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She was like a shooting star; like a fireball crashing to earth. She burned through the air screaming, and the sound cut off like a gunshot as she hit the ground. The flames lingered, in the leaves, in her flesh.
She did not jump because she wished to die—that was already accomplished. She threw herself over the edge because it was there; because when survival is no longer an option, the body seeks the path of least pain.
The Death Note ordered Misora Naomi to disappear, and disappear she did. The one circumstantial victim of BB's war on L became one of many victims of Kira's war on existence. She could not survive...but nor did she entirely submit. Just as he found it impossible for a prisoner to travel instantly from a Japanese prison cell to Paris, just as he proved it impossible to draw a face one cannot envision, Yagami Light unwittingly, unknowingly proved that it is impossible to stand still and calmly burn to ash.
Because as Misora Naomi and Beyond Birthday could both recount, if one were to find them together, glaring at each other in the Nothingness—burning alive is extraordinarily painful.
***
The air echoes with a high-pitched noise, and the flight of birds. The smoke is acrid. The trees stand testament to a twisting both part of and older than Kira's crusade.
Of all the thousands of people that Kira killed, only a very rare few were allowed to choose the way they died. Misora Naomi was one. Light gave her the honour because he knew she was intelligent; he had heard her reasoning about him, and that she had worked a case in the past with L. She was intelligent, and he was moreso, and so he not only allowed but forced her to take death into her own hands. It was a brilliant move, and one that would have worked out well had L not known her so accurately. Even Light, however, did not know at the time, and never found out, how brilliant, and how cruel a move it was.
Had Light known the whole truth about Misora's case with L, or its conclusion, he would probably have been both a little more serious to start with, and a little more exultant in the end. Light expected the body to disappear for a while—to be found hung in a few months time, or shot in a remote place outside of city limits. Light did not know that Misora Naomi was one of the few people in the world to have witnessed an attempt at self-immolation.
When the Death Note asked its victim how best she could kill herself to ensure that the body would not be found, her mind replied at once that if her body were burned to ash, the job would be done.
***
It was not a pile of ashes on the ground—the fall had extinguished the fire. It was something uglier—something far more reflective of its truth. This burning too had failed though this one, at least, had managed to kill.
There were a number of considerations that had to be made when burning oneself to death, and Misora Naomi had personal experience with most of them. One of the most important conditions, she knew, was that no one must walk in and douse you with water (or spray you white and foamy with a fire extinguisher). So after making the appropriate preparations, she climbed efficiently into her dead fiancee's rented car and left Tokyo. It was a long time since Misora had been in Japan, but she had grown up there, and with the full force of her significant intellect trained on the task, it was not difficult to pinpoint a sufficiently isolated place—the most ideally isolated place, since the note had used a superlative—and drive away from people, away from ears and eyes.
Several hours later, the rent-a-car pulled up in the cigarette-butt end of a road that led nowhere, and stayed there.
***
The death was inevitable—the jump was not. She had never peacefully played her part in their stories. Her final resistance was unconscious, but significant nonetheless.
Misora Naomi's death does not last 40 seconds.
When the road ends she straps the can of gasoline onto her back and walks through the trees, quickly, too quickly. There is no space in her mind for avoiding obstacles, or for registering pain. Everything is death, and death is a space in the centre of the forest where no one will hear her scream, and no one will see her disappear. The rush of wind through treetops, and water flowing somewhere. No sound of traffic. The most isolated place is trees, and cliffs, and treacherous terrain. It is trecking through impenetrable underbrush, heading for nothing. It is a treck no casual passerby would be mad enough to make—a hack and slash through the forest that no follower could accomplish at her speed without the force of a supernatural directive behind them. Even if someone manages to follow her, they will never reach her before it's too late.
It is the perfect suicide, from the woman who would never kill herself.
***
A resistance against Kira, and against his control, for taking her life. A resistance against an older enemy, with an equally false name, for giving her the knowledge to burn this way—he would be devestated, undoubtedly, to know that she had succeeded in burning to death where he had been so viciously prevented.
It is remarkably simple, setting herself on fire. Misora Naomi is not particularly concerned about the forest burning—she has no room left in her mind for that, and it will further conceal the body anyhow, mix her ash with the ash of wood and leaf and creature and make it impossible to identify. She releases the straps holding the can to her back, lifts it off, places it on an even patch of leaves and dirt and faeces. Something scuttles away as she screws off the lid—the smell of gasoline screams danger to everything but her. The pouring itself is a little difficult—it's only a tiny hole, and the can is heavy. But the power of will when fully devoted is exceptional, and it's all too easy to ignore the ache and protest of arms that will soon be gone.
The petrol smells strong, and it makes her skin wet. It makes her clothes stick to her body. It rolls off the leather in drops, and pools on the leaves on the ground, and mixes with the dirt and the droppings.
