L is for Legacy (Chapter One: The Eyes of Truth)
I've gotten started on this project while I'm still rabidly obsessed. Thanks to all who encouraged me to go for it. The second chapter might be posted over the weekend. I'm anticipating about five or six chapters in all. We shall see.
Title: L Is For Legacy ~ Chapter One: "The Eyes of Truth"
Characters: Light, Misa; past L/Light/Misa; and introducing Yagami Haru
Genre: Semi-AU, Drama, OC
Rating: PG-13
Summary: When Light invited L into a threesome with him and Misa during the summer they were chained at the wrist, he never imagined Misa would become pregnant with L’s child. Now L is dead, and Light must face the burden of raising his rival’s son as his own. Takes place in the canon interlude from 2005-2009.
Chapter One:
The Eyes of Truth
~*~
Yagami Haru was born on April 1, 2005. Light would never forget that day, the smell of hospitals, and anxiety, and waiting. He drummed his fingers nervously on the arm of his chair. What exactly had they meant by ‘risky’? What kind of ‘complications’ meant that Light had to leave the room and wait there, staring down the apathetic wall clock? Light was not accustomed to fearing for Misa’s personal safety. Except when it endangered his own designs, he had never in the past given her well being much thought. But that had all changed when Misa announced she was carrying the heir to Light’s new world. Now, that heir’s life - his son’s life - hung in the balance, and Light was absolutely powerless to make a difference. Powerless. He could be Kira, he could be L, he could be a cherished son and a junior tennis champion and the highest-scoring student in his class and the love of Amane Misa’s misguided life, and still, he could do nothing.
He could do nothing.
It was killing him. Light hadn’t been prepared for fatherhood at nineteen, hadn’t been prepared to marry the girl he could never love when she revealed her condition. And he hadn’t been prepared to be here, three and a half weeks too early, under harsh hospital lights, just hoping mother and newborn would make it out alive. He told himself that it was just a baby, that Misa was just a girl, that if today went horribly wrong he could always find someone else, someone more deserving, even. Of course he would have another chance. He had been prepared to wait; that had been his original intent. But somehow, the cold harsh glare of reason didn’t soothe him. In his gut, Light was afraid.
Maybe he would call his father again and see how things were going at HQ. Anything for a distraction. He shuffled through his backpack. Wallet, keys, prescription anxiety pills. Three big, glossy parenting magazines, which Misa had purchased and insisted he read, marking noteworthy articles with hot pink post-it notes. A candy bar, which Misa had been craving in abundance all through her too-short pregnancy. A thin black college notebook. Somehow his cell phone had ended up at the very bottom of the pack.
Just as Light was about to phone Soichiro for the second time that day, the doctor emerged from the maternity ward.
“Yagami-san?”
Light lowered his phone and looked up, trying to read the doctor’s face.
“Come in and see your son.”
It was a boy, just as the doctors had assured them. He was terribly small, but besides that he looked normal, healthy and alert in Misa’s frail arms. Already his eyes were wide open, moving from Light to Misa to the doctor to his own miniature toes. It was those huge round eyes, gunmetal gray shot through with black, that almost stopped Light’s heart. He’d seen those eyes before.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” Misa beamed. Though pale and drained, she glowed with pride as she held the baby to her chest. It was clear that she didn’t see the ghost Light saw in her son’s eyes.
“Yes,” said Light, his words catching in his throat. “Yes, he is.”
~*~
About a month after Haru was born, Light secretly clipped a tuft of his downy black hair and took it to a lab for a paternity test. He didn’t tell Misa, and when the results came back confirming that Haru’s DNA didn’t match his own, he didn’t even want to face her. It was all too easy to reconstruct what had happened. He knew Misa, the poster girl for lovesick fidelity, would never have slept with anyone else - not without Light, anyway. Undoubtedly then, baby Haru was the product of that wild summer night when Light and Misa had brought Ryuuzaki into bed with them. The boys were chained at the wrist, and frustrations had been running high all around. Mistakes had been made that night, careless mistakes he could only blame himself for. Light had always remembered that evening fondly. But even if he wanted to forget it, cruel chance had ensured now that he never could.
