Fanfic / We All Need A Hero

“Seventeen-year-old Light Yagami is destined to change the world someday. Everyone knows that. And Light’s little sister Sayu will make sure he gets his chance, no matter what it takes.”

"We All Need A Hero" is a Death Note fanfic AU Created by TheWhiteDeath where Sayu Yagami finds the Death Note instead of Light.

The fanfic was first published on January 8th 2023 on ArchiveOfOurOwn and can be found Here

We All Need A Hero contains examples of:

• Age-Gap Romance: Sayu’s and Misa’s relationship, with the former being 14 and the latter being 19.
• Anti-Villain: Unlike Light in canon, Sayu never develops a god complex while using the Death Note to kill criminals and tries to pick the most peaceful and merciful deaths for them. She's only killing criminals because she believes that eliminating crime will allow her father and brother to achieve a better future. She is even willing to acknowledge that her efforts are ultimately not working out after she inevitably gets the police on her tail, only continuing with the killing because she legitimately believes she can help create a better world and because of the persistent threat of Ryuk writing her name in it if she were to ever stop. Finally, unlike Light, she doesn't touch criminals already in prison or who show signs of rehabilitation.
• Armor-Piercing Response / Armor-Piercing Question: Light doles out dozens of these by the second when Sayu confesses about being Kira to him in a bid for his help…only for Sayu to turn it around on him and get his help
• Ascended Extra: By default from the premise alone, Sayu Yagami is one.
• Big Brother Instinct: Light has this in spades for Sayu like in canon, genuinely getting angry at L when he points to the possibility of Kira being Sayu. It’s to point of him actively lying to Kazue and driving her to tears in order to protect Sayu when Kazue puts together her being Kira. He even goes as far as to become Sayu’s ally in her Kira crusade (after a bit of coaxing/gaslighting).
• Big Brother Worship: Sayu idolizes her brother and views him as a better person than she is. She believes in him so strongly that wanting a better future for him instead of the stressful life of a police officer is one of her primary motivations for becoming Kira in this universe.
• Blackmail: In order for Raye to give the FBI Agents names, the Kira puppet Sayu uses threatens the life of his fiancée Naomi and everyone he knows.
  • Tsuru somewhat does this to Sayu by asking for help with her English homework in exchange for not gossiping about Sayu's relationship with Misa Amane. Sayu's become well-qualified to help with English studies since she's been excelling in the subject after months of navigating English-language Kira forum boards to choose her victims.
• Bluff the Imposter: Shortly after Light encounters L at To-Oh University, Sayu gets a phone call from Mogi pretending to be L. Light had just told her about his encounter with someone claiming to be L, so Sayu smells a rat and tests the caller by mentioning how Light had wanted to kick off their joint freshman address instead of finishing it. Mogi responds by blaming the university, which confirms Sayu's suspicions that she's talking to an imposter L because Light had actually told her the exact opposite. She hangs up on him in short order.
• Break the Cutie: Poor Sayu, her whole motivation is wanting to make a better world for her brother and father to stay with their family, since the emergence of Kira, their family has drifted further and further apart, and she genuinely cares about doing the right thing no matter if she views herself as monster because of it. In fact the reason she didn’t let Ryuk take the Death Note Back in chapter 1 was because he considered giving it to Light.
  • Also the fact that chapter 8 reveals that she was pretty ready to kill herself once Kazue came close to the truth about her rather than face her family for the monster she is.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: It's implied that Sayu's become so accustomed to prodding Light into doing her homework for her that she's had little reason to display her true potential in school. But once she starts her career as Kira and can only rely on herself to keep ahead of L and the police, Sayu's forced to dig deep and draw upon reserves of determination and skill even she didn't know she had. Her plan to thwart the FBI agents is actually more complex than what Light attempted in canon, since she needed to insert extra steps to find and expose the agents' identities without killing them or incriminating herself in the process.
• Casual Kink: Downplayed: In chapter 7, Sayu’s friend Tsuru makes a comment about how them being front row at the Misa-Misa concert; that they can squeeze her feet, with Sayu jokingly commenting how she didn’t know she was into that sort of thing.
• Closet Key: Misa asking Sayu to start dating her is what makes Sayu start genuinely considering girls attractive.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Ryuk is a Shinigami that can kill anyone by just knowing their name and is the primary cause of the conflict within Death Note. He also likes to play Mario party with Sayu when no one is home.
• Dramatic Irony: This Fic is full of it especially when considering canon.
  • Firstly is Sayu proclaiming Light is a better person than she is on a few occasions, when canon shows he is a far more sociopathic and brutal Kira than she is.
