Chapter Text
Fourteen Days Before.
“Hey, Light! You got the food?” Matsuda asks cheerily.
The words reverberate through Light’s skull as he pulls his coat tighter around his body. He hopes all L can deduce from the gesture is that he’s cold.And he is cold, a slow, penetrating cold that threads through him until it seems his bones might rattle inside his skin, an ache rather than a shiver and impossible to shake, dripping wet from the downpour outside; a downpour with the persistence and excess of the Genesis flood.
Light, who believes in no deities beyond himself and, reluctantly, shinigami, finds himself with a sudden appreciation for chapters six to nine of the Book of Genesis. Having seen that the earth was corrupt and rife with violence, God employed a flood to return the world to its pre-creation state, to destroy what He had made. Light, though usually unwilling to attribute merit to the schemes of others, considers that God had the right idea there. Unfortunately, even that divine intervention proved insufficient, because the world remains rotten to its core.
“Eh, no. My apologies, Matsuda. They were closed,” he says, and though he keeps his voice even, the apology drags across his throat with a roughness that catches him off guard, as if the words have skimmed a place already scraped raw.
L lifts his head at once, the precision of the movement almost mechanical, and Light holds himself still beneath the weight of those tunnel-black eyes, eyes so dark they seem to hollow the space between them, and a gaze so focused it feels less like observation and more like an violation he has already survived once tonight.
Perhaps he can attribute the croak in his voice to the early symptoms of a viral infection. It is unseasonably cold even for October and he is shivering, soaked through to the skin, which will satisfy his father and the other task force members who would readily blame any decline in his health on exposure to the elements.
After a lifetime of being chastised by his mother for neglecting to wear a coat, he knows most people subscribe to the comforting but incorrect belief that cold weather itself causes illness. It is a pleasant fiction, simple and domestic, the sort of explanation that keeps mothers busy and children obedient.
L would, of course, see through it immediately, constructing some immaculate line of reasoning that linked a hoarse voice to Kira with infuriating ease, tracing symptoms the way other men trace fingerprints. But even L would have to concede that correlation exists between cold air and influenza transmission, between reduced vitamin D levels in winter months and immune system efficacy.
Correlation does not equal causation, naturally, but correlation presented with sufficient composure becomes persuasive.
Light has never needed to feign illness, having never required an excuse to avoid school, responsibility, or anything else that might dull the sheen of his reputation, yet he is confident he could reproduce the symptoms of a rhinovirus with near-clinical precision for as long as necessary. The dryness in his throat is already helpful and the faint tremor in his hands needs no rehearsal whatsoever.
He needs distance after tonight, and the most efficient method is to frame that distance as courtesy, to insist that he does not wish to spread an infection to the task force, to reference current World Health Organization guidance on airborne droplets with the appropriate level of restraint and civic-minded concern.
He would appear conscientious rather than evasive, fatigued rather than strategic, and in the end Light ensures that even his defensive mechanisms uphold the flawless image he spends his life curating.
“Oh. That’s okay, Light, maybe they’ll be open again tomorrow,” Matsuda says, unsuccessfully concealing his disappointment.
They will be open tomorrow. Sugo Italianio, which claims to make the best pizza in Tokyo, operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, a business model Light has always regarded with mild suspicion because he cannot imagine who chooses pizza at eight in the morning. The economics seem questionable at best; electricity at that hour must be ruinous and staffing even worse, yet somehow the place never falters, its queues stretching down the pavement every evening as though the city has collectively agreed to ignore basic arithmetic.
He has half convinced himself it is a front for something, though he has never taken the time to decide what, yet it remains reliably open for all but one circumstance: the Italian national football team. If an important match is on, the restaurant simply declares a personal holiday, followed by a brief period of mourning should Italy lose.
Matsuda knows this as well as anyone, considering he introduced the entire task force to the place with the enthusiasm of a man introducing them to high culture, and Light makes a mental note to check the fixtures later. If Italy is playing tonight, he might have an excuse ready-made for him, although judging by the way the evening has unfolded so far, he doubts fortune intends to align itself with his plans. Still, it is a possibility worth confirming; even the smallest detail could help stabilise the story he is building, and Light has never allowed himself the luxury of ignoring an available safeguard.
