I don’t know if we’re still in the age of Y/N L/N search-and-replace self-insert fanfics but can I just say there’s MASSIVE untapped potential for a Y/N L/N Death Note fanfiction if you just
hang on. This. Like this:
Light clicked his bedroom door shut, and leaned against it, and slid gently down. His attention was wrapped so wholly in the unmarked envelope in his hand. He slit it open, and unsheathed the documents like he was pulling money from a wallet. He was, in a sense. These documents had cost him. The private eye he hired had not been cheap.
But it HAD been worth it, Light knew with relief washing through his veins as he thumbed through the contents: birth certificate, social security card, medical records, vaccination history, school records, IDs with photos – mother’s name, father’s name, date of birth, eye color, hair color, blood type.
Light held in his hands EVERYTHING there was to know about the girl. And he basked in it, drinking it in, a name finally to attach to the woman who haunted him.
First name: Y/N. Last name: L/N.
Light cracked a grin, rib cage rippling with manic chuckles that bubbled to his lips and erupted, cackles, delighted trills. The sense of victory flooded him. That girl who knew he was Kira, that girl who had worked so hard to hide her identity, that girl who plagued him, followed him, haunted him every day, who he could never touch.
Finally, Light could kill her.
He rose, and walked nearly numb to his desk, and pulled out the scrap of Death Note he kept in the false bottom of the top drawer. He reveled in it as he wrote: Y/N L/N, dies alone at 11:48pm of a brain aneurysm.
The damnation felt so sweet.
She was waiting for him, early as the sun which crested behind her, all soft smiles and sweet squinted eyes. She was waiting for him as she did every single day. She stood there, as always - a thing of nightmares.
The blood left Light’s face once he opened the front door to her, feet and hands tingling cold, stomach in knots.
He’d been worried when he awoke to no news about his dead university classmate. And the confirmation of his every fear settled as a knot in his gut. Y/N L/N was alive, in front of him, just as she was every other day, smiling.
“You seem surprised, Light. Like you’ve seen a ghost?” Her wry smile was a mockery. Light loathed her more than anything.
“Y/N … L/N…” he muttered, through gritted teeth. “…Good morning.”
“Oh! You discovered my name. Good job good job, that was faster than I expected.”
“Aren’t I dead?” she titled her head and swayed a bit in place. “That’s how Kira kills people, yeah? Full name? And you’ve got mine. So why aren’t I dead?”
Kira. Light’s eye twitched. She did that. At every chance, dropping with such nonchalance that she knew. If he argued back, she would ignore him. If he defended himself, it would get him nowhere.
Ignore, deflect, probe, find a weak point.
“Is it a fake name? Is Y/N L/N a fake name?” It would be hard to believe; it would be beyond elaborate. Every ounce of documentation would need to have been faked, or else perfectly stolen, with a complete erasure of who the girl really was. Not a single piece of contradictory evidence. Enough to completely fool Japan’s most esteemed private eye. It was almost unfathomable.
“No, it’s not a fake name. That’s my name. My real name. You’re right.” She spun on her heel and walked forward, into the sun, toward campus, sunlight streaking through the wisps in her hair. “But you can’t kill me with it, Kira.”
Light refused to answer. He refused to concede. He refused to show his hand, and yet, maybe he already had… Maybe he’d already lost.
He’d try again tonight. He’d try again as many times as it took to eliminate her, this unfathomable girl, who appeared in his uni classroom claiming to be an old elementary school classmate of his, who followed him every day and spoke in hints that suggested she knew, and yet never revealed how, or why, or what she wanted from him.
He’d try again. He’d kill her this time.
“It won’t work, trying again, that is. If you want to kill me, you’ll have to use your own hands.” She glanced over her shoulder at him. “But that’s messy, and suspicious, and too easy to solve, right? So you need the Death Note to do away with me. But it won’t work.”
Death Note, dammit, she really DID know.
“Hey Light, what’s my name?”
“Y/N, L/N,” he ground out, almost robotically.
“And what name did you write in the Death Note?”
Light hesitated. Did he stand any chance of keeping his hand concealed?
He locked eyes with her, and he knew the answer was no. She knew. He knew.
“Doesn’t sound quite right, does it?” she asked. And with her words, Light felt some unsettled something thud in his chest. A disquiet. An unrest. A thinly veiled wrongness.
“My name, that name, Y/N L/N, how do you spell it?” she asked.
“Y…” Light paused. Y? No… That was almost certainly not right.
“First letter, second letter, third letter. Come on. I believe in you.”
A headache was building behind Light’s eyes.
“Y…. S-slash…. N…” No. That wasn’t a name. That wasn’t anyone’s name. And it wasn’t her name. Her name, her name was—
“You can’t spell it, Light. You can’t. And no one can. No one except an extremely, intractably lucky person could even guess what my name might be, at the time that all of this plays out.”
“What do I look like, Light? The Death Note needs a mental image! What do I look like?”
And Light looked. He looked directly at her, piercing, probing, roving, studying, drinking her in. She looked exactly as he remembered, with H/C hair and E/C eyes and….
“I’m not anyone, Light,” she offered with the same, sweetly saccharine smile that Light could not describe beyond those words. “Or I’m everyone, I guess. I’m every Y/N L/N who reads this, any one of them. And when the dust settles, and the story stabilizes, and those markers are replaced for real, it will be too late. Because that will not be the name you wrote in your Death Note. You’ll always have written Y, and slash, and N, and L, and slash, and N, and that will never be right. I’ll be someone else by the time it matters, every time.”
Light blinked through the stars in his vision. Looking at her hurt, his vision wobbling in and out of focus on the nothing, and the everything she was. The hair color, and the eye color, and the first name, and the last name, that were every potential quantum combination, and still none of them.
“What do you want from me?” he asked. “Why are you following me? Why do you know who I am. What do you want?”
“Nothing. I want nothing. I don’t have a defined will. It’s not like I’m a person.” She stepped forward again, hands clenched to the bag behind her back. A normal school bag, a normal school uniform, trotting in step eastward toward the college campus. “I’m an insert. And that means I’m whoever they want me to be, every time. It’s not any deeper than that.”
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