  • Secondly is Sochiro assuring himself that his children can’t be mass killers and if they are then he never really knew them at all. Sayu is Kira in this Fic and Light is Kira in Death Note.
  • And Thirdly Sayu’s motivation for being Kira is so her family doesn’t drift apart from Sochiro over working on cases, Kira’s emergence does nothing but drift her family apart with Sochiro working more than ever to catch his own Daughter.
  • One of the reason Sayu kept using the Death Note is Ryuk implying that he would give it to Light instead and is generally repulsed by the idea whenever it comes up, not wanting him to be wrapped up in all of it. In chapter 9; Sayu is pushed into a corner by L with his borderline torture of Misa Amane, as result goes to Light to help her by revealing she is Kira, showing him the Death Note and thus wrapping him in her mess.
• Gaslighting: Light is quick to dismiss Kazue’s claims for believing Sayu to be Kira by lying to her, dismissing her beliefs as fresh emotional wounds and being embittered from their break up that she would drag Sayu into it.
  “We only broke up yesterday, the feelings are still fresh,” Light was saying. “You’re still seeing things from that lens, reaching conclusions that justify your-”, “But Sayu is a far better person than I am. She doesn’t deserve to get dragged into this. If you’re so embittered you can’t see that, then you’re not the woman I thought you were.”, “So thank you. Thank you for proving my point,” Light finished, his voice cold as a dead star. “You’re not family, Kazue. You never were.”
  • In Chapter 9 Sayu of all people does this to light convincing him that he always knew she was Kira deep down, that he unintentionally helped her because he truly believes what Kira is doing is right, that he’s complicit and has just as much blood on his hands as she does to join her.
• Godzilla Threshold: Under the ultimatum of Rem killing her unless Sayu can figure out how to save Misa from L, Sayu decides to use her trump card…and go to her big brother for help
• In Spite of a Nail: L still tricks Kira into revealing themselves to the world on TV while pinning down their rough location; albeit with a different method than in canon.
  • Taskforce search still narrows down to two families because of the FBI agents that were targeted.
  • Misa Amane still gets arrested due to forensic evidence she left on the second Kira Tapes.
• Jerkass Has a Point: While Light certainly isn’t helping his case by lying to Kazue, his defensiveness of Sayu makes a lot of sense, especially for those who may have a younger sibling. Also factoring in while Kazue’s perception skills are good, the proof she has against Sayu is sketchy and minimal at best as if they here to added in a court off law, the case would likely be dismissed by the court due to a lack of evidence.
• Knight Templar Big Brother: Inverted. Sayu is so aggrieved by the idea of her older brother wasting his incredible potential on an unrewarding police career that she's willing to embark on a one-girl war against crime to prevent it. As she tells Ryuk, she'll kill as many criminals as it takes to keep Light from throwing his life away like Sayu feels their father is doing.
• Mama Didn't Raise No Criminal: Much like it was canon, with the addition of Kazue this time round. When L brings up Sayu Yagami being a Kira suspect he gets given a lot more push back from it in comparison to Light, noting that he is going to need some serious evidence when broaching her as a potential suspect to the task force.
• Manipulative Bitch: Like Light, this is Sayu's primary skill to combat L, and potentially even more crucial for her because she lacks the raw intellect to compete with L and she knows it. Sayu herself notes that she and Light devised an arsenal of conversational tactics and ploys while growing up together. She uses these tricks to coax classified information out of one of her dad's subordinates by pretending her inquiry was driven by harmless youthful indignation, to sway the majority of the NPA into abandoning L by convincing them he respects the police less than Kira does and to turn an unexpected phone call from the task force intended to rattle her back on the caller, tricking them into revealing they were an imposter L and not the real detective.
  • Even when innocent in this universe, Light still demonstrates being one. Most noteworthy being how he emotionally blackmailed Kazue when she brought her theory about Sayu being Kira to him and flat out lying to her face to debunk her theory more effectively, gaslighting her argument into nothing but her being bitter and slandering Sayu in order to spite him. Coldly saying she isn’t family because of it, driving Kazue to tears.
• Meet Cute: Sayu first encounters Misa Amane by coincidence. Her classmates invited her to a Misa-Misa concert in Roppongi, and because they arrived early enough to be standing in the front row, Misa was able to spot Sayu in the crowd and recognize her as Kira. Misa slips Sayu a message inviting her backstage once the show is over using a piece of her Death Note to tell Sayu that she's the Second Kira.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Misa belatedly hits this several months after her News Station attack, realizing that the people she killed were completely innocent and probably had families of their own and completely freaks out over this.