“Perhaps,” Light says, allowing a faint smile, “although given I am starting to feel unwell, soup is probably the wiser choice. Pizza might be a little ambitious for a while.” He delivers it lightly but the ease is intentional, the joke less about humour than about directing the conversation exactly where he needs it to go.
“You should have worn a warmer coat, Light,” his father scolds.
Light nearly rolls his eyes at the predictability of it, at the comfortable futility of parental logic; it would not have mattered if he had wrapped himself in a snowsuit, but his father's unknowing implication drives a thin blade of guilt through him all the same. Regardless, his flesh would have been exposed to the biting air, assaulted by battering raindrops and unwanted hands. A thicker coat might only have offered a heavier shield for the evidence he is so carefully concealing beneath it.
He draws the sodden fabric tighter around himself, the slight shift of his hips sends pain rippling upward through his body and he inhales sharply.
L’s eyes narrow.
“Are you quite well, Light?” L muses, twirling his fork between the branches of his spindly pale fingers — an idle gesture that never feels idle.
Light swallows with difficulty as he watches the movement and makes a note to mention a sore throat tomorrow. His stomach turns in quiet protest. Since regaining his memories following the exposure of Yotsuba and Higuchi (which of course he had absolutely nothing to do with, thank you very much Ryuzaki) he tries not to dwell too long on the thoughts he entertained during his abdication of the Death Note. Without his memories he had no reason to hate L, no reason to want him dead.
And despite that climactic moment of anagnorisis in which his true identity was restored to him, everything he thought about L when he did not know any better remains painfully ingrained, as if those old impressions had rooted themselves into the bone and refused to be dislodged by revelation or circumstance. The fluid movements of L’s fingers are not lost on him; they never were, even in those weeks of enforced proximity when he was naïve enough to let curiosity masquerade as something warmer.
Unfortunately, the implication turns his stomach and had he not already emptied its contents — and perhaps its lining, if the burn in his gut is any indication — across the rain-slick alleyway, he is certain he would be vomiting neatly onto his own shoes.
“’m fine, Ryuzaki. There’s really no need for concern,,” Light says with the quiet zeal of a martyr, fully aware that the tone will irritate L, “like I said, I think I might be coming down with something.” He adds a dry cough with calculated restraint.
“Perhaps you have caught a cold out there in the rain,” L replies, voice mild and therefore worse, “you should listen to your father in the future.”
Light glowers, aware that L knows perfectly well this is not how things work. L also knows his father’s comment about wearing a warmer coat will grate, that the irritation will twist through him before he suppresses it, neatly hidden before it ever reaches his expression. L will read that restraint as filial piety, a son too disciplined to contradict a parent in public, which is not untrue, though it is far from the whole explanation.
The floor feels unreliable beneath him, its steadiness thrown into doubt by the lingering cold in his body. A scatter of ice-prick tingles collects in his fingers as numb skin meets the overheated air of the conference room, the sensation drifting close enough to pain that it distracts him with each shift of weight. Where his spine meets his tailbone a dull, insistent throb rises and falls with his breathing, a rhythm that threatens to gather force if he gives it any attention at all.
Light considers allowing it. Allowing the Genesis flood to pour from his eyes, allowing whatever fragile scaffolding he has erected around himself to dissolve beneath its weight — perhaps it would return him to his original state, untouched, unviolated, cleansed. What better ritual than the holy tears of a God? He appreciates the symmetry even as he rejects the theology. He does not believe in the Christian God, he does not believe in the Genesis flood, and tonight he is not entirely convinced he believes in himself.
This is why he does not rise to his father’s remark. It is why he resists the bait L has set for him, because L knows exactly what he is doing by echoing paternal misinformation in that calm, needling way. It is meant to vex him, to widen whatever cracks already run beneath the surface, to see if something unruly will break free.
Perhaps L expects him to snap, to reveal something feral beneath the civility, to confess in tone if not in words. But L underestimates Light’s capacity to masquerade as someone completely composed, completely sane, even when every part of him feels as though it is dragging itself back from an edge he has not yet named.
“Perhaps,” Light curls his lip as he surrenders, if L takes this admission of defeat as an indicator of guilt he finds he lacks the capacity to care, “I must’ve forgotten my umbrella, how careless of me.”
“Quite, particularly because we watched the news together this morning and you were present for the weather forecast, you really should pay more attention in the future, Light.”
