an: Evil teaser to the sequel that may or may not actually eventually exist. It's still unclear whether or not I'll get around to writing it.

Which of course makes this teaser extra evil, even by teasers' distressingly immoral standards, but I wanted to post it anyway.

Just 'cause, y'know, on the off-chance I'm killed in some freak accident tomorrow from having my name written in a Death Note, this way I'll at least die with one less unrealized possibility for me to regret.

rebirth

He gasped, lungs aching for air like he'd just been drowning, and immediately started hacking up dirt. It was in his esophagus, in his nose, in his mouth, covering his tongue and crusting his eyes. He scrabbled desperately to his hands and knees, coughing and spitting, eyes clenched shut and watering.

He sat there breathing hard, air moving clean and cold through his lungs. There was still dirt coating his tongue, but he was no longer choking on it.

"Kira-kun?" the voice was soft and inodorous, not like the wind that dragged chilly fingers threateningly over his skin and inundated him with scents of rain and soil and something floral and rotting; roses, carnations, stargazer lilies. Funeral flowers.

He turned his head, opened his eyes, saw Lawliet crouched there like a monster in the moonlight, all bent limbs and unnatural contrasts, pale skin and pale clothes and dark hair and dark eyes and dark shadows beneath them even though he'd just been dead, and behind him were rows upon rows of gravestones bleached white as bones and draping long, black shadows over the silver grass like the trains of mourning dresses, and far above them the sky was a soft, velvety gray-black, matte and slimy like the skin of a manta ray, besetted with glittering studs of stars that looked frigid and painful to the touch, like tears of frozen nitrogen, suspended there, hanging in space, ready to fall and impale him like so many needles at the slightest touch and he could have laughed if he wasn't still struggling just to breathe.

But he managed to rasp out, "I was right," and reach out a trembling, silhouetted hand towards the gelid sparks of light. "The stars are cold."

He cracked a painful grin, his skin too cold and too stiff, his lips too dry, but it was nothing he hadn't felt before and he grinned wider and welcomed the uncomfortable sensations that told him he was alive, because he'd won. "They were wrong when they told me that stars didn't exist."

tbc?

an: In case you didn't read ink and are wondering about the ending: by the end of ink Light had gone completely insane and started hallucinating very vividly, and that last line about stars is a reference to one of those scenes, in which Shinigami-like monsters tormented him both psychologically and physically. (of course, they were really just figments of his mind and he was actually physically harming himself, but he did not and could not perceive that; to him the monsters were very real)

Explanation for the change depicted here: Light was not insane when he was dead - in this story and in ash - because he was dead and was only a stubborn manifestation of memories and desires coalesced as a 'soul' or whatever. having no corporeal body, he had no brain with which to have been physiologically insane. but having been dead is not a magical healing elixir, so once he's alive again and has a corporeal brain the insanity returns because of the connections that developed/eroded between the synapses and everything. because science. obviously.

And also I just really enjoy writing characters who are insane.

So if I ever is able to actually write the sequel, you may rest assured that everyone and everything will be unduly messed up.