(no subject)
Most people don't stay very long in the mansion at all.
There are layers, the deeper you go. Most are sucked in only briefly, for an afternoon, or a day. They talk to people they should never have met, and learn enough to save themselves, save their world - or finish the bad job they began. Many write it off as a dream. Many never forget it. Some make themselves forget. It depends who you meet, and who you are - an L or a Misa, a Mello or a Matt.
A lot stay longer, but not much longer. They're the ones who are around for a week, or two weeks, or a month. They make a small splash. People remember them. They ask, "What happened to so-and-so? He's gone home? Ah." Often these conversations involve uncomfortable pauses; most are too intelligent to think that "sent home" is all there is to it.
Some are around for the long term. They get to know each other. They form relationships - friends, family or followers. They make and break each other; they fight and spit, and eventually most of them, even the ones on different sides, make up. There's so little to do, after all. Stuck in the rats' nest for months or years, they think they know it all; that almost nothing can happen out of sight. That they define the place's population. Eventually, they all go back to their worlds, most of them changed forever by their forced interlude. Some really do go home - or think they do - but are drawn back. To some of them, it happens over and over; the instability is soul-destroying.
And then there are the lifers, those unfortunates who the mansion finds fascinating enough to keep all their lives long - or, in the case of the dead, literally forever. Light is one of these. He's been dead for seven years - longer than he was active as Kira. Though he hasn't aged a day, he's now thirty years old, marked by the regular attack of the mansion's stupid Hallowe'en pranks. It had been the first holiday to take place after his arrival, and it had been, he thinks, not more than six weeks after he died. The disparity between his world's calendar and the mansion's has never ceased to annoy him, and the frequently deadly holiday is as good an approximation of his real birthday as any. While he's never shared this idiosyncrasy with anyone, it amuses him that it also happens to be L's birthday; like most things, that piece of information was far easier to learn in the mansion than in the company of the L he first knew.
He's quieter, now; he's slowly becoming what he refuses to call "institutionalised", accustomed to the regular ways and patterns of his afterlife. It's not as bad as it might be. The libraries change their contents all the time. He still draws. The food is reasonably varied, more so now that he's started cooking once in a while. The people are tedious, and mostly identical, but he's found he doesn't have to speak to them; that he doesn't, particularly, want to speak to them any more. Most of them are children. They understand nothing. Three years in, he'd been bored of having the same meaningless conversations with the same people over and over, and it hasn't improved with time. He's begun to lie for fun, when he's forced to speak; he finds it cruelly, childishly amusing, just the sort of thing he'd disparage others for. He does it for the look on their faces, more than anything else; for their outrage at not being taken seriously. Sometimes it even helps to ingratiate him. So you're Kira? No, I'm in interior design. No, I gave it up; spaghetti farming had better hours. No, I'm a mango. Or, just sometimes, So I am. What do you plan to do about it? Or, with a select few - those who try not to stare at him with wide eyes, who don't dare to ask, he'll just smile and turn away, little black sketchbook in hand. Go in peace.
Weighting the downside further, Sayu's stupid cat hasn't died yet. It's growing old now, settling into an overfed middle-age, sleeping and coming out to trail after Light only occasionally. For all that the creature's so closely associated with him, it's maintained a startling level of popularity. It's mainly due to mumbled explanations in the early days that the cat had once been Sayu's; Light thinks they might have begun with Mel. Some form of hushed apology, perhaps? He doesn't know, or care. He'd been pulled out of the mansion proper just as he'd started to gain a proper feel for his revenge on her, and when he'd finally been returned, she'd been gone.
L - again, not Light's early nemesis, but a later arrival - had asked him once why the cat wasn't white. "It would complete the cliché, Yagami-kun." Light had curtly replied that grey fur would show up better on L's stupid white shirts, and did he have nothing better to do besides? Exchanging meaningful glares, they'd left in different directions, with Periwinkle and his thick grey fur trailing L just to annoy him. Exchanges like that, though, are only mostly hostile. They feel familiar, more so than they ought to, in a long-ago way Light can't place. He knows the what and why of it well enough.
But - yes, his seven years is longer than most people ever spend in the place. The transient population seems to turn over entirely, every year or two. When Light had finally been returned, he'd found that he recognised almost nobody. All his old targets had gone, replaced by others wearing their faces and his own. And it had been in that displacement, that knowledge that he was almost the only one left, that he'd properly turned his attention to the mansion itself.
Cities are full of more life than humans know how to see. Watch carefully, and you'll see the merest glimpses, here and there - the birds in the sky, and, if you're good, the ones in the shrubbery. Perhaps you can name a few. Foxes in your bins. Squirrels in the trees, and rats below, brown and black. Worms and slow-worms, beetles and spiders, ants, flies and wasps. Moths and slime molds and springtails, bacteria, viruses and archaea. The bulk of the apple's hidden out of sight, safely away from the humans who depend on it all. The mansion is no different.