Chapter Text
For as long as he could remember, Light Yagami had been… different… from his peers.
When he was young, adults had liked to call him a “precocious child,” which even then Light had recognized for what it was- a sugar-coated way of saying that he was weird.
He’d recognized it before he had been able to comprehend why- recognized it in the slight scrunch of their noses when their eyes landed on him, in the subtle pauses they took as they chose the words with which to reference him, in the careful distance that they maintained, a barely-there barrier but one Light noticed nonetheless.
One of the perks of being a precocious child was that Light was extraordinarily perceptive with a mind as sharp as broken glass.
Traits that others found odd or off-putting were simply what was natural for Light.
He didn’t meet their eyes directly because he had no need to. He could absorb any relevant information from his peripherals, and he hardly ever came across a situation where someone required more attention from him than that. He would rather focus attention on something that actually interested him.
He ignored them because they didn’t have anything of worth to say, and it was pointless to answer them when their questions were so painfully ignorant. He didn’t see why he should be expected to speak when he had nothing of note to say to them, so he didn’t.
He snapped at them when they tried to tell him what to do or redirect him to some kind of pointless drivel because they were interrupting him, getting in the way of him spending his time on things that were actually engaging. It was their fault, really.
Light’s parents took him to doctors who had said he had delayed social and emotional development, Selective Mutism, Reactive Attachment Disorder, Reactive Aggression, and a slew of other issues that had them sick with worry.
Less than a year later, Sayu had been born, and all throughout the pregnancy his parents had been wracked with stress. They had never said it out loud, but some part of Light knew that it was because of him. They were afraid. Scared to death that the new baby would turn out wrong. Troubled. Like Light.
Light had always been told that he had been the calmest baby that the nurses in the Labor and Delivery Unit had ever seen, but that day Sayu had arrived as a wailing, crying, ugly creature, and his parents had sighed a breath of relief.
The first few months they had treated her like a porcelain doll, fragile and poised to break at the slightest mishandling. It was like with every breath they expected something to go awry- but it never did. Sayu began to smile and cry and laugh like any other baby, and the pressure in the house had eventually eased. By all appearances, Sayu was an ordinary child.
Much later in life, Light would learn that Sachiko Yagami had been diagnosed with postpartum depression after Light had been born, and that she had blamed herself for all of Light’s perceived problems for the longest. Only then would Light begin to turn wide doe eyes upon his mother to watch as she smiled and cooed at Sayu, and only then would Light begin to come to understand that Sayu had something which he himself somehow lacked.
Light knew that it wasn’t favoritism that his mother was displaying for Sayu, he knew that Sayu’s presence didn’t mean that his mother loved him any less. She demonstrated that each day, showering him with as much affection as she could muster and doing all that she could to participate in his interests with him even if he knew she often didn’t understand them.
He could see how desperately she sought to maintain a bond with him- he had found it annoying at first, but at some point he had begun to almost enjoy her efforts, and to her delight had stopped trying to push her away.
At times he even went as far as attempting to explain his experiments to her. It never failed to go flying over her head, just as he knew it would, but she nodded along like she understood anyway, seeming over the moon that he had taken the time to tell her about it at all. At times like those, her joy was so infectious that even Light hadn’t been able to remain unaffected.
As he pondered it, he found that he wasn’t angry or jealous of Sayu, but he was curious. He had always seen others as the ones who were lacking, not himself, but now he began to wonder what exactly it was that made him different from the other children. What he was missing and… what it would have been like if he had it.
The older he had gotten, the more Light had come to learn what it was that the adults wanted from him, and it hadn’t taken long for him to realize that the best course of action was to simply play along. The path of least resistance.
So he watched and he listened and he learned. He cataloged every twitch of the mouth and flex of the brow, every flick of the eye and crinkle in the corners. He found exactly what they wanted him to say, and he said it. He watched how they reacted to the other children, pinpointed the actions which pleased them most, and then perfected them.
He found that as soon as he began to play the game correctly, it was laughably easy to garner favor from adults and children alike.
His mother had cried the first time he had taken her hand and smiled at her and told her he loved her.
Sachiko was by no means a religious person, but later that night he’d overheard her in her room sobbing and thanking God for answering her prayers. The next day, she had insisted on spoiling him rotten, making his favorite breakfast and taking him to the park and all the other mundane things that he had previously shown no interest in.
When he approached the other children in the park and began to play with them, all smiles and laughs, she had nearly broken down for the second time in a twenty-four hour span.
His mother was overjoyed to see him “come out of his shell,” and for a moment Light had wished he was stupid enough not to pick up on the blatant implications behind her happiness. But he wasn't, and so he knew that what she was really overjoyed about was that he was finally becoming the kind of “normal son” that she could be proud of.
Normal.