If Light were the sort of person who fell victim to clichés he would have begun his internal retelling of the night’s events with it was a dark and stormy night, a line so embarrassingly on the nose that even he, under considerable strain, cannot quite bring himself to use it unironically.
It was dark and cold and violently wet outside, ferocious winds tearing through the streets just as the meteorologist had predicted, but it had not been like that when he left headquarters and in his haste to taste even the faintest semblance of freedom from L’s watchful, accusatory stare he had genuinely forgotten the forecast. Or perhaps chosen to forget it, because the promise of rain feels abstract when one is desperate for air.
The storm had been sprung upon him with all the suddenness of a tsunami or an attack from behind, and the pathetic fallacy is not wasted on him as the downpour continues with a relentlessness so theatrical he almost expects a divine cue hidden somewhere in the thunder.
He cannot tell whether the building is truly shifting under the wind or whether it is only his unsteady body answering to delayed shock, although neither explanation offers much comfort. Skyscrapers are built to move, their steel frames engineered to flex so the structure survives pressure rather than shatter beneath it, and the logic is uncomfortably apt; rigidity is what breaks.
Light had believed he was designed better than this, hardened enough to withstand any strain, balanced enough to stay upright through whatever conditions he faced, precise and unyielding in the way a proof holds firm against contradiction. If he is faltering now, then there must have been a flaw somewhere in the architecture, a crack buried deep in the foundation or a quiet rot in the walls that has been waiting for the smallest shift to reveal how weak the beams have been all along.
He is crumbling like the ruins of a temple, wrestling with morality and humanity and humiliation while standing before his most formidable adversary, and he can only hope that enough paint has been smeared across the fractures in his composure to preserve the façade. He hopes the lighting in the conference room is forgiving. He hopes L, for once, mistakes cosmetic repair for structural soundness. He hopes the tremor in his posture reads as cold rather than devastation, that the tilt of his spine suggests nothing more than fatigue, that the storm outside draws L’s attention away from the one gathering beneath Light’s ribs.
Because if L looks too closely, if he peers through the scaffolding with that cataclysmic precision he reserves for the guilty, he will see the whole architecture listing, and Light does not know if he would collapse entirely or find the strength to keep standing.
“Well, they don’t call you the world’s greatest detective for nothing, Ryuzaki,” Light says, maintaining a level warmth pitched precisely for the task force’s benefit while shaping the undercurrent so L hears the challenge for what it is, “I think I ought to head to bed now.”
“It’s still early,” L jabs, as though the hour can be bent by scrutiny alone.
“Perhaps, but I don’t feel well and an early night would be sensible if I intend to be fully functional tomorrow. You wouldn’t want me working at anything less than my best, would you, Ryuzaki?” Light replies in a tone calibrated so his father hears nothing but diligence, the careful performance he reaches for whenever he needs the room to see exactly what he wants them to see.
“I think you’re avoiding us.”
“Hardly,” Light answers, a scoff shaped with just enough disdain to seem unbothered.
“First you suggest take-out pizza for dinner, which is unusual for someone who regulates his diet with the same precision he applies to everything else, and who rarely deviates from three balanced meals prepared at consistent times. However, the choice conveniently allowed you to leave the building alone. Then you return without it and immediately request to withdraw to your room; you are avoiding us, or perhaps just avoiding me.”
“Whilst I admit I’m happy to have some distance between us after being handcuffed to you for weeks, my desire for pizza and my impending head cold have nothing to do with you. Not everything is about you, Ryuzaki.”
L looks unconvinced. He lowers his gaze to the slice of strawberry cake on his delicate plate and spears it with the tines of his fork. The scrape of metal on bone china slices straight through Light’s nerves with a violence disproportionate to the act. The sound fractures through him and splinters into older echoes: the rasp of a belt unbuckling, the dry choke of denim against brick, the thunderous crack of cranial bone meeting an alley wall.
L chews with his mouth open and swallows without hesitation, as though etiquette has never applied to him, as though optics are an unnecessary concern in whatever private order he believes himself to inhabit, and Light feels a scream coil low in his throat with no path upward, trapped by the same composure he forces over every other fracture.
“Well goodnight then,” Light says, bowing his head to his father and the rest of the task force, his neck stiff and aching in a way unrelated to posture.
“Goodnight son, sleep well.”
