Disclaimer: These characters aren't mine, I am making no money off of this.

Warnings: Sexual content and spoilers for a vast majority of the Death Note anime and manga.

Pairings: Raye Penber/Naomi Misora, onesided Rem/Naomi Misora.

Assectation

What was the fascination with humans? Rem watched the others, watching them. Wondering why and what, and not understanding the compulsion. Humans were humans. They lived and died and it meant nothing to a god of death. They were fleeting bits of use, and yet….

They watched, the gods of death. They watched as the humans lived their lives. Grew, loved, lost, lived. Was it some strange need borne of their stunted existence? Was it merely entertainment?

Rem didn't understand.

One day, she watched. She crouched down and looked into the human realm, letting her eyes move over humans in their lives. Such bright things, they were. Glittering and brilliant in contrast to the deadened world of the shinigami.

There was a quality about them, she decided. Something unfathomable and foreign, at the edge of her grasp of understanding. Something that drew the eye. So many lives, flashing and burning and then fading away. To her, it was all in the blink of a moment.

But she could see what was so attractive. Ephemeral, they were. Laughing, loving, crying.

Even in sorrow, they were colored with light.

There were so many. Rem focused, searching for one. One to follow, to observe, to watch a small moment in time. There were so many. How easy it would be, to lose herself in their lives.

She had seen it happen.

The danger with fascination was simply that. It consumed. Fascination turned to obsession. How easy it would be to remain, day after day, watching. Unmoving, unconcerned, some gargoyle perched upon the edge of the world and tracing the lines and lives of creation.

Rem watched.

There was a woman. Dark haired, pale skinned, pleasing to the eyes of other humans. She walked with purpose. Her strides were sure, long. Her shoulders were set. There was something about her that drew the eye. The movement of her hips. The fall of her hair. The curve of her breasts. It was intangible and gripping.

Rem was silent as she watched. She watched the woman walk, some street in some city that was full of humans. But in the crowd, this single one stood out from the others. It was as though she walked on a dark stage as the only player illuminated.

Rem returned, again and again, and sought out the woman. She watched, entranced, eyes fixed on the brightness of the human world and the black haired woman. Rem watched her life. There was a man there, but Rem ignored him. He was unremarkable. He was a silent player in the drama that she watched. A prop. It was the woman that she wanted. Wanted to watch.

But there was a want. It was nameless and shapeless and Rem couldn't quite place it. But it didn't matter. It kept her returning to watch, day after day.

And she only watched. There was temptation to visit the human world, but she resisted. However gripped she was by the desire to look close, to become a player in this woman's life, she ignored it. She would not become drawn into it. She would remain an observer.

The man was the woman's lover. Rem knew her name, but to remain distanced, refused to use it. She would not while away her life watching some human. She would not fail to write names in her Note. She had seen what could happen. She was not so entrapped as that.

But the temptation was there. Rem watched as the woman made love to the man. She straddled him, naked, body tight and lean. She was without flaw in Rem's eyes. She was not soft as so many humans were. She was muscular and fit. She moved with fluidity, and even in sex, there was a hardness about her. In her eyes. In her shoulders. In the narrow line of her pale back.

Rem watched her body. The flutter of pulse in her throat. The beads of sweat that gathered on her breasts and rolled along their slopes. The flux of muscles in her flat stomach. The tightening of tendons in her thighs and buttocks.

Rem watched as a human looked at art. There was no sexual desire, even as she watched the woman buck and moan and grip bed sheets in a passionate abandon. That desire didn't exist in shinigami. The want, the desire, it was something incompatible with human wants and emotions. But Rem enjoyed when the woman took her lover to bed.

It was that that finally drew her down. The wasteland of the shinigami realm could no longer hold her. She stood in the bedroom, an invisible specter, watching beside the bed. The woman was so close. Her back was arched, her breasts thrust out, Rem could reach out and touch her. It was a temptation.

There was another temptation. The temptation to write down the name of this woman's lover. To erase him from the stage. Would she still be as beautiful, in mourning? Would her sorrow be as brilliant? Rem wanted to see. But without the lover, these moments would be gone. There would be no further nights of passionate repose, no afternoons where the woman clawed at the wall of her apartment as her man took her from behind.

Rem would miss those. Besides, they were humans. Their lives were fragile. She would see sorrow one way or another. She could wait. Time meant nothing to a creature was nearly immortal. And until then she would watch, and stand beside the bed in mute enthrallment, watching the lean hard woman. The woman she had come to think of as hers.

Sometimes it was as though the woman knew she was there. Her head would turn, black hair falling across her shoulder, and eyes dark and heavy with lust would fix on the place where Rem hovered. But it was only a human woman, offering the slope of her neck to her human lover and nothing more. But Rem could watch her eyes; her black, smoldering, intoxicating eyes.

Perhaps it was not so impossible for a god of death to feel the stirrings of true desire. It was those eyes. As pleasing as her body was, all lines and hardness and smooth pale divinity, it was her eyes that stabbed through Rem completely.

Perhaps this was how obsessions began. In the shingami world, Rem was questioned. What had caught her attention so strongly, down there in the human world? Just some woman, nothing more. Just an idle amusement. Something to break up the tedium of shingami life.

But then again, perhaps she was too close. Watched too closely. Followed too intently. Perhaps it was time to leave the lean, hard woman behind. There would be other humans, if she wanted. Other women. Just as appealing, just as enticing, just as enthralling.

The drama was played out. It would grow dull soon as it was. It was still new and interesting, but that would fade. And what then? Write two new names in her Note? Give the woman pain, to watch her sorrow? No. She no longer wanted to see that. The desire had faded, replaced by that unnamed something instead.

Rem would stop watching the human. But she would watch the other gods of death as they watched the humans. And perhaps one day she'd find another of her own.