Author's Note: A small note that this is a side fic to "God of the Machine" if you haven't read that then this will be only a brief introduction to those characters and would seem... stupid for lack of a better term. So I highly recommend you read that story before embarking on this one. This is also NOT CANON, for obvious reasons.
Light Yagami, number one high school student in all of Japan according to his test scores, was best friends with an alien from another dimension.
Of course, no one knew this.
She looked human enough, convincingly human. She looked like an ordinary, Caucasian, high school transfer student who just happened to be in Japan and living with Light for the duration of her exchange program. Nothing about her was too out of the ordinary, perhaps she was a bit tall, perhaps she was a bit thinner than most girls he knew, and perhaps her eyes were a bit too pale of a blue for eyes but nothing that made you stop and stare and mutter to yourself that she was something out of science fiction.
She acted convincingly enough too. She might be fluent in Japanese at a very young age, and without any real reason to be given her apparent heritage, but beyond that she was perfection in her acting. She knew all the nuances of high school teenage social behavior, how to interact with people, how to fit in, and again no one in their right mind would think that she was faking being human.
The sad thing was, Light thought to himself, if he hadn't seen her appearing out of nothingness in the middle of his bedroom he would have been fooled as well.
This was why Anna Jones bothered him so much and if he was honest it was the reason she was currently his only true friend.
Friends, he didn't have any, hadn't ever had any if he thought about it. He had… acquaintances and peers, he supposed he would say. People he would laugh with in the classroom, girls who would casually date him if he asked, people from tennis, people from cram school, just lots of people who only saw what he wanted them to see. All concerned with their test scores and grades, the latest video games and movies, all these things that Light had no interest in whatsoever.
Humanity, he'd decided was fairly boring and somewhat barbaric. It was a terrible thing to say, and it wasn't true about everyone, and he felt horrible for thinking it but none the less… None the less, he had been thinking it for some time, especially before she had shown up.
He'd seen where his life was headed, he'd seen that proud and golden path as he graduated high school with honors then university with honors and then joined the NPA with honors. He'd looked far into the future, seen him marrying some woman he tolerated at best, but who would please his father and mother. He'd seen that world, and it looked so terribly bleak and empty.
And he was already so terribly bored.
But she wasn't boring, because she wasn't human even if she acted well enough to fool everyone around them, and perhaps even to fool herself. Her cover of Anna Jones, the American exchange student, set in place for her conveniently by her or what she claimed to be some higher power, was very far from boring.
For perhaps the first time in his life he found himself interested in something.
He found himself looking her up, tracking down how far Anna Jones went before the paper trail stopped. Did she have friends? Family? A home town? She had all of her documentation but if Light were actually to travel to America, to call up a few homes, would they vouch for a brilliant teenage girl studying Japanese named Anna.
It was a puzzle, one the likes of which he'd never imagined, and meanwhile there was her commentary as well. Her halfhearted attempts to leave Japan that were somehow always wasted, her arguments on how she couldn't possibly be an alien and if she was one then she was frighteningly good at imitating human behavior but frighteningly bad at making any real progress.
They hypothesized just why she was there.
He theorized that she could be observing humanity, learning their culture. Under the guise of an American girl this was clever, she had a reason to not understand all cultural nuances, but no one would question whether or not she was from another planet.
She'd argued that if they knew the difference between Japan and America then they'd already done a fair bit of research on human nature and had no reason to be sending her in.
Later stage in the plan then, they'd set up a system of observation already, she could be a university student or whatever the equivalent was sent to observe developing life forms.
She said she couldn't imagine a sentient race sending undergraduates to make contact with other developing sentient life forms; because no one could be that stupid.
Her argument then usually boiled down to the assertion that she wasn't really an alien, only technically one, and that parallel Earth was more or less the same as his Earth. Beyond some insane deity plucking her from her old life and inserting her into his she was a perfectly ordinary teenage girl who just had the odd penchant for films with robots in them.
He would kindly point out that this was all opinion, and hardly fact.
