A Year of Jubilee [The Death Note Fanfic]

Chapter 43

Light slipped quietly into the security room on the top floor, the one that belonged to Watari. The old man's body was slumped forward, lifeless, in the chair before the monitors, his fingers still resting against a big red button on the control panel. Light eyed the panel from where he stood, checking to make sure that the downstairs surveillance monitors hadn't switched back on since the reset. They hadn't.

Relaxing, he moved forward into the room, going straight to the pile of ash in a far corner. The edge of a black notebook poked out from beneath the gray dust. It was Rem's Death Note.

Light bent to retrieve it, shaking the remains of the deceased shinigami from off of its covers. Then he slipped the notebook into his inner coat pocket, before striding over to the control panel by Watari's corpse and flipping a switch. The monitors in front of him flickered back on to show surveillance of the rest of the building, through which task force members frantically combed hallways in search of Rem. None of them were anywhere near the top floor. Good.

Sliding the Death Note back out of his coat, he flipped it open. To his chagrin, the pages were all filled with names written in every direction, without any heed to lines, spacing or order. He scowled. Did all shinigami write in their Death Notes like this? Flipping to the last page, he scanned the bottom, only to find names that were either written in a foreign alphabet, or that were clearly female. What's more, they all went in diagonal directions, piling up in the corners of the page without any indication as to which could have been written last. Light snapped the book shut with a growl and put it back into his coat pocket. He'd have to go over it more thoroughly later.

Pulling his cell phone from his pocket, he flipped it open to call Aizawa. Before he could hit dial, however, a scene on the monitors caught his eye.

It was L and Julie, still sitting together on the floor of the main room. The two were huddled at a close distance from each other, talking quietly.

Light's fingers clenched around his phone. Rage, white-hot and fused with hatred, coursed through him.

L was supposed to be dead. He, Light, was supposed to have won. This whole game was supposed to be over, and he was supposed to be the god of a new world.

But something had gone wrong.

Somehow, L had beaten death. And Light didn't know how he had done it, but he was sure that Julie Amachi—or whatever her name really was—had something to do with it. The thought made him gnash his teeth.

He was going to kill her. One way or another, he would kill both of them, even if it meant making Misa copy down every single unrecognizable letter on the pages of Rem's Death Note into her own. That would take care of L. After that, he just had to figure out a way to kill Julie. And this time, he would make sure that neither of them could come back.

Hitting the dial button on his phone, he held the device up to his ear and cleared his throat, forcing himself to be calm.

"Aizawa?" he said when the other man answered. He took a deep breath and then, in a tone of fear and panic, went on, "It's—it's Watari! I...I found his body. And a strange pile of ash in the same room. I don't know what's going on here, but you all better get up here quick!"

Hanging up, he glanced back at the monitors. His gaze fell on L and Julie again. Slowly, a sinister smile crept onto his lips.

"This game isn't over yet," he said softly. "I can still win."

Jubilee had held onto L for as long as she could, long after someone noticed that Light had disappeared, long after Aizawa had rounded up the others to "follow Light's example and find that shinigami." Somewhere in the background she was distantly aware of Hellenos and L's guardian angel, along with a vague flurry of other angelic activity, all apparently rejoicing amongst themselves. Hellenos and the other guardian angel looked to be sharing a high-five or something of its equivalent. But they all seemed to purposefully recede into the background, giving Jubilee and L space to share their moment. Only Matsuda lingered close by, awkwardly hovering over the two of them on the floor while they ignored him and continued to hug.