L is For Legacy (Chapter 3: The Lies That Bind)
Title: L Is For Legacy ~ Chapter Three: The Lies That Bind
Characters: Light, Misa, and Haru-chan; past L/Light/Misa, hints of L/Light
Genre: Semi-AU, Drama
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 interlude from 2005-2009.
There are extra L/ Light hints in this one. Enjoy!
Chapter Three:
The Lies That Bind
~*~
Every few weeks, Misa would have a recurring nightmare. In the dream, Haru was wandering around the apartment unsupervised, pulling low drawers open one by one and spilling their contents onto the floor. In one of these drawers, there was always a thin black notebook, its cover inscribed with foreign scrawl. A book Haru hadn’t read yet. He would kneel with it on the carpet, turning the lined pages and trying to make out the names. Misa could sense dream-Haru’s thoughts; the boy had decided this notebook must be for handwriting practice. He picked up a pencil in his tiny awkward hand and, in deep concentration, struggled to form the initial strokes of his own name, which Light had been teaching him. Panicked, Misa screamed at him to stop, to look at her, to come to her and put the notebook away. But Misa was absent from her own dream, and the child could not hear her warning.
~*~
It was clear from the start that Haru wasn’t quite fitting in at nursery school. The head teacher simply did not know what to do with him. At three, he had the verbal and quantitative aptitude of an average eight-year-old, and the classroom reading and number exercises bored him, sometimes literally, to tears. Yet for all his talent, Haru simply could not be controlled. Transitioning him from free playtime in the schoolyard to an organized indoor activity was like pulling teeth, and naptime was altogether out of the question. Manic energy level notwithstanding, there was also the issue of what the teachers called his “attitude.” If Haru did not want to follow a particular instruction, which was the case more often than not, his typical response involved some variation of “You can’t tell me what to do; you’re not my father.” Once Haru had grown to recognize Light’s authority, he accepted no substitutes. Even more frustrating, he refused to accept help with anything, insisting he could do it himself. In one regrettable incident, his teacher had tried to help him button his jacket, and Haru hit her in the shin with his miniature umbrella. After the headmaster's call had been placed to the Yagami household, Haru had to suffer through three bitter weeks without sweets.
Though Haru was friendly with the other children, most of them were intimidated by him, and so he remained relatively isolated from his peers. In Light’s opinion, it also didn’t help that Haru still liked to dress up in ruffles and frills. Nothing Light did to wean him of this habit had the slightest effect. At school there was even a designated dress up box full of assorted lost and outgrown costume items, most of them no more masculine than Misa’s old wardrobe, and Haru combed this collection for his daily amusement. Eventually his fashion choices began to coalesce around a favorite piece: a vaguely Western looking hot pink wide-brimmed hat, adorned with several large polyester flowers. Haru grew so attached to his hat that at first the teachers tried to get him to sit still through lessons by bribing him with hat-wearing privileges. But when the other students started demanding the right to wear hats in class as well, Haru’s pride and joy had to be confiscated.
“Why dress-up?” Light lamented as the young couple drove home from a rather uncomfortable parent-teacher conference in which the hat incident had been recounted in detail. “Of all the things! Why couldn’t I have had a son who liked tennis, or chess?”
“Haru’s a little young for tennis and chess, don’t you think so, Light?”
“He’s a little young to be reading chapter books, too. Maybe we should start teaching him English soon. They say the earlier the better.”
“Ooooh, our son is so brilliant!” Misa smiled and squeezed Light’s arm with such enthusiasm that for a minute he was afraid he might swerve out of the lane. “Just like his father!”
Light said nothing. He continued driving home.
~*~
In the kitchen, Haru was being unusually quiet. He was concentrating on a new coloring book Light had modified for him. It was a sort of color-by-number, only inside each area to be colored Light had added a little math problem. The answer to the problem determined what color to use, according to a key on the top of the page. Seven times three is twenty-one; add the digits together and you get three; three stands for green. Misa looked over at her son and felt a swell of pride. He was finally developing an attention span, and even though he wasn’t quite coloring inside the lines, he was at least following the code. On second glance, she noticed the little genius was wearing her old fishnet tights as a scarf.
Haru immediately noticed he was being watched. He put down his stubby green crayon and looked up at Misa imploringly.