And they would go on, bickering back and forth, both doing their best but both failing in being truly convincing and only becoming more frustrated as they went on.
They never did reach a conclusion, but then, that was never really the point.
Being trapped in another parallel universe to Earth could be far worse.
There could be a war going on, there could be an actual alien invasion going on, it could secretly be the Matrix, point being it could be a lot worse than Tokyo in the late nineties. Hell, it could be worse even then that, she had an identity (graciously gifted upon her by the bastard god that had sent her here), she had a place to sleep, she had a sort of friend…
So it could be worse.
But she still liked to complain.
She'd been doing things, not great things necessarily, high school things but she'd still been doing them. She'd had a family, a few casual acquaintances here and there, and she didn't really appreciate being taken from all of that to a world where she still couldn't manage to even read the newspaper.
So she went to high school, she somehow got excellent grades in spite of being almost completely illiterate and not knowing a word of Japanese, she went shopping with Sayu, she watched really bad soap operas on television, and she tried to convince Light Yagami that she wasn't actually an alien sent to destroy his planet.
Not that Light seemed all that concerned by the idea of her destroying his planet. Light was an odd guy, very smart, ridiculously smart, but odd. He didn't seem to realize this about himself, which on the surface he looked perfect, there was nothing wrong with him but… But if an alien being had appeared in Anna's bedroom, and she was convinced that it was going to destroy the world, she would be a bit more concerned and proactive than he was.
Light just seemed, mildly entertained by the idea, perhaps even a bit excited. The sad fact of life though was that he was the closest thing she had to a friend, given the fact that he was the only one who knew that she wasn't from his America and was faking her way through high school.
She didn't try to look into Light's thought processes too deeply, down that path lay madness.
So instead she did homework, went shopping, watched a lot of parallel universe Japanese television, chatted with Light, and just waited for something to happen.
Because she didn't really see the point in all of this.
Despite being in Japan, a parallel world Japan, it was like she was back at home. She still went to school, chatted with friends, ate lunch, did homework, did all of those student like things that normal people do.
If she was going to be an alien she might as well feel like she was doing alien things.
It just bothered her on some fundamental level, that she'd crossed dimensions essentially just to be a high school girl again, worse the high school girl that everyone went to in order to ask if Prince Charming Light Yagami had a secret girlfriend.
Why did anyone care if he had a secret girlfriend?
She didn't care, she cared more about cross-dimensional travel and appearing in random people's houses! Also, Light may seem great on the outside, but he was secretly bizarre. He had absolutely no friends, ate lunch by himself, and was completely unconcerned by the idea of an alien taking over his planet.
Seriously, who did that?
She could have gone up to him, after appearing in his bedroom, done the whole "Take me to your leader, earthling." And he probably would have done it, after trying to explain why there wasn't just one leader anywhere.
Oh, trying to enslave my people? That's nice here have some udon.
Anyone who did that had major issues, she wasn't sure what those issues were, but they had to be quite large. Not as large as being from another dimension without any reason why you were in another dimension, but still large issues.
It almost made her want to believe that she was the one who had been abducted by aliens. That it was a "Slaughterhouse Five" type scenario, where she was in some alien zoo interacting with her more or less natural environment all while her keepers observed her in a giant bubble. It would explain why all of her tickets out of Tokyo kept disappearing whenever she bought them, or why the bus would break down, or why she couldn't seem to leave.
Light could be an alien, it would explain a lot.
She really wished that she could be back home though, where she had been fairly certain that no one was an alien trying to destroy a planet or run a zoo. She missed those days.
And that was all Anna Jones really had to say about Light Yagami.
Author's Note: In order to keep this a one shot you will notice the lack of details and over all plot. If I really wanted to get into this, which I don't at the moment, L would probably show up as an alien hunter, Light and Anna would go AWOL, there would be secret laboratories, and things would be much more exciting if terrible for poor Anna Jones. At any rate this is for the 400th review of "God of the Machine" by chibianimefan26 who asked for a fic detailing the characters relationships sans Kira. So here we are in a world without Kira.
Thanks for reading, reviews are always nice.
Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note.