• O.C. Stand-in: Deputy-Director Kitamura's daughter was only mentioned in passing as a possible Kira suspect being investigated by Mogi in canon. In this story she gets a name and joins the main cast. Kazue Kitamura is a classmate of Light's who's helped the NPA with forensics work in the past. She and Light start dating as they begin university together, which leads to both of them getting L's personal attention as his top two Kira suspects. Kazue reluctantly joins the task force after the Sakura TV incident to help examine the Second Kira's tapes for clues.
• Oh, Crap!: Sayu has this reaction when she gets tricked by L on the TV broadcast to the point of her almost relinquishing ownership of the Death Note before composing herself.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When L finds out that Sayu tricked Mogi into revealing he was a fake L calling her by phone. The normally calm L could barely suppress his rage as Mogi notes by phone no less, being taken off guard that Kira could seriously be her.
• Passed in Their Sleep: This is Sayu's calling card as Kira. She tries to minimize the pain her victims feel by always specifying that they fall asleep before dying of a heart attack. This show of sympathy even for her victims underscores how differently she approaches being Kira compared to Light, who seemed to enjoy causing suffering.
• Point of Divergence: With Sayu receiving the Death Note several things change.
  • Raye Penber and the rest of the FBI agents aren’t killed as Sayu actively avoids killing innocent officers.
  • As a direct result of the previous change, Naomi Misora's death is avoided as she doesn’t need to avenge her fiance's death. Furthermore, she wouldn’t have the theory of Kira being able to kill outside of a heart attack, because Sayu learned Raye's identity through less dramatic means than a violent busjacking. Whether she may have a role in the story has yet to be seen.
• Sadistic Choice: For Sayu, her choices are either use the Death Note regularly and continue killing or give up ownership of the Death Note, loosing all memories of it and possibly have Ryuk give the notebook to someone much worse or maybe even her brother. And she can’t just not use at all as Ryuk expects her to use it or he’ll write her name in his book. One way or the other her choice will effect the world.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Kazue Kitamura has a moment of this when she figures out Sayu Kira’s motivation in her head.
  Piece by painful piece, it all fell into place. Kazue could now recognize Kira’s actions as those of a lonely and neglected child, trying desperately to fix the world so Daddy could come home to them.
• The Casanova: Sayu seems to being showing signs of this as unlike her brother Light she genuinely enjoys dating Misa and actively goes out of her way to be a good girlfriend. She unintentionally starts eyeing up Kazue before mentally bashing herself for having such thoughts about her brother’s girlfriend, and her friend Tsuru showed some possible signs of crushing on her, like making a comment about imagining Sayu in Misa-Misa’s revealing goth getup.
• Thicker Than Water: Seemingly played straight with Light regarding Sayu. He refuses to consider the possibility of her being Kira at all when the subject gets brought up by Kazue, while Light suspects Kazue despite abundant evidence to the contrary and their families being close friends with one another through their respective fathers' work relationship. This hurts Kazue greatly and they break up.
• Uptown Girl: Misa being a Pop-star/Actress/Model is considerably more wealthy than Sayu, always trying to provide for her, such as on there first date, where she takes Sayu to a fancy restaurants and casually pay’s for the both of them. When her family and Kitamura’s go to the same restaurant for a get together, she orders the same meal from last time and is embarrassed when it’s the most expensive one ordered on the table.
• We Can Rule Together: Sayu uses a Kira-controlled puppet to deliver a speech in this vein in order to convince the NPA's officers to take her side and abandon L. Her speech causes much division within the force, leading to most detectives dropping the case.
  • Does this again in Chapter 9 to even greater effect when she manipulates Light to join her crusade as Kira
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Sayu main motivation for becoming Kira was creating a better world so her Dad could come home to see them and her brother won’t disappear from their lives like their Father has by pursuing a career in the law. And even when she states that it’s failing, Sayu still continues to be Kira because she wants to create a better future for the weak and downtrodden of the world. Even the violent criminals that seek rehabilitation.
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: The other half of Sayu's motivation to become Kira is her concern for the long hours her dad works as a police chief, and the effect it's having on her mother, who suffers Soichiro's neglect in stoic silence. Her greatest fear is of Light getting so caught up in police work that he disappears from her and Sachiko's lives the way Soichiro has. Sayu herself even lampshades this in the story's opening lines.
  If only Dad had come home more often, Sayu Yagami reflected, she might not have turned out like this. Sure, that's what all the serial killers say. But none of them had killed as many people as she had.