Chapters: 21/38 Fandom: Death Note (Anime & Manga) Rating: Explicit 

Just like the ATLAS, he and Light were destined to burn. He knew this. He knew it. It was only logical.

People like Light didn’t stay with people like him. Soon they would become asynchronous again, tracing individual orbits that would never meet.

Light would stay here, tethered to the glory, and continue on the trajectory that he had always been destined to.

And L would untether himself again. Searching for another planet to gravitate toward.

—

Or, a NASA lawlight AU

Chapters: 20/38 Fandom: Death Note (Anime & Manga) Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: L/Yagami Light 

Just like the ATLAS, he and Light were destined to burn. He knew this. He knew it. It was only logical.

People like Light didn’t stay with people like him, and soon they would become asynchronous again, tracing individual orbits that would never meet.

Light would stay here, tethered to the glory, and continue on the trajectory that he had always been destined to.

And L would untether himself again. Searching for another planet to gravitate toward.

Or, a NASA lawlight AU

Sneak peak of Chapter 20

Is of course Light thinks that the only way to make the world a better place is mass murdering all the criminals.

Light himself only behaves - filling the role of perfect son, student, brother and boyfriend - when there is consequences for him not to. For him it's an act, a mask he puts on before stepping out of his room in the morning.

Light doesn't think people who are capable of doing bad things (who have the capacity to do them) would ever choose not to do them if there were no consequences. And he thinks this because he is exactly like that himself.

Light has no belief in the ability of people to change. He has no belief in the ability of people being given the choice to do bad things and not doing them. Light thinks that evil is just something you're born with, something innate and instinctive for some people while not for others.

So of course he thinks that stopping crime boils down to killing all the evil people in the world. Of course he doesn't think about the systems that breed that kind of evil and how to dismantle them.

The world is black and white -

And he is so desperate to wipe the evil from himself that he'll kill millions to do it. To keep believing he isn't among the very sort of people he thinks need to killed for the world to be a better place.

As much as I do buy his sentiment that "the world needs to be fixed", one must also recognize that, just like L, his motivation isn't just to do what's right, but to harvest intellectual stimulation and alleviate his general boredom by taking on this holier-than-thou task to reap a superior reward that down-to-earth undertakings could never provide.

We do see, however, how an absolute air of mundane monotony and tedium has surrounded him after the timeskip; after L's passing. It cannot be what he wished for when he began using the death note and it's a far cry from the excitement and the challenge that filled his everyday life when L was with him. It gives me the impression that L inspires Light to act in exceptionally vigorous ways that cause him to take on baggage without further consideration for the future (a future where there is no L to make this baggage an exciting challenge, that is, tolerable any longer). Even though Mello & Near relight that spark a little bit, you can see the annoyances and encumbrances that have accumulated up until that point absolutely interfering with the little excitement L's relics bring him. The point this sticks out especially well and the main reason I don't think Light would've lasted long without L (as in several years) would be when Light finally snaps and yells at Misa to shut up after losing the death note to Mello. In a world without L, he would have still chosen to keep close watch of Misa, and while his life trajectory might've been closer to what Mikami enjoyed with the death note, it would not have been even half as fun after years of doing the same shtick, basically unchallenged by anyone and having no truly riveting presence to make the burdens worth it.