Light Yagami sat in the serene quiet of his bedroom, the door closed against the mundane sounds of his family life. The information delivered by the man calling himself Chris Walker churned in his mind, a strange and surreal tableau. L, the great detective, the immovable object that had stood against his unstoppable force, had apparently shattered. He had murdered one of his own task force members and fled, becoming a fugitive.
It was, on the surface, a spectacular victory. His primary antagonist had, through some unfathomable internal pressure, self-destructed. The international team of geniuses was now leaderless, rudderless, and undoubtedly consumed by paranoia and grief. There would be no more clever traps, no more intellectual duels. The most significant stick in his throat, as he had come to think of L, had been removed. This should have been a moment of pure, unadulterated triumph.
And yet, Light felt a profound and unsettling strangeness. It was too easy. Too chaotic. L was not a creature of passion; he was a being of pure, cold logic. For him to commit such an act… it was like watching a master mathematician suddenly declare that two plus two equals a fish. It was a fundamental violation of the man's known nature. It was wrong.
This unease was compounded by another, more persistent mystery. He ran a hand over the smooth, obsidian cover of the Death Note hidden in his desk drawer. He had possessed this ultimate power for months now. He had become a god, reshaping the world in his own image, and yet, the creature who was supposed to accompany this power, the Shinigami, had remained conspicuously absent. The rules had spoken of its existence, but his reality had been a solitary one. He had begun to wonder if, the rules were inaccurate. If perhaps he had been granted this power without the usual, grotesque baggage.
He was so lost in this thought that he did not at first register the change in the room's atmosphere. A sudden drop in temperature. A dry, dusty scent, like ancient paper and forgotten things. And a new, hulking shadow that blotted out the light from his desk lamp.
"Took you long enough to wonder where I was," a voice rasped, a sound like dry leaves skittering across pavement.
Light shot up from his chair, his heart leaping into his throat. His eyes, wide with a shock that was utterly genuine, landed on the creature that was now lounging, half-materialized, on his bed. It was a grotesque, towering parody of life, with long, gangly limbs, a shock of purple-black hair, and skin the colour of old bone. A wide, toothy grin was stretched across its face, and its large, yellow eyes with their blood-red irises held a look of profound, eternal boredom.
"Surprised?" the creature cackled, its grin widening. "You humans and your faces are always so interesting when you're startled."
Light's mind, a fortress of logic, struggled for a moment to process the impossible reality before him. This was it. The baggage. He forced his breathing to slow, his composure returning like a steel shield. "You're… a Shinigami."
"Give the genius a prize," the creature drawled. It floated lazily into the air, its spindly legs crossing as if it were sitting in an invisible chair. "The name's Ryuk. It's been a while since I had one of these notebooks in the human world. I was getting pretty bored just watching. You've been… moderately entertaining so far."
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[From the journal of Dr. John H. Watson]
I have found in my travels that there is a unique and poignant sadness to be found in the quiet, residential streets of any great city. It is a world away from the grand dramas and historical moments, a place where the small, intimate tragedies of human life unfold behind closed doors. It was with this feeling that Holmes and I found ourselves travelling through the peaceful, sun-dappled lanes of Yokohama, searching for an address on a street named Yamate Hon-dori.
Our destination was the home of a Mrs. Hino, the aunt of the unfortunate Akane Tanaka. It was Holmes's belief, and one I could not refute, that to understand the monster Akane had become, we must first understand the woman she had been.
The house was a modest but impeccably kept two-story dwelling, with a small garden in the front where a few late-blooming chrysanthemums stood like stoic, colourful soldiers. We were met at the door by Mrs. Hino herself, a woman in her late sixties with a kind, weary face and eyes that held the familiar shadow of a long-nursed sorrow. We presented our Scotland Yard credentials, and Holmes launched into our carefully prepared cover story.