She has already carefully removed the matches from her jacket pocket so they won't get wet. She is an excellent planner.
A bird calls in the distance. Ants panic and die.
Her feet make individual noises for each step:
1, 2, to the matchbox where she set it aside.
3, 4, back to the spot where the gasoline has pooled, because a puddle on the ground will catch better than the sheen on her skin.
Misora Naomi does not think last thoughts, or make last plans.
Misora Naomi's resolve does not make her strong.
But her thoughts are devoted only to dying in the best way to hide the body. And that makes everything easy.
***
She leaves no evidence for L, no evidence he can use, but she owes him no more than he does her. L would never have fallen for the ID trick, though, and neither would B. She had only seconds to ponder that, but it was enough to want to scream. That scream never made it to her lips, and is long gone by the time a new one tears her open.
Her hand is raised, and her fingers flick out in a movement subconsciously learned—we do not need to think to light a match.
Misora Naomi's hand is covered in petrol.
Petrol, any small child could report, is highly flammable.
The split of high-pitched agony, cracked, unwilled—pain, pain, unconsciousness and pain—the flicker of flame and light and heat and the unimaginable.
When the match hits the pool at her feet, the sound is a little like ripping paper, and as it ripples up her ankles her voice is a nail scratching down a blackboard into a microphone hooked up to an amplifier on top volume.
She was right—a static pool of gasoline catches even better than it does soaking her fingers.
Misora Naomi is burning. Burning up her arm, and up both legs, catching her clothing, catching the acrid liquid drenching her hair.
The pain is unimaginable. The pain is far too great to function. Her whole body, however, is not yet on fire.
And so, while she cannot stop the scream issuing wildly from cracked, wide-stretched lips, she reaches down with the untouched hand and retrieves another match, and lights it too. This hand catches just like the other, and is followed by an arm, which connects to a shoulder, until the fires meet up and consume each other and grow and work their magic.
Forty seconds later, the fire has burned through most of her clothes.
And now, the case notes will never reveal, because no one will ever know, Misora Naomi is on fire. The moisture is burned from her skin, and it dries and withers and separates from fat and muscle. Her flesh is cooked slowly, discolouring, toughening, searing through a vivid, pulsing red to a char-grilled black.
***
She was disgusted by the colours once, or horrified. She cannot see them now, because her eyes are on fire too.
Logically, of course, lighting the second match should not have been possible, nor necessary—a woman burning alive should not be able to light a match, and a woman standing in a pool of petrol will burn regardless. The actions of Misora Naomi, however, belong to the Death Note, and her hands are no longer her own. Misora has always been an independent woman and it is lucky, perhaps, that she is in far too much pain to realise that this has changed. Then again, perhaps it is immaterial. Her mind belongs to the Death Note too.
Fifty seconds later, the directive keeping her glued to the spot cracks (as it cracked with her scream, because she shouldn't scream, shouldn't attract attention, but she can't stop, her body won't stop, the sound won't stop ringing as skin dissolves and heat disintegrates the person who was the infamous cracker of the LA BB Murder Cases and the fiancee of Ray Penber and a woman fighting Kira and a woman, a woman who lived in Japan and lived in the United States and wanted to be a good FBI Agent and wanted to be a good wife and wanted to live).
She runs through the trees wildly, thoughtlessly—her thoughts are forcibly focused on burning faster, hotter, disappearing more thoroughly, though they have no power over the flames. Were mental coherence still possible, they might keep her still, because still is the best way to burn.
But her thoughts are not coherent, not anymore. Her mind is burning too.
And so when she reaches the edge of the cliff—treacherous terrain, discovery highly unlikely—she jumps, and the fire burns all the way down.
A shooting star from the cliffs—a fireball crashing to earth. A burning woman leaping over the edge. A final act of resistance.
***
When she handcuffed him half-conscious, Beyond Birthday knew that she would die young, but not how. Not that she would die the way he'd intended, and not that the same hand would kill them in the end.
200 metres above, the forest burns for miles, a melted gasoline can in the centre.
The one who started the fire is never found.
200 metres below, the half-charred, half smashed-by-impact, red and black remains of Misora Naomi smoke and make the air smell foul. For weeks, no animal comes near. Until the smell fades, and small creatures find meat beneath the ashes, and the last pieces of the woman are carried away.
***
The human whose name is written in this note shall die.
Misora Naomi was one of the very, very few of Kira's victims to be allowed to choose the way she died.
Yagami Light knew she was intelligent, but he never expected her to do so well. Most people have never considered many ways to die. She would shoot herself in a lonely place, he thought. Maybe hang. Most people do not know to think to burn, and the Death Note cannot give knowledge that one does not have from the past.
Somewhere, in the distant nothingness, Beyond Birthday laughed. Revenge, indirect as it was, was sweet.