Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note or its characters or Pink Rabbits by The National.

This one-shot is inspired by a scene that is exactly 30 seconds long from episode 26 of Death Note. I think it speaks volumes about Light's state of mind, so does the song, so if you don't remember that scene I highly encourage you to go check it out.

It had been ten days since L's funeral.

L is dead.

Light Yagami was in a café he did not care to know the name of. To any bystander, he seemed like a well-groomed college kid on a date with his blabbering girlfriend. But to a trained observer who knew him – perhaps a strange detective that liked to chain himself to suspects, or a supernatural being that plagued him for months on end – he resembled an empty vessel. An umbra hominis. Something hollow.

Just like the hollow madness that began to creep through the cracks of his mind. This was not the liberating void of a world cleansed, ready for a new god, but rather an emptiness that resonated with the phantom clink of chains he no longer wore. Sometimes, he'd catch himself turning to ask someone to please come with him to refill his coffee because he can't possibly move alone freely when he's chained to him, and then when he'd turn he'd see nothing—just the oppressive quiet, and the ever-deepening realization that the battle was over, and victory tasted like ash.

L is dead.

And Misa was alive. She was a wretched and vapid creature whose existence seemed solely to vex him. He mused on the intolerability of her everything—the frivolous laughter, the artificial scent of perfume that made him want to retch, the superficial smile that never seemed to wane, the hollow gaze that mirrored nothing of the intellectual depth he craved. Her blissful ignorance was a stark, infuriating contrast to his sharp acumen. In her, he saw the epitome of all that was inferior.

She was a pawn whose movements on the chessboard of his ambitions had been played out to their end. She was nothing but a leftover piece. The two reasons he kept her alive for so long were gone: L is dead and so was the incessant annoying pathetic excuse for a Shinigami that had the audacity to threaten the god of the new world if something happened to the banal bottle blonde.

It was only the logical progression of events that her name would be written down next. Just like Naomi and Raye and Thierry and Merrie and Higuchi and Namikawa and Hatori and ShimuraandKidaandMidoandTakahashiand—

"…in forever, can't you enjoy yourself a little more?"

The umbra hominis stared at the nauseatingly pouting blonde with unseeing eyes.

How he loathed the banal chatter, the asinine comments that spilled from her lips like an insult to his intellect. And yet the words that unwillingly slithered from his mouth were so alien and incongruent with his current train of thought they might as well have been conjured up by another entity trapped within his own consciousness.

"Misa, let's move in together."

Or perhaps it was a deep-seated compulsion that he had no courage to face.

It started out innocently enough.

During a particularly utterly boring night of going through the system to retrieve the missing data while the task force's chatter became a whirring hum in the background, he suddenly saw it in the periphery of his vision: the glint of metal, eerily dancing and clinking and then conveniently disappearing the moment Light's iris unconsciously shifted towards it.

The three-second pause of his mechanical typing and the slightest turn of his head were the only indication that something caused a shift in his focus. Of course, none of the idiots noticed anything. They were too engrossed in a trivial discussion – something about patents and an orphanage. Of course, for the first hundred and twelve times it happened, he easily dismissed it as exhaustion, nothing more than his mind playing tricks on him.

In the days that followed, everyone was adjusting to the new headquarters that was his and Misa's apartment. Despite the very real threat of death and witnessing first-hand the fate of anyone who dared stand in God's way, everyone was abuzz and motivated and keen on avenging the fallen like the gullible fools they were.

As a result, Light was almost never alone. When everyone retired for the day, Misa was there. Her chatter never ceased, and her high-pitched voice that grated against his senses like sandpaper made it hard to form any coherent thoughts when she was around. And that was why he never noticed when the things he saw in the corner of his eyes were more than merely the side effects of his neurofatigue.

Until Misa stayed for a couple of days away from Tokyo for something or another – a modelling photoshoot or a commercial or Kira knows what. Misa always blabbered but Light never listened and never really cared to know.

With Misa gone, he realized he couldn't chalk up the weirdness in the air to her presence or her stupidity or her shrill voice making his brain grind to a halt. There were moments, fleeting and ephemeral, when there was something else—a soft scraping of a spoon against a teacup when no one was drinking tea, a sensation of a cold metal chain curling around his wrist, tugging gently, insistently.

He would occasionally catch glimpses of something—or someone—in the periphery of his vision. The tangle of unkempt black hair, too distinct to dismiss, fluttered at the edge of his sight. But whenever he turned to look directly at it, there was nothing, just the empty space of a room that seemed suddenly too large and too stifling all at once.

He would wake abruptly to the feeling of spidery fingers around his throat and the sinister symphony of clinking chains, the sound so vivid and close it was as if the metal lay cool against his ears.

God didn't have nightmares.

His heart would race, pounding a frantic Morse code against his ribs, the message clear and, willingly or unwillingly – he was not sure, decrypted and transformed into a chorus and sung by his fraying mind.

We are Kira.

We are Kira.

We are Kira.

And Light would be oblivious to the sound of his voice repeating his own mantra aloud and the laughter of a Shinigami coming from the next room.

And when Misa finally, finally came back, Light almost collapsed with relief because she was the eyes of the God of the New World, and of course she would never really be useless and there is absolutely no reason to kill her as long as she was by his side and there is absolutely nothing wrong with him and the thought of being alone doesn't terrify him because he is a God and L is dead.

L is dead and I am insane.