Chapter 04: Reacquainted with Humanity

He sat in the passenger seat of the car, holding on to his backpack with a tight grip, as though the Death Note inside of it would disappear. His mother had been the one that he had called, and so she had come and picked him up with no small amount of confusion on her part. Other than the fact that there had been some sort of incident, she didn't notice anything else different about him.

"All you do is study, Raito. Are you getting enough sleep?"

He glanced over at his mother, the name Yagami Sachiko faintly hovering over her head. Raito did his best to ignore the numbers that were under her name, a feeling of guilt at what he had done to his family forming an icy knot in his gut. "I might have stayed up a little later than usual last night… Promise you won't tell dad?" Maybe this would be his chance to change things… He didn't want to involve his family, they didn't deserve that, but he did need to