“Hope you feel better, Light!”
“Thank you, Matsuda.”
L doesn’t speak. To the untrained eye he appears more absorbed in the strawberry perched neatly atop his cake than in anything else in the room, as though sugar might hold his attention more securely than the conversation he has already dissected.
Light, however, recognises the faint furrow settling between L’s brows, the almost imperceptible tightening at the corners of his eyes, each microscopic shift signalling that his mind has seized upon something. L is always thinking, the cogs of his brain grinding ceaselessly, his engineering flawless to a fault. He never stops, never rests, and Light knows this intimately from the weeks they spent handcuffed together.
He remembers the shallow, fractured sleep of those nights, the way the harsh glow of L’s laptop spilled across the room in cold, surgical light while keys clicked in erratic bursts that nonetheless followed some inscrutable rhythm only L could understand. L’s mind is compulsive, a lattice of rushing thoughts and interlocking patterns that appear chaotic to anyone else but resolve into crystalline order for him.
And they truly do not call him the world’s greatest detective for nothing. When he narrows his focus onto a single thread of reasoning, when a hypothesis begins to take shape behind his eyes, his expression shifts almost imperceptibly — the narrowing gaze, the twitch of tension along his brow, the sharpened stillness of someone isolating the weakest link in a chain.
When L is calculating something he looks exactly as he does now, Light hopes that whatever he is analysing has nothing to do with him, though he knows this to be almost impossible.
***
Fourteen Days Before.
Light knows the building is riddled with cameras, knows L could be watching every step of his return, analysing posture and pace with the same calm precision he applies to crime scenes, storing even the smallest inconsistency as potential evidence. Walking normally hurts far more than giving in to the limp pressing at the edge of his control, yet a limp is exactly the kind of deviation L notices and Light refuses to hand him even a single loose thread.
L has no proof, but he has already decided Light is Kira, and without evidence his certainty remains an irritation rather than a conviction. The fake rules Light placed in the Death Note should shield him, and although nothing involving L is ever uncomplicated, the principles still favour Light; there is no irrefutable evidence against him.
Even so, if L senses anything unusual in Light tonight, he will begin to pry, not with questions at first but with that slow, inevitable pressure he applies whenever he detects a fracture. Light cannot risk fractures. So he keeps the steady rhythm of someone entirely uninjured, each step measured, each movement controlled even as pain shoots upward through him and shakes the fragile framework of composure he is trying to maintain.
When he enters his room he tells himself he can relax. His father had argued relentlessly for the privacy of this space, insisting it was the least he deserved after the thirteen-day rule cleared him. So Light knows there are no cameras here; that knowledge should ease him yet the moment he switches on the lamp the shadows leap across the walls in thin splintered shapes, gathering in the corners with a willingness that unsettles him; each one too ready to echo the silhouette of the man who dragged him into the alley, as though the room itself is waiting for its chance to replay the night with perfect, looping fidelity.
He turns on the shower, raises the heat to the highest temperature he can stand, and steps into the thickening steam. In theory he should no longer be cold. The water burns across the skin of his arms and legs until feeling returns in sharp waves that border on relief and punishment at the same time, yet the warmth never reaches the weight lodged beneath his sternum, a dense pressure that threatens to rise into his throat whenever his thoughts are given even a moment to slip free.
Light scrubs his skin, hard. He washes his hair and his body with practised precision. He watches the water run red around his feet as though observing someone else’s contamination.
Then he scrubs again, and again, because repetition is orderly and order implies control, and if he can reduce this to a sequence—wash, rinse, repeat—he might survive the night without rupturing.
Time blurs in the thickening steam until he grows faint with heat. Only then does he step out, letting whatever forensic remnants remain slip obediently down the drain. The mirror is fogged which is a small mercy; he doubts he could look at himself without splintering in some humiliating, irreversible way. His arms are flushed red from the ferocity of his scrubbing and even the microfibre towel feels punitive against his raw skin, grazing it with an abrasive drag that suggests judgement more than hygiene.
A dull ache pulses beneath the left side of his skull, spreading outward in time with each heartbeat. He remembers the crack of bone against brick and the sudden burst of white that swallowed his vision, the brief and humiliating lapse where his thoughts simply failed to form. If it bruises he will need a story, not a list of possibilities but a chain that fits neatly together: influenza leading to vomiting, vomiting leading to dehydration, dehydration leading to fainting. A progression so ordinary it practically writes itself; he works through the steps as he dresses, adjusting each with the same instinctive precision he once applied to mathematical proofs, smoothing the sequence until it feels seamless enough to survive inspection.