Light hated that word. He hated everything it stood for, and he hated himself even more for lowering himself to the pointless standards of normalcy.
He couldn’t bring himself to resent her for it, not when he had come to see how much of a burden his previous behavior had been on her, and certainly not when she had gone to such lengths to love him and accommodate him for all those years despite it all. He realized now that very few people would have done what she had done, would have put up with a child so “difficult” and treated him with no less care because of it.
So he taught himself to grit his teeth and put up with it. That didn’t mean that he didn’t sometimes doubt his decision when he was finally alone with his thoughts in the dark of his bedroom. Staring listlessly at the ceiling with the kind of exhaustion that no amount of sleep could hope to touch, he’d wonder if keeping up his act was even worth it- everything was so much simpler before.
From the first time that Light had begun to display apathy for the pain of others, his father had made sure to firmly instill the idea of right and wrong into his head.
A little girl had fallen off the swingset at the playground and Light hadn’t so much as blinked at her bloody skinned knee and obnoxious crying, disregarding her pleas for him to go get her mom in favor of carrying on strategically stacking blocks. When his mother had come to check on him, they had soon found her there and hurried to comfort her and find her parents.
Afterward, she had asked Light why he hadn’t helped her or told an adult that she was hurt, and he had simply replied that he hadn’t thought it was important since she had only skinned her knee and he had been busy.
Soichiro Yagami was a police officer with a strict sense of justice and a stubborn penchant for protecting the weak, and he had not stood idly by when he had learned of this incident.
In his early years of life, his father had put in overtime on his cases more often than not. He wasn’t around often enough for Light to get a proper read on him in the beginning, so he hadn’t been able to tell if all the unexplained extra hours at work were once again because of Light or not, but he did know that something about him had made the man uncomfortable.
From then on, however, his father had become a much more present figure in his life, and after Sayu was born, he no longer took any overtime unless there was a particularly tricky case that required it. Thus, Light had suddenly found himself spending exponentially more time with his father, most of which consisted of him subtly trying to teach Light about the values of justice and virtue and honor.
Light clocked what he was doing right away, and it wasn’t nearly as effective at making Light give weight to his opinions as his mother’s approach was, but he indulged him by at least pretending he was listening, if only for the sake of his father’s ego.
Light had only actually begun considering what his father said to him after the first time that his father had taken him to the station to tag along for “bring your child to work day.” His father had clearly seen it as a teachable experience, and though it might not have worked in the way he had initially intended, it had ended up succeeding in catching Light’s interest.
His father hadn’t let him see any actual case details, saying he was too young, but Light was as perceptive as always and he could tell even from the small tidbits of information he caught here and there that criminal investigations were positively fascinating. His father had earned more of his attention and respect as an officer than he had ever garnered as a father, but that at least served as a point of intrigue to draw Light in.
From that, Light had begun to look closer into his father’s actions and motivations, and eventually he had come to hold that same respect or higher for him as a father. He still didn’t understand much of the principles and morals that his father preached, but he’d also started to see that no matter how clever he was, there were still concepts that he couldn’t quite wrap his head around.
Ethics were one such concept, and Light reluctantly accepted that, for some things, he would have to refer to a higher authority. He decided to look to his father for direction in those few cases where his own judgement couldn’t be trusted.
Which was why the thought crossed his mind as to if doing this to his family was the right thing to do. Was it right to give them false hope that he had somehow been “fixed” when in reality he was only feeding them sweet lies? Because in the end, that’s all he was. A liar.
Weren’t lies for the sake of sparing someone’s feelings okay, though? A white lie, he told himself. They were just pretty white lies that he’d spun to keep everyone happy. They weren’t hurting anyone, so was there truly any problem with it?
The more he told himself that, the further he found himself caught in that white web of his own creation. But what else could he do? It wasn’t all a lie, after all.
It hadn’t been a lie when he had told his mother he loved her. Maybe it wasn’t the way others did or the way she had wished, but he still cared for his family. If he hadn’t, he never would have gone to all of the trouble of altering his behavior for their comfort. Yes, it might have benefited him to get everyone off of his back too, but ultimately, it had never really mattered to him what others thought of him. The irritation that the unwanted concern brought was undoubtedly preferable to the agonizing boredom that he had traded it for.
If it weren’t for his consideration for his family, his love for them, then he would never have subjected himself to this torture every day. It was a chore, that’s what living had become. Every day the same dull grey, heavy and monotonous. It was all so… easy. Nothing he tried could ever challenge him, from school to sports to people.
His peers flocked to him, but despite having all of the “friends” he could ever ask for, he couldn’t bring himself to see any of them as real people. They were all like cardboard cutouts, or pre-programmed NPCs in a video game. His feelings for most humans ranged from apathy at best to disgust and repulsion at worst.
