A/N: This is a collection of random drabbles about the Shinigami. It will update randomly, as I think them up.
Disclaimer: Don't faint with the shock, but I don't own Death Note. Ohba and Obata do.
The Game
Amid skulls and bones, with skulls and bones, a garish group gambles, the pot eternally growing, and shrinking. A priceless pot, to be sure, yet equally as worthless. Still, it fills and empties and wealth changes hands, the stakes always high, loss always terrible.
There is only one way to lose-giving up and walking away, interest in the game lost.
The penalty is almost always death.
And so the game drags on, rules adapting with each player's mood, yet nothing is changed, for they all know the others' game much too well. Play never falters, moves are never questioned. But for the necessary accusations of cheating and the familiar jeering there is little conversation. When one had life times behind him and life times ahead, discussion becomes monotonous, repetitive, but as long as the game continued all else was bearable.
So rudimentary was the game, so centrifugal to their existence, that the attention paid to the specific players tended to turn them to roles rather than entities. Each and any could leave and return the others without them being any the wiser, space automatically being filled and emptied as needed. So the game wore on, endlessly, and the participating shinigami could be assured of the other's continued presence, continued patience, continued play.
After all, it's not as if there was anything else to do.
A/N: Review.