He runs his hands lightly over his skin, tracing the places where tenderness gathers and may bloom darker by morning. Most bruises will be hidden beneath his clothes; he has always preferred long sleeves, a habit that now feels practical rather than aesthetic, a small mercy in a night that has offered none.
Climbing into bed he allows himself the brief idea that a night’s sleep might let him move on, that he might fold the incident into some distant compartment and return his attention to work and consequences that actually matter, yet the thought dissolves the moment his body settles against the mattress. He turns from one side to the other, each shift scraping across something bruised or tender, and he discovers with a kind of bleak amusement that there is no position, no arrangement of limbs, that does not spark pain from some hidden fault line beneath the skin. Closing his eyes proves worse, because the moment darkness settles behind them the alleyway blooms in perfect, merciless detail.
The sound of heavy rain battering the pavement like a living thing. The stink of cigarette smoke and stale beer clinging to the air, the sweet rot of discarded pizza turning his stomach even before terror had the chance to. The grip of cold, damp hands fastening around his shoulders and slamming him into brick so violently his spine had rung with the impact. The metallic tang flooding his mouth where he had bitten through his own lip. The sight of blood smeared across his palms as he’d dragged his trousers back into place, wiping it away on the lining of his coat with a steadiness that feels ghoulish now, as though he had been watching himself through glass.
He thinks he screamed. He must have. Pathetic little sounds torn out of him and devoured by desolate streets that refused to echo them back, the sobs that followed swallowed just as efficiently, as if the city itself were conspiring to mute him, to render the moment unrecorded and therefore unreal.
Even wrapped tightly in his duvet Light shivers as the sound returns, the low taunting snarl his attacker breathed against him, a noise lodged somewhere beneath bone and nerve, surfacing without warning and dragging a cold rush across his skin. He tells himself this is why the world needs Kira, why justice requires something far harsher than courts and empathy, because men like that move through life certain they will never face consequence, protected by anonymity and the broad, uncaring sweep of the world.
The thought fires through him with a heat that feels almost clean. He wants to find the man and kill him, not with the restrained distance of the Death Note but with his own hands, to strip him out of existence so completely that even memory would fail to hold his outline. The clarity of the fantasy startles him in its sharpness, and he forces himself to acknowledge what it would cost him.
Hunting a man who has no connection to the Kira investigation would invite scrutiny he cannot withstand, scrutiny that would undo every step he has taken to maintain the image he depends on. He cannot explain a private vendetta without unravelling the persona he has built, and confession is a luxury reserved for people who survive being truly seen. Light knows he will not, cannot, allow himself that kind of exposure.
The thought of his father knowing what had happened to him leaves him consumed with a novel strain of vulnerability, one that feels more destabilising than the physical pain itself; truly he doesn’t know how his father would react. He is an experienced police officer who has encountered cases of sexual assault throughout his career, has interviewed victims, documented injuries, spoken in measured tones about trauma and procedure.
The police are supposed to be trained in empathetic practice, in how to support victims after a traumatic incident, that is the language used in training manuals and press conferences, though that is not to say they always employ those skills. Light knows better than anyone else that the system is broken.
But this is his father. A model of professional restraint, the kind of officer Light imagines he would trust if he were someone else’s son, calm and procedural and quietly protective. But he is his father’s son, and it is one thing for his father to manage victims at a professional distance and another entirely for him to find his own child catalogued in that category, another case to be processed, pitied and placed in a file.
Besides, Light has no wish to report anything. He has already removed every trace of the man from his skin with a precision that bordered on desperation, and he cannot bear the thought of any detail being preserved for evidence, labelled and photographed and locked away. Without DNA he would be left only with his statement and an injury that any sufficiently callous defendant could claim resulted from rough but consensual sex, an argument he can already hear delivered with confidence and shrugged sympathy.
Not that his case would ever reach a court of law, because Light does not have a name or a face to accuse, and the irony of that is not lost on him.