That was one of the largest problems he had faced as a child- feelings. As a child, he never really understood them. It wasn’t like he was emotionless. Sure, there were things he liked and disliked, things that pleased him or angered him, but watching others express their feelings had always confused him.
Overreaction. Unnecessary. Illogical. Those were the thoughts that often came to mind.
People cried so easily over the littlest things, especially children. That little girl scraping her knee and crying for her mother? Light couldn’t make sense of it. It was just pain. A physical sensation caused by trauma to the body. It hurt and it was unpleasant, but that was all it was.
Crying over emotional pain made even less sense to him. The first funeral he had attended, he had watched bewildered as grown men and women weeped over the casket of the lady that he had been informed was his second cousin. His younger self couldn’t make heads or tails of it no matter how hard he tried to puzzle it out.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t understand death- he wasn’t stupid. What he couldn’t fathom was why these people were crying over this woman’s death when it had no real affect on their lives, nor did it cause any actual bodily pain.
The first time they attended a funeral he had been too young for anyone to deign to acknowledge and Sayu had been too young to fully understand what was going on. The second time they attended a funeral, Sayu had been ten and Light thirteen.
That time, Light had asked her.
“Why is everyone crying?” Sayu had replied quietly as they watched from the back of the room while their parents went around giving their condolences. “Well, I guess because they cared about that ojiisan, and now he’s dead, so they won’t be able to see him ever again,” she’d explained with a frown that was partly of deep thought and partly genuine pity.
Sayu wasn’t like Light- Sayu was normal. She never had to think very hard about these kinds of things because the answers came naturally to her. To her, it was obvious. Sayu was still his sister, however, and of that there could be no mistake. She was the only one in Light’s life who was unfazed by all of Light’s oddities. She never looked at him like he was strange when he asked questions and she always took him seriously.
She didn’t understand, no one did, but at least with her he never felt the need to pretend to be something that he wasn’t. She accepted him as he was, and that was enough. For these reasons, as time had passed he had begun to gravitate to her whenever he had questions about normal people things.
When he’d only furrowed his brows in confusion, a look that Sayu knew meant that he still didn’t get it but didn’t want to seem dumb, she bit her lip and hummed before finally raising a finger in instruction, “Think of it like this- you care about me, and mom, and dad, and Montaro, right?”
Montaro had been their family dog. Sayu had named him. Light had seen him as a nuisance for the longest, the clambering, slobbering, dumb thing that he was. Montaro had a bad habit of following Light around and getting right up under his feet. He’d made Light trip when making his way up the stairs no small number of times.
The foolish thing insisted on sleeping at the foot of Light’s bed, and the few times that Light had pushed him out and closed the door on him, telling him to go back to his own bed in the living room, Montaro would whine and scratch at Light’s door all night until he gave up and let him back in. Then one day Montaro’s bed had inexplicably ended up in Light’s room, and that was that.
Light didn’t know how such a doltish animal somehow always seemed to know exactly when Light was having difficulty sleeping, but every time he found himself tossing and turning in his sheets, Montaro materialized at his side, nuzzled his snout against Light, and stayed there until Light’s mind quieted enough for him to fall asleep. Light’s rest had experienced an absurd uptake in quality and he had begrudgingly come to tolerate the beast’s company.
Light had nodded skeptically to her question, not yet seeing how it related to the topic at hand, and she’d continued, “Right. So how would you feel if one day something happened to one of us and you could never see them again, like ever? Like if one day, mom was just gone, and you knew that she was never gonna come back?”
Light was silent for the rest of the funeral. Sayu’s words had left a funny feeling in his chest that had remained long after they’d made it back home.
Less than two weeks after Light’s fourteenth birthday, Montaro died.
It was sudden, a run-in with a car out on the main road. Sayu insisted on having him buried in the back yard, but neither her nor his mom had been willing to face Montaro’s body on the side of the road after hearing the news, and his dad had been at work, so Light volunteered.
He could tell with one look that Montaro’s death had been painful, and far from quick. His chest felt empty in a way that was distinctly different from the hollow indifference he’d felt in the face of others’ misfortune up to now. This feeling was new. Uncomfortable.
Light didn’t cry.
They buried him the next day. Light stood back and watched while his mother comforted a sobbing Sayu who had determinedly donned the all-black attire she had complained about when getting ready for the funeral the previous year.
Light didn’t cry.
That evening Light made his way up the stairs to his room without the tapping of paws on hardwood floor trailing after him.
Light didn’t cry.
He slept fitfully, the night restless in a way he couldn’t remember suffering through in years. When Light woke, it was to sheets damp with sweat, the red glow of his clock telling him it was much too early to be awake, and puffy wet patches at the corners of his eyes.
Light didn’t go back to sleep.