“Mommy, who’s Kira?”
Misa almost dropped the cucumber she had been slicing. “Kira?” She swallowed her panic. “How did you hear about that, Haru?”
“Today at school Daisuke-chan stole a cookie from Keiko-chan during lunch. Keiko said she would tell sensei on him, but Daisuke just stuck his tongue out at her. Then Keiko said she would tell ‘Kira’ on him, and he almost started crying, and gave the cookie back. I’ve never seen Daisuke cry before. He’s like the toughest kid in class! I guessed he was afraid of what Kira was going to do to him, so I asked Keiko who Kira was, and why he was so scary.” He frowned skeptically. “She said Kira is a man who lives up in the sky, right over Japan, and keeps away all the bad guys. If you do something bad, and Kira sees your face, he breaks your heart so it stops working and you die.” He paused a second to chew on his thumb. “But that didn’t make any sense to me, so I thought I’d ask you.”
Misa was very quiet. “I think that’s something you should ask your father about, Haru. Why don’t you talk about it with him when he gets home tonight, when I’m at the photo shoot?”
Haru poked at the table with the butt of the crayon. “How come you can’t tell me?”
“I could tell you, but I think your dad would rather talk about it with you first.” She resumed slicing the cucumber, trying not to let her hands tremble. “He knows more about Kira than almost anybody else.”
~*~
With respect to Kira, Light inhabited two mutually exclusive worlds. In one world, Kira was a criminal, the target of his and his father’s tireless work. This was the outer world, the public world. In his private, inner world, of course, Light was Kira, and Kira was Justice, a man become a god. This world - the true world -was visible only to Light, Misa, and the ever-present eyes of the shinigami. But into which of these two realities should Light lead Haru?
He considered. It would not be wrong or difficult to lie to his son. As bright as Haru was, he was only a child; what did he know of death, or justice? Eventually, when he was old enough to understand Kira’s motives and his duty to the world, Haru could be told. Yet it seemed contradictory for him to raise the boy to believe Kira was evil, and then turn around and expect him to take up Kira's mantle once he knew the truth. If Haru grew up hating and fearing Kira, he might become an obstacle to Light’s new order, rather than its heir. In that case, was he doomed to the same fate as his biological father? The thought of hurting Haru made Light sick. But he knew underneath it all that it would be even more dangerous for the child to know the reality of the situation. He loved Haru, but he couldn’t trust the boy, so easily bribed by the promise of cake, not to crack under pressure if questioned. He was too young; he couldn’t understand the stakes. Light could even imagine Haru boasting to his classmates about how his dad is Kira. Visions of disaster raced through his head.
No, Haru could not know the truth. Not yet.
~*~
That evening, when Misa had left for her photo shoot, Light sat Haru down on his lap in the living room. Light couldn’t help but notice that the boy had grown, almost as big as a normal three-year-old. He’d finally put on some weight, and little bands of baby-smooth ankle were visible between the tops of his socks and the bottoms of his now-too-short pants. In the smoky eyes, Light saw the child’s concern. Serious sit-downs did not happen every day.
“Haru,” Light began, still hesitant, “what did your friend at school tell you about Kira?”
“Well,” said Haru, “Keiko-chan said Kira lives in the sky above Japan, and that all day he watches out for bad people down below, on the ground. When Kira sees someone do a bad thing, they die. But I’m pretty sure he has to see them first. Or something like that.” He wrinkled his nose. “Is this Kira actually real?”
Light nodded. “Kira is very real. He first appeared about a year and a half before you were born.”
“So I was negative one point five.”
Light laughed. “Yes, that’s right. Or if you want to be really precise, you were closer to negative one point three three years old. One year and four months.”
“December 2003.”
“Exactly.” Light never ceased to be impressed with his son’s quick mind, though anything less, he knew, would have been a bitter disappointment. “Anyway, that was the time this whole mystery began. That’s what it is, really, a mystery. There are a lot of things we don’t know about Kira, things that nobody knows. For example, nobody knows what Kira looks like, or where lives. It’s very unlikely that he lives in the sky like your friend said. Although some people believe Kira is a god, the police have reason to believe he is a man with very special powers.”
Haru’s face lit up. “Like a superhero?”
Light nodded. “More or less. But with his powers, which are also very mysterious, he kills people.”