Light’s head swirls and a wave of motion sickness rises despite the fact that he is lying flat, the room tilting in a slow and disorienting drift. His thoughts roam like unwanted hands, dragging over every surface of his mind as he imagines the faces of his father, Matsuda, Aizawa, and Mogi if the truth were ever to be revealed.
Their expressions twist and reconfigure into grotesque parodies of themselves — disgust curdling into disbelief, disbelief into anger, anger into pity — cycling through each possibility with the exaggerated theatricality of a nightmare rehearsal. Pity is the worst. Disgust he could withstand, anger he could deflect, but pity would settle, would cling, would mark him.
He isn’t sure how L would react, and that uncertainty festers. L is strange and unpredictable in the most calculated ways, a creature who approaches humanity the way one approaches a puzzle: by touch only when necessary. Like his father, L has a lifetime of proximity to criminal cases, but unlike his father, he maintains a kind of clinical distance from victims, an intellectual remove that masquerades as objectivity. If he feels empathy at all, Light has never seen it.
So perhaps he would not care, would continue to lick sugar from his fingers and shovel cake into his mouth while reducing Light’s confession to a probability ratio. He considers, briefly, that L might not believe him at all, might decide the timing is too convenient and treat it as another calculated attempt to appear innocent, because people hesitate to call a victim a killer. The thought barely forms before Light dismisses it. L would accuse him regardless, would walk straight past whatever social rule should stop him, because compassion has never shaped L’s behaviour and never will.
What chills him more is the possibility that L might think him weak, that L might look at him differently, that some quiet, ruinous softness might replace the grudging respect that has been the constant thread between them. Light cannot tolerate the idea of becoming small in L’s eyes, of being handled with caution, spoken to in gentler tones, evaluated as something fragile rather than something strong. When he imagines the task force’s faces he sees them shift into masks of pity, and the thought sends a tight ache through his stomach as if he is bracing for a blow he cannot dodge.
If he becomes another victim he becomes the kind of person L investigates but never esteems, another file in a cabinet, another tragedy to be documented and set aside, another reminder of a world cracked enough to demand correction. A world that requires Kira.
He does not like L. He hates him with a completeness he has never afforded anyone else, because L stands in the way not only of Light Yagami but of Kira, of the only workable architecture for the world he intends. Yet hatred is almost a relief, because hatred gives him distance, and distance is something he can control.
When Light had sacrificed his memories he had admired L’s mind instead of resenting it. He had been able to imagine a future in which he surpassed him openly, becoming the world’s greatest detective through intellect and discipline alone, a victory earned rather than forced.
In that imagined future L had not needed to die for Light to triumph; he could have been outthought, outpaced, beaten in a way that still allowed respect. Light had even permitted himself, quietly and with a degree of embarrassment, to notice the elegance of L’s hands as he worked, the long fingers moving across the keyboard, the pale lines of vein rising as he handled evidence, the steady, effortless motion of someone thinking faster than anyone else in the room.
He squeezes his eyes shut now and the image warps instantly. The elegance disintegrates. Slender fingers thicken. Clean nails yellow and split. Pale skin darkens, bruises, coarsens. Calloused hands dig into his hips. Fingers fumble at his belt with brutal impatience. Nails bite. A fist locks in his hair and wrenches his head back before dragging it forward into cold brick.
The shift hits so abruptly that Light lurches off the bed and stumbles toward the bathroom, barely reaching the toilet before he vomits. The bile climbs his throat in a hot, acidic rush, tearing out of him as though it has been waiting behind his ribs for permission, and his body convulses again and again until he is left heaving over the bowl, coughing and spluttering with nothing left to give.
His ribs throb with each retch and he almost laughs, a wet and miserable sound, because only a few hours earlier he had calmly constructed an illness that would leave him vomiting through the night, and now his body, obedient as ever, seems intent on fulfilling the script. His stomach twists once more and forces up a thin wash of bitterness, the taste clinging to his tongue with the persistence of punishment.
He laughs, or at least he thinks he is laughing, the sound thin and fractured in his throat. He cannot quite distinguish it from the sob that follows, because hot salt floods his eyes and suddenly he is heaving again, choking on bile and breath and something that feels dangerously close to hysteria.
The tears come slowly at first, an inconvenient leak he could almost ignore, and then they gather momentum until they spill freely, relentless and ungovernable—like the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao Dam in China, like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, like the Genesis flood.