Metempsychosis
is a Death Note fanfiction by palant1r
After the warehouse, Matsuda wakes up the next morning faced with a second chance. One day to fix everything, one day to build the January 28 he wants. And that day will repeat for as long as it takes to get things right.
He knows that he can't save everyone. But it would be nice if he could just save someone.
OR
Matsuda gets stuck in a time loop and the situation quickly gets worse.
Metempsychosis provides examples of:
- Arbitrary Skepticism: Averted. Everyone Matsuda tells about the time loop believes him pretty quickly, and Gevanni even says that after having accepted Death Notes and shinigami as real he can believe just about anything.
- Ate His Gun: Matsuda, in one of the loops, after impulsively killing Light early in the day.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: In Chapter 13, Matsuda tortures Light for information about some unresolved aspects of the Kira case.
- Cradling Your Kill: In Chapter 11, Light writes Matsuda’s name in his watch while distracting him with a kiss and then holds him while he dies.
- Despair Event Horizon: Matsuda crosses it after discovering that neither stopping Kira without killing Light nor dying himself will end the loop. Time Loop Fatigue quickly sets in after this point.
- Fix Fic: Inverted. In the tags on AO3, the author describes their work as “the opposite of a fix it fic” and “an i can make it worse fic”.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: The basic premise of the story. Matsuda is trapped in a time loop on January 28th, 2010, waking up again on the morning of that day after every time he goes to sleep or dies.
- Hope Spot
- In Chapter 10, Matsuda stays up past midnight and sees the date change over to January 29th with Light still alive and a plan in place to convince him to stop killing permanently. Matsuda believes that this means that the loop has ended and time will progress forward into this hopeful future. The author even teases the audience by naming this chapter “January 29th, 2010” instead of the usual “January 28th”. In the next chapter, when he wakes up and discovers that it’s the 28th again, Matsuda finds himself teetering on the edge of the Despair Event Horizon.
- This leads to a darker version in Chapter 11, when Matsuda dies for the first time and hopes that he won’t come back.
- It Gets Easier: Matsuda, killing Light in several loops, and eventually, Matsuda killing people in general.
- Love Redeems: Matsuda’s goal in Chapters 9 & 10 is to convince Light to run away with him and give up being Kira.
- Murder-Suicide: A temporary time-loop version in Chapter 12. Matsuda impulsively kills Light early in the day, then decides he doesn’t want to have to conceal or explain his actions and kills himself to restart the loop.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Matsuda, after killing the Task Force in chapter 15.It couldn’t end like this. It couldn’t. What had he done? What kind of monster could kill like this, not just once, but over and over and over again? What kind of neurotic evil could work for weeks to kill the same good people?
- "Not So Different" Remark: In Chapter 13 Ryuk comments that Matsuda, in becoming indifferent towards people who don’t remember the loops, is starting to think about them the way a shinigami thinks about humans.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Matsuda, of course, and Ryuk.
- Sanity Slippage: The more loops Matsuda goes through, the more this happens, as he does things he normally would have never done. This becomes exacerbated after the end of chapter 11, after Light kills Matsuda with a scrap of the Death Note.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Subverted. Matsuda initially assumes that the time loop will end if he manages to create a “good” resolution for the events of January 28th, but after several failed attempts he starts to lose hope that a good resolution even exists.
- Time Loop Fatigue: Matsuda gradually loses hope of escaping the loop and becomes acclimated to the idea that his actions don’t have consequences. This leads him to take increasingly reckless and immoral actions, such as assassinating world leaders on a whim in Chapter 12 and torturing Light in Chapter 13.
- Time Title: Every chapter (except Chapter 10 and Chapter 19) is titled “January 28th, 2010”.
- Tranquil Fury: Near in chapter 15, after Matsuda kills Rester.