He came home from work that day to find Misa cradling her son - her son, he told himself, not theirs - on the living room couch.
“Light!” she exclaimed, as if she hadn’t seen him in weeks. It seemed she never tired of seeing him walk through the door every day. She rose to greet him. In her arms, the infant Haru was sucking his thumb, his wide, foreign, goddamn Ryuuzaki eyes focused on some faraway place.
“Hi Misa,” he replied. She moved towards him as if she expected a kiss, but Light, distracted, barely noticed. “How has Haru been today?”
Misa rolled her eyes. “He seems fine, but I’m exhausted. I tried to give him a nap, but he didn’t want it. I put him down for a minute and he screams bloody murder.” She shook her head at him playfully and spoke in the kind of voice with which overbearing pet owners address their poodles. “You don’t like sleeping do you? No you don’t!” With the hand he wasn’t sucking on, the month-old insomniac-in-the-making grabbed Misa’s pigtail.
At that point, Light almost broke down and told her the truth about where he had been that afternoon. But there was such adoration in Misa’s gaze, such pure, naked love for her husband and her son, that Light didn’t have the heart to tell her. She would have to know, eventually. She’d suspect it on her own in time, presuming she wasn’t too blinded by her love for Light to recognize her kid was teeming with Lawliet genes. Knowing Misa, it might not be a safe presumption.
~*~
It was strange, realizing you were frightened of your own (ostensible) son. Light didn’t believe in reincarnation, and yet sometimes when he looked at Haru’s eyes he couldn’t help but feeling as though L himself were watching him. It wasn’t just their size, shape, and color that got to him; something about the depth and intensity of Haru’s gray-black stare unsettled him. In his more paranoid moments, Light imagined the baby’s eyes were bugged with tiny cameras, installed by L at conception to monitor Kira’s every move. He wondered if Haru would eventually develop the dark bags beneath his lower lids that had made his true father’s face so distinctive. For the sake of his own honor, he hoped not.
Despite being constantly reminded of the unforgiving truth, Light grew attached to Haru. In a way, it was impossible not to. Over the course of his first year, it became clear that Haru was a highly intelligent child. His language acquisition was off the charts - a specialist they had taken him to described it as “magic” - and by his first birthday he was speaking in short but complete sentences, albeit with the vocabulary of one primarily interested in food. When Haru’s delighted grandparents observed this, Sachiko insisted that Light had been equally verbal as a baby, but the look Soichiro gave her was skeptical. Haru was naturally inquisitive, and loved to point at objects as if hoping the adults around him would tell him the corresponding word. He seemed to commit the tiniest details to memory without effort. Every adult who met him was blown away with his learning capacity, particularly Matusda, who quipped that Haru might pose a threat to his own job on the task force in a couple of years.
Once Haru had begun to talk, he basically never stopped. Light suspected Haru had learned Japanese so quickly simply out of sheer practice. Favorite conversation topics included breakfast, lunch, dinner, and Can I Have A Snack, as well as anything having to do with Misa’s hair, an early and inexplicable fixation. “Mommy’s hair is pretty” was a stock phrase Haru used to fill the silences. He also liked to express himself in lengthy memorized lines from stories his parents had read to him aloud, as well as variations of “Put me down, please!” or “Let go of me!” He was a very smiley baby, and his smile was contagious, as most babies’ are. He almost never cried; instead, he screamed. And he was very, very loud. It was clear he had inherited a few traits from Misa after all. The combination of L’s insomnia (Haru did sleep, of course, but not much, especially for a baby) and Misa’s volume made for some very unpleasant nights at the Yagami residence indeed.