"Mrs. Hino," he began, his tone a perfect blend of professional gravity and gentle sympathy, "we are conducting a sensitive inquiry into a potential scandal that your niece, Miss Tanaka, may have become unfortunately entangled with during her time at university. We have reason to believe she may be the victim of a rather unscrupulous group of individuals. We were hoping you could provide us with some background information that might help us ensure her safety."
The lie was a necessary cruelty, and I felt a pang of guilt as I saw the flicker of hope in the old woman's eyes. "Her safety?" she asked, her voice trembling slightly. "Then you know where she is? We have not heard from her in months. We were so worried."
I felt a profound sadness for this poor woman. She had no idea that her niece was not merely missing, but was dead, the victim of a world of cruelty so profound it would likely shatter her gentle heart.
We were shown into a comfortable, if slightly cluttered, living room. Her husband, a quiet, dignified man, sat by the window, and her son, a man in his late twenties with a sullen, closed-off expression, gave us a brief, resentful nod before returning his attention to his telephone. Holmes, I noticed, gave the son a quick, sharp glance, his eyes lingering for a fraction of a second longer than was necessary.
Mrs. Hino spoke of Akane with the wistful fondness reserved for a lost and troubled child. She painted a picture of a brilliant, sensitive girl who had been haunted by tragedy from a young age.
"Her childhood… it was a mess," the aunt said, her hands twisting a handkerchief in her lap. "That dreadful fire. To lose her mother, her father, her little brother, all in one night… it would break anyone. She was never the same after that. She always had… troubles. Nightmares. A darkness that clung to her."
"We were informed she suffered a head injury while in college," Holmes prompted gently. "A concussion, I believe?"
"Oh, yes," Mrs. Hino sighed. "A nasty fall. She was in the hospital for a week. Lost a great deal of her memory of that year. It was on the twenty-fourth of April, three years ago. I remember the date because it was the day before my husband's birthday." She gave a small, sad smile. "In a way, we thought it might be a blessing. The doctors said the memory loss might help her move past some of the psychological… mess. And for a time, it seemed to. She was calmer. Quieter."
I found myself doing the grim mathematics in my head. The concussion, the memory loss… it was the perfect event to cover her descent into the orbit of a creature like B.B. She had likely fallen into his grasp, and the subsequent trauma had mercifully wiped the slate clean, at least for a time.
It was then that Mrs. Hino revealed the most startling piece of information. "She was always so secretive, you know. Especially about the fire. She was convinced it was not an accident. She told me once, not long before her fall, that she had discovered who was responsible. She had all her important information, her diaries, her research, in a document on her computer, and she told me she had set the password as the name of the person who set the fire."
Holmes and I exchanged a look of profound, electrifying shock.
"The name of the arsonist?" Holmes asked, his voice sharp with an intensity he could no longer conceal. "Did she tell you the name? Why did she not go to the police?"
"She was about to," the aunt said, her eyes welling with tears. "She said she was gathering the last of her proof. And then… then she had her fall. The concussion. When she came out of the hospital, she could not remember the name. She could never open the document again."
The sheer, tragic stupidity of it was almost too much to bear. To hold the key to her family's justice, and to use it as a simple password… it seemed the act of a loose-brained fool. And yet, as I considered the portrait of the deeply troubled and psychotic young woman Mrs. Hino had painted, it began to make a sad kind of sense. It was not an act of logic, but of obsession. The name was so important to her, so central to her being, that it had become the key to her entire world.
While this conversation was unfolding, I noticed the son, who had been pretending to be engrossed in his telephone, had grown pale. He stood up abruptly, muttered a curt excuse about needing to make a call, and quickly left the room, disappearing up the stairs. Holmes's eyes followed him, his expression utterly unreadable, but I saw the faint, almost imperceptible tightening of the muscles around his jaw. He had noticed it too.
The puzzle of Akane Tanaka had just become infinitely more complex, and a new, far more immediate, and deeply unsettling question had just presented itself right here, in this quiet, sun-dappled house of secrets.