Misa was not stupid.

She was less intelligent, obviously, than the geniuses she surrounded herself with on a semi-daily basis, but not stupid. She knew that Light did not love her--could not love her--but she loved him enough for the both of them and, to her, that was enough.

She'd declare her love for him often, if not just to hear the same words repeated back to her in his voice (like a parrot, or a tape recorder; couldn't he possibly be more original?), then to imagine that someday, he'd mean it. It's almost like her dreams, but in her dreams, he always meant it. She loved him enough to pretend. Sometimes she wished he could do the same.
Light is no actor (that much is obvious from the fact that she believes the men she works with in the movies more easily than she does him), but he's smart enough to deceive most. Misa is an actress. She's good enough that Light thinks he's deceived her, as well, and if that was what would please him--her Light-kun--enough to keep her around for just that much longer, she could keep it up. Whatever it took, she would do.

She would murder a man in an instant, and kill a thousand more in the blink of a shinigami eye, risk death, or life, in prison, or worse, just to be useful. Just for those rare moments when he would embrace her, lie through his teeth, and make her "useful" to him again, but even in that long, exhausted, panting moment between consciousness and sleep, when judgment is blurred with a hazy fog just behind the eyes, he cannot tell her he loves her and make her believe it, so she pretends that his grunt is a romantic sound and is able to fall asleep and dream of truth again.

Misa was not stupid, she was an actress.

A/N: This is old. I remember it being an attempt to convince myself that Misa really was not as stupid as she seemed. Did it work? (I am not a LightxMisa fan. This is all I've written for this pairing. I do not own Death Note.)