Physically, Haru was much more ordinary, even subnormal, learning to walk around his tenth month. Though he grew at a healthy rate, he was always on the small side and never quite caught up to the kids his age. But what Haru lacked in size he made up for twofold in raw energy. He hated sitting still, and if held in one position too long he would start to hit the nearest noise-producing object - whether it was Light, Misa, or his tray-table - until he was moved. If let loose to crawl, retrieving him was something like trying to catch a small rodent with your bare hands, and once captured, the screaming would commence. Haru put everything in his mouth, especially his fingers and occasionally his toes. This, the specialist assured them, was typical baby behavior, but it never ceased to remind Light of Ryuuzaki’s thumb nibbling. Haru’s favorite actual baby foods were mashed banana and other fruits, and Light dreaded the day when Misa would introduce him to full-blown sweets. It puzzled Misa how adamant Light was about making sure Haru sat up straight in his high chair. But if there was one thing Light would not allow, it was for Haru to train himself to sit in some ridiculous frog posture. Even genetics had limits, after all.
~*~
One night in mid-winter, Light stood over Haru’s crib. The baby, finally, had gone to sleep. By night Haru’s pale blue room glowed a deep periwinkle, filmed over with the glow of city lights through sheer curtains, which Misa had installed because Haru did not like the dark. The child’s eyes were closed. He slept on his back, with a yellow blanket twisted up around his legs. In the half-dark, his downy black hair had a violet cast.
In the beginning, Light had thought of Haru bitterly as L’s last victory. Now, gazing down upon the peaceful infant, Light understood the victory as his own. L’s would-be successor had passed instead into the hands of Kira. Although not exactly as planned, the circle was complete. Light listened to the thin whisper of Haru’s breathing. One day, would this brilliant boy take his place as god of judgment? He would have liked to hope that, by the time Haru had grown, the world would no longer need Kira. In that moment, there was nothing he wanted more than a safe, peaceful world for his son. But the world would always need Kira, if only as deterrence for slipping back into corruption and decay. The hand of god never rests.
“You are mine,” said Light softly, as lovingly as the words could be said. “You will be my son, and this will be your world.” He smiled. “I have so much to show you.”
**
Next chapter...
Title: L Is For Legacy ~ Chapter One: "The Eyes of Truth"
Characters: Light, Misa; past L/Light/Misa; and introducing Yagami Haru
Genre: Semi-AU, Drama, OC
Rating: PG-13
Summary: When Light invited L into a threesome with him and Misa during the summer they were chained at the wrist, he never imagined Misa would become pregnant with L’s child. Now L is dead, and Light must face the burden of raising his rival’s son as his own. Takes place in the canon interlude from 2005-2009.
Chapter One:
The Eyes of Truth
~*~
Yagami Haru was born on April 1, 2005. Light would never forget that day, the smell of hospitals, and anxiety, and waiting. He drummed his fingers nervously on the arm of his chair. What exactly had they meant by ‘risky’? What kind of ‘complications’ meant that Light had to leave the room and wait there, staring down the apathetic wall clock? Light was not accustomed to fearing for Misa’s personal safety. Except when it endangered his own designs, he had never in the past given her well being much thought. But that had all changed when Misa announced she was carrying the heir to Light’s new world. Now, that heir’s life - his son’s life - hung in the balance, and Light was absolutely powerless to make a difference. Powerless. He could be Kira, he could be L, he could be a cherished son and a junior tennis champion and the highest-scoring student in his class and the love of Amane Misa’s misguided life, and still, he could do nothing.
He could do nothing.
It was killing him. Light hadn’t been prepared for fatherhood at nineteen, hadn’t been prepared to marry the girl he could never love when she revealed her condition. And he hadn’t been prepared to be here, three and a half weeks too early, under harsh hospital lights, just hoping mother and newborn would make it out alive. He told himself that it was just a baby, that Misa was just a girl, that if today went horribly wrong he could always find someone else, someone more deserving, even. Of course he would have another chance. He had been prepared to wait; that had been his original intent. But somehow, the cold harsh glare of reason didn’t soothe him. In his gut, Light was afraid.
