving than Ryuuzaki had been at his most ruthless. He wasn't—quite—a person.

Still, Near could not have been less like Light, and Matsuda supposed with no small amount of bitterness that that was something.

---

She'd always said it, plaintive or affronted, sarcastic or indignant: I'm not stupid! And she thought it a lot, too. She did all right in school. She knew her way around the city. It was just in comparison that she seemed to be less, to be just not so intelligent, to be just a girl with the last name that that made teachers always smile fondly and recall the model student that—ah, I'm sorry, dear; what was your name? Sayu? Yagami. She was Sayu Yagami. What a load of luck that name had brought them in the end, huh.

Once she'd thought Dad was the lucky one and felt so horrified, so awful for even thinking that.

I'm not stupid! But she was, they all had been. They hadn't seen it, had they? Until it was too late?

--but no one—

--absolutely no one—

--was as stupid as her brilliant brother Light.

All those people. The criminals—they—so many of them—and those investigators, they had families, for God's sake. MisaMisa who was so pretty, who had laughing blue eyes full of love and suggestion and red lipstick and had whispered in Sayu's ear, you're gorgeous--

Her father, too—so many angry tears for that—unforgivable!

…but Sayu'd never once thought, Light, how could you?

Because she…almost…

…He could've been—

just maybe—

No; that was just her own grief talking, for sure; she wrapped her coat more tightly around herself and hurried back down the cement walk.

---

Misa Amane: wasn't.

--

In the wasteland that was the province of the Death gods Ryuk sat on a rock and listened to the disgruntled sounds of a craps game. Mucking with probability. He'd carried a lot of nonsense from the human world.

He brought a few memories of that one person:

There was Light, Ryuk had thought, so cool, so suave, so calm, with all this savoir-faire about killing his own species with the Death Note like it was nothing more than his personal business. He had planned everything so carefully. Acted so very mature. It would have been more convincing had he not been explaining all the details of his plans to Ryuk with the pride of a self-satisfied seventeen-year-old egotistical enough to say he wanted no approval besides the recognition of the whole world as their God.

--had he not been so eager, like a well-bred puppy. Look what I did! Look what I did!

Check this out, Ryuk, he'd say.

Poor little Light Yagami. Ryuk didn't know where he had gotten the idea that Ryuk cared, but since it was interesting, he had gladly listened.

The way he'd said, you'll see the exception to the rule, Ryuk.

That's lucky for me.

Light always added Ryuk's name to the end of his sentences. Kind of possessive of it—something human females often did with their boyfriends, it looked like, which amused Ryuk quite a bit. This, Ryuk. That, Ryuk. Well, Ryuk?

He spent a lot of time with the Death Note; more than any shinigami ever had. Of course names were important. Something with a name could be destroyed.

He'd been interesting for a while.

If Ryuk had been at all interested in making human-like observations he would have pointed out that the core of all such things ended up being like the core of an apple. You got to the end, the center, the finish, and it was bitter and hard to digest and not really worth it. It ended up decomposing somewhere.

Ryuk wondered if there was anything he could have done. Yagami, that was. Going and getting himself shot by a dim-bulb and outsmarted by a guy who looked like he had cotton candy growing out of his head. Kind of a shame, really. Yagami'd always shot for great amounts of dignity, which was a human thing that Ryuk didn't really get, but he was sure that he hadn't had much when the end showed up.

And now Ryuk was stuck again with rotten apple cores.

Oh well.

The shinigami here forgot everything quickly. Ryuk probably wouldn't.

He played with an idea.

"Hey, Ryuk."

"Yeah?"

"Done with all that stuff in the human world?"

"Yep." A death god's grin; back down there it would have been grotesque and unnerving. "Got boring."

"Not that one kid's pet anymore?"

That one kid.

Light Yagami, he could've said, remember Light Yagami, he sure was a better shinigami than the rest of you slobs.

Could have.

"Nope," he said. "Got boring after a while."