“But bad people, right?”
Light hesitated. “Mostly bad people. It seems that Kira’s goal is to kill all the bad people - criminals, that is - people who rob and steal and kidnap, and who are killers themselves. As long as the threat of Kira is always there, people will be afraid of him, and fewer people will be willing to commit crimes.”
“Like Daisuke stealing cookies.”
Light laughed and tousled Haru’s hair. “Well, I honestly don’t think Kira pays attention to kids at the playground stealing cookies. Your friend Daisuke’s probably got nothing to worry about.”
“He’s not my friend,” said Haru earnestly.
“All the same. He will be fine. And so will you.” He held Haru close to him, feeling an unexpected surge of protective instinct. No matter what, he wouldn’t let anything happen to this child.
“How does he kill them? The bad people? Keiko said he does something like break their hearts, but I thought that was weird.”
Again Light felt the urge to smile. “One of Kira’s special powers is to give someone a heart attack, which means that your heart suddenly stops working. Your heart pumps your blood through your whole body and carries the oxygen and the energy you need to your brain and your lungs and your fingers and toes.” He made an illustrative pumping motion with his fist. “If your heart stops working, you can die.”
Haru’s eyes were wider than he’d ever see them, and that was saying a lot. “So…in real life, Kira can all of a sudden just make that happen to anyone?”
“He has a rule. He has to have seen the person’s face, and usually to know their name.”
“That’s really scary,” said Haru, looking down at his knees. “But I guess Kira doesn’t sound that bad, really, if he keeps people from doing the wrong thing.”
“There are many good people who like Kira and support what he does. But there are other good people, like your Grandfather Soichiro, who believe that what Kira does is wrong. Even if someone has committed a terrible crime, it is against the law to just kill them.”
“They’re supposed to have a trial first,” Haru nodded.
“Yes, Haru, that’s exactly right, and that’s the reason your Grandfather and me are working with the police to catch Kira. But Kira believes what he is doing is right, even if he’s breaking laws, so when he discovers people who are trying to stop him, he might choose to kill them too, even though they aren’t criminals.”
“Wait, so you’re saying Kira kills good people too!”
“He can, and he has. Many policemen have died trying to solve the Kira case.”
Haru chewed his thumb thoughtfully. “But if the good people trying to stop him just stopped…stopped trying, I mean, then Kira wouldn’t want to kill them anymore, right, because they’re good?”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Then how come everybody doesn’t just stop trying to catch him? That way he’ll only hurt the bad people.”
Deep inside, Light wanted to hug the boy and shout Yes, yes! You perfect, brilliant, righteous child, you understand! I knew that you would understand. But all he did was nod.
“That’s very logical, Haru. But sometimes when you believe in something very, very strongly, you are willing to risk your life to defend that cause. Grandpa Soichiro knows that he might die trying to capture Kira, but to him, it’s more important to do his very best to stop the killings altogether.”
“Still, Grandpa’s good and the criminals are bad,” said Haru. He pronounced it crim-nulls. “I’d rather have Grandpa stay alive than all those dangerous men.”
“I know,” Light said, squeezing his hand gently. “But that’s what the police are there for, to stop the criminals. And don’t forget that Kira has killed innocent people, and that makes him a criminal too.”
“Did Kira kill your friend?”
Light was taken aback. “Which friend?”
“You and Mom talked about him before, a few months ago I think. The one who liked cake. What was his name?”
Light swallowed. “Ryuuzaki.” Just saying that name into those round dark eyes brought forth a dark mix of emotions he didn’t want to address, ever, if he could help it. Inside, Light focused on shutting out the feelings. They had only ever gotten in the way. The child just looked at him imploringly, unaware. “Yes,” Light answered. Technically, it wasn’t true, not directly, but the feeling was the same. “Kira killed him.”
“His heart was broke?”
“Yes.” And, perhaps, not only his.
“Do you miss him?”
Again, the knots in his stomach, the chill in the room.
“Sometimes, I do miss him,” said Light. “But sometimes, I feel like he’s still with us.”
Haru’s eyes were the color of lead. “Kira’s not going to get you too, Daddy, is he?”
Light held him close. “No, he isn’t. Please don’t worry, Haru. I won’t let that happen.”
*
Next chapter...