Maybe he would call his father again and see how things were going at HQ. Anything for a distraction. He shuffled through his backpack. Wallet, keys, prescription anxiety pills. Three big, glossy parenting magazines, which Misa had purchased and insisted he read, marking noteworthy articles with hot pink post-it notes. A candy bar, which Misa had been craving in abundance all through her too-short pregnancy. A thin black college notebook. Somehow his cell phone had ended up at the very bottom of the pack.
Just as Light was about to phone Soichiro for the second time that day, the doctor emerged from the maternity ward.
“Yagami-san?”
Light lowered his phone and looked up, trying to read the doctor’s face.
“Come in and see your son.”
It was a boy, just as the doctors had assured them. He was terribly small, but besides that he looked normal, healthy and alert in Misa’s frail arms. Already his eyes were wide open, moving from Light to Misa to the doctor to his own miniature toes. It was those huge round eyes, gunmetal gray shot through with black, that almost stopped Light’s heart. He’d seen those eyes before.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” Misa beamed. Though pale and drained, she glowed with pride as she held the baby to her chest. It was clear that she didn’t see the ghost Light saw in her son’s eyes.
“Yes,” said Light, his words catching in his throat. “Yes, he is.”
~*~
About a month after Haru was born, Light secretly clipped a tuft of his downy black hair and took it to a lab for a paternity test. He didn’t tell Misa, and when the results came back confirming that Haru’s DNA didn’t match his own, he didn’t even want to face her. It was all too easy to reconstruct what had happened. He knew Misa, the poster girl for lovesick fidelity, would never have slept with anyone else - not without Light, anyway. Undoubtedly then, baby Haru was the product of that wild summer night when Light and Misa had brought Ryuuzaki into bed with them. The boys were chained at the wrist, and frustrations had been running high all around. Mistakes had been made that night, careless mistakes he could only blame himself for. Light had always remembered that evening fondly. But even if he wanted to forget it, cruel chance had ensured now that he never could.
He came home from work that day to find Misa cradling her son - her son, he told himself, not theirs - on the living room couch.
“Light!” she exclaimed, as if she hadn’t seen him in weeks. It seemed she never tired of seeing him walk through the door every day. She rose to greet him. In her arms, the infant Haru was sucking his thumb, his wide, foreign, goddamn Ryuuzaki eyes focused on some faraway place.
“Hi Misa,” he replied. She moved towards him as if she expected a kiss, but Light, distracted, barely noticed. “How has Haru been today?”
Misa rolled her eyes. “He seems fine, but I’m exhausted. I tried to give him a nap, but he didn’t want it. I put him down for a minute and he screams bloody murder.” She shook her head at him playfully and spoke in the kind of voice with which overbearing pet owners address their poodles. “You don’t like sleeping do you? No you don’t!” With the hand he wasn’t sucking on, the month-old insomniac-in-the-making grabbed Misa’s pigtail.
At that point, Light almost broke down and told her the truth about where he had been that afternoon. But there was such adoration in Misa’s gaze, such pure, naked love for her husband and her son, that Light didn’t have the heart to tell her. She would have to know, eventually. She’d suspect it on her own in time, presuming she wasn’t too blinded by her love for Light to recognize her kid was teeming with Lawliet genes. Knowing Misa, it might not be a safe presumption.
~*~
It was strange, realizing you were frightened of your own (ostensible) son. Light didn’t believe in reincarnation, and yet sometimes when he looked at Haru’s eyes he couldn’t help but feeling as though L himself were watching him. It wasn’t just their size, shape, and color that got to him; something about the depth and intensity of Haru’s gray-black stare unsettled him. In his more paranoid moments, Light imagined the baby’s eyes were bugged with tiny cameras, installed by L at conception to monitor Kira’s every move. He wondered if Haru would eventually develop the dark bags beneath his lower lids that had made his true father’s face so distinctive. For the sake of his own honor, he hoped not.
