There was no one else in the apartment; Raito was certain of this point, and when had he been this paranoid anyway? And so he lay with his eyes closed and waited for nothing. Dreams never follow any sort of order.
He thought he'd almost fallen asleep when the door opened.
"Raito? It's time to get up."
And then he was really awake and he almost didn't want to be. He sat up and turned to stare. "Dad?"
His father looked just the same as he always had; no, he looked younger, he looked like the dad Raito can only really remember from photographs.
"Did Ryuzaki send you?" he asked, because he wanted to be sure. This could be a wish-fulfilment dream. There'd been a lot of those, for a while. But his father didn't answer.
(Damn it, L, this isn't fair.)
"You are dead," Raito said, at last, scrambling out of bed and walking towards him. "I know you are. Did you see Ryuzaki? It's - it's important."
The lines of streetlight from the window shone in his father's glasses. Raito saw his own face there for a second before Dad turned away, walked out of the room. Raito followed.
Outside the room there was darkness.
"How's your mother?" Dad said at last. "And Sayu. Are they all right?"
"Yes," Raito said, only because he was tired, and then realised the lie was unnecessary. "Well. Sayu's still not getting out much. But she'll be better soon." When the world was better. "Dad, you're not answering my question. Did you - do you get to talk to other people when you're dead?"
There was darkness and not even a speck of light. (Raito dreamt this once. That it was dark, and no matter how much he tried to put the lights on they wouldn't work and it wasn't fair.)
"I didn't think," his father said, "that anything from work would follow us home. I thought you would all be safe."
There was darkness and the walls around them as if they weren't walking through the apartment at all. As if they were buried. Only Dad's voice gave Raito any clue to how far he was ahead, and getting further. He sped up a little. "Dad, wait." (They lost Sayu once, in town. Raito found her and made his mother cry.) "They are safe. Mum is sad and Sayu obviously went through a traumatic experience but no one's going to hurt them now, and they will be better, they will -"
"And you?"
Far away, he could hear laughing. Children.
"Me? There's nothing wrong with me."
They both stopped. The laughter was closer now, and words, but he couldn't tell what they were.
"I thought you were following," Dad said. "But when I looked back, you'd gone."
"I'd gone? It's you who left. Dad, please, you have to tell me, did you speak to Ryuzaki?"
Silence.
"Dad?"
And suddenly the laughter was right behind him and running footsteps and then a small figure ran into him, glancing off his legs and wailing, and a voice from further back called Sayu, you idiot. Just slow down!
"I never left!" Raito shouted into the dark. "You hear me? I never left, it was you! I did it for you, you always put the right thing above everything else. You would've killed me too. You - you just think about that!"
And further along in the dark the little girl was crying.
This time Raito woke to hear some late-night partygoers laughing in the street. Some girl was shrieking, and at first it sounded like crying. Outside, the streetlight flickered, and suddenly burst into life again. It was now two.
