Boredom
"Thank you," Dawn said with a smile as her order was finally set before her. The antelope waitress kindly returned the gesture with a bow before setting off to finish her other tasks.
Being left alone at her window seat in the cafe, the ewe couldn't help but berate herself for even coming out here in the first place. She bit back a laugh and thought back to her reasons of why.
Mostly out of imagined guilt gnawing at her from the past few days of news being tossed out left and right. That and boredom.
Those were... coincidences. None of this stuff is real, she mused, staring at her cup of coffee and slice of apple pie.
Truth be told, she didn't even want it. She had lunch already and was due back to finish reports for Lionheart - that lazy self-centered prick of a pred - in a half hour. But still, she didn't know how to feel about... that.
She cast her gaze to the shop's tv, currently playing the ZNN afternoon news.
Dawn shuddered. Incidents.
That's what she called them. Simply, emphatically, completely accidental, random, coincidental, mere happenstance: incidents.
Taking her own advice from earlier, she drew in a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then released a sigh of contention. It eased her mind and allowed her to focus. Finally satisfied and calm, she lifted her fork to dig into her snack.
After savouring two or three delicious bites and merrily kicking her hind hooves under the table, her ears swiveled at the sound of 'breaking news'.
Looking up, she saw the same reporter from the last 'incident' jogging down the street. Curious and feeling her stomach twist into knots, she listened carefully.
"-re just tuning in, we have confirmation that one of the city's most wanted criminals, Lynn Maine, is holding several mammals hostage inside the Leming Brothers Bank."
The whispers around her were almost rendered silent from how she took in the name. The waitress had to turn up the volume.
Having heard of him before as he was on the wanted list and in her records as well, Dawn knew it was only a matter of time before that ticking time bomb of an ocelot was back at it.
Her eyes narrowed along with her muzzle growing into a scowl. He was an undesirable mammal; a predator, and an immediate threat to the general populace. And every cop in the city had tried to find him for well over a month.
Now he had shown up and done the exact thing his species was known for: cause trouble for everyone else.
She shook her head. There was no way that anything could be done about him, and she could only hope that all of his hostages made it out safely. They were prey - lemmings at that - and he was a dangerous predator; all of them were.
The camera zoomed in towards the entrance of the bank and her heart sank. Police were surrounding it, and there was no way that they could get in to seize the mammal with how big everyone was. He'd likely take out a dozen or so hostages before they could get to him.
That wasn't just. There was nothing right about that; for the innocent to die while the predator lived behind bars.
If only someone could get rid of that-
The instant the thought crossed her mind, she froze. The memory of those 'incidents' came back in full force, and she found herself questioning herself again if it was all real.
Cautiously, her eyes trailed down to her purse where 'it' had been kept for the past few days. She hadn't noticed it, but her hooves were already reaching in for the concealed item. Dawn had figured she would tote the thing around as either a joke or to keep her mind at ease.
Finally having grabbed the edge of a solid black notebook, she lifted it out, taking a moment to soak in the name written on the front again. The little ewe shuddered when she muttered its name, "Death Note."
A chill ran down her spine as she called to it, her eyes flitting everywhere guiltily in hopes that nobody had seen her bring the accursed thing out into the open. When she had seen them all take notice only of the news, she sighed and slowly opened the book of her past 'incidents'.
There, on the first page, were written three names; each of them burned in her memory over the past week.
For a long moment, she merely stared at the names and re-read them over and over again; her hoof-writing was to be admired. All criminals at the time and all deceased now. Yet, the only thing that they had in common was that they were predators.
Her anger boiled in her as the news continued to play out. Silently she wished that this was all true and that she could do something that even the police surrounding the building couldn't.
Without hesitation, she grabbed a pen, only to hold back a giggle and shake her head. She rested the pen between the notebook's binding.
"It's just a hoax, none of it will matter," she muttered to herself, wholeheartedly meaning it. They had all died of accidents, and that one that had a heart attack was a well-timed coincidence.
But were they really?
Her own curiosity taking precedence over her rationality, she wanted to see if anything of this made sense at all.
Analyzing her options, she came to one conclusion: that she had to think of something so utterly ridiculous that it would be impossible for it to happen otherwise. And at that, she only had forty seconds to prove it right.
One more look at the news ignited her to try. She was a smart sheep, and as such, it only took her half the time to think of something that would be so... dumb that it would have to be impossible.
When she had finished and taken a look at the timestamp on the breaking news update and what she had written, she sighed in relief.
"Nothing."
That's what happened, a whole lot of not-
"We have movement!"
Her eyes shot open as well as the other patrons. They watched as the ocelot suspect ran out of the building with a trash bin on his head, blood dripping out of an open wound on his neck. He didn't get far and collapsed on the curb, unresponsive. The police didn't even fire a shot.
For a long moment, the sheep sat there quietly; baffled beyond words at what she and countless others had witnessed. Mouth agape and her hoof coming to silence any stray words, she looked down at the new note she wrote; she couldn't believe it.
'At approximately twelve thirty-three PM on November 29, known suspect Lynn Maine suddenly becomes crazed. He gets his head stuck in a garbage bin and runs out of the bank lobby clawing at his own neck in an attempt to remove it.'
Despite all the commotion going on around her, Dawn was, again, in her own little world. It was silent as her blood felt hot, her breath nearly stopped.
It's real! It's real! IT'S REAL! her every thought screamed, hammering it home even further with every word.
She felt horrified that she had not taken one, but four lives in such a short time. That was four lives cut short, four lives ended, four times she should be on trial. The realization dawned on her: she was a murderer; a serial killer.
Panic ensued. She imagined herself in jail, prison forever. The same prison that housed those vicious preds that deserved to have their names written in the book, not hers.
As quickly as she could muster, Dawn put the notebook back in her purse. The fewer mammals that saw her have anything out in the open the better. If she got caught, then it was all over.
It was that thought that crossed her mind again and again: if she got caught.
The ewe stopped panicking for a moment, weighing the situation as it were. The threat to the prey mammals was over, nobody would believe that writing someone's name down would kill them, and most importantly, nobody had seen her do it. As far as everyone was concerned, she was just doing work off-site
Every thought began to coalesce. If she didn't get caught, then she could continue to act as a force of good to those prey who were subjugated by vicious predators. If she could do that, then it would only be a matter of time before prey were seen as strong; no longer the weaker side of the 90/10 split. And if she could show that prey could keep the city safe without predators, then that meant predators were unnecessary.
A ghost of a smile slowly crawled its way onto her muzzle. She had work to do, she had the power to change the course of Zootopia.
No. Even better.
She giggled, gathering her things and pulling out a few bills to pay for her lunch. On her way out, her hoof clutched the binding of the book firmly. "I can make the world a better place."
[A/N]
This thing has been driving me crazy for a few months now (at least 12 XD) so I figured that I'd do something as an anime mashup collection with Zootopia themes. This here is... well, a placeholder for a larger project in the works, but I wanted to try a few for now to see how they'd work.
The reason I chose Death Note first was because of how awesome it was. I'm imagining Dawn with a bag of potato chips in her office now. XD
However, I'm trying to limit these to 1-2 shots until I can figure out what to do with the ten tons of anime that are out there.
Up next is likely going to be Hellsing!
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Till Next Time
-DLW