Despite being constantly reminded of the unforgiving truth, Light grew attached to Haru. In a way, it was impossible not to. Over the course of his first year, it became clear that Haru was a highly intelligent child. His language acquisition was off the charts - a specialist they had taken him to described it as “magic” - and by his first birthday he was speaking in short but complete sentences, albeit with the vocabulary of one primarily interested in food. When Haru’s delighted grandparents observed this, Sachiko insisted that Light had been equally verbal as a baby, but the look Soichiro gave her was skeptical. Haru was naturally inquisitive, and loved to point at objects as if hoping the adults around him would tell him the corresponding word. He seemed to commit the tiniest details to memory without effort. Every adult who met him was blown away with his learning capacity, particularly Matusda, who quipped that Haru might pose a threat to his own job on the task force in a couple of years.
Once Haru had begun to talk, he basically never stopped. Light suspected Haru had learned Japanese so quickly simply out of sheer practice. Favorite conversation topics included breakfast, lunch, dinner, and Can I Have A Snack, as well as anything having to do with Misa’s hair, an early and inexplicable fixation. “Mommy’s hair is pretty” was a stock phrase Haru used to fill the silences. He also liked to express himself in lengthy memorized lines from stories his parents had read to him aloud, as well as variations of “Put me down, please!” or “Let go of me!” He was a very smiley baby, and his smile was contagious, as most babies’ are. He almost never cried; instead, he screamed. And he was very, very loud. It was clear he had inherited a few traits from Misa after all. The combination of L’s insomnia (Haru did sleep, of course, but not much, especially for a baby) and Misa’s volume made for some very unpleasant nights at the Yagami residence indeed.
Physically, Haru was much more ordinary, even subnormal, learning to walk around his tenth month. Though he grew at a healthy rate, he was always on the small side and never quite caught up to the kids his age. But what Haru lacked in size he made up for twofold in raw energy. He hated sitting still, and if held in one position too long he would start to hit the nearest noise-producing object - whether it was Light, Misa, or his tray-table - until he was moved. If let loose to crawl, retrieving him was something like trying to catch a small rodent with your bare hands, and once captured, the screaming would commence. Haru put everything in his mouth, especially his fingers and occasionally his toes. This, the specialist assured them, was typical baby behavior, but it never ceased to remind Light of Ryuuzaki’s thumb nibbling. Haru’s favorite actual baby foods were mashed banana and other fruits, and Light dreaded the day when Misa would introduce him to full-blown sweets. It puzzled Misa how adamant Light was about making sure Haru sat up straight in his high chair. But if there was one thing Light would not allow, it was for Haru to train himself to sit in some ridiculous frog posture. Even genetics had limits, after all.
~*~
One night in mid-winter, Light stood over Haru’s crib. The baby, finally, had gone to sleep. By night Haru’s pale blue room glowed a deep periwinkle, filmed over with the glow of city lights through sheer curtains, which Misa had installed because Haru did not like the dark. The child’s eyes were closed. He slept on his back, with a yellow blanket twisted up around his legs. In the half-dark, his downy black hair had a violet cast.
In the beginning, Light had thought of Haru bitterly as L’s last victory. Now, gazing down upon the peaceful infant, Light understood the victory as his own. L’s would-be successor had passed instead into the hands of Kira. Although not exactly as planned, the circle was complete. Light listened to the thin whisper of Haru’s breathing. One day, would this brilliant boy take his place as god of judgment? He would have liked to hope that, by the time Haru had grown, the world would no longer need Kira. In that moment, there was nothing he wanted more than a safe, peaceful world for his son. But the world would always need Kira, if only as deterrence for slipping back into corruption and decay. The hand of god never rests.
“You are mine,” said Light softly, as lovingly as the words could be said. “You will be my son, and this will be your world.” He smiled. “I have so much to show you.”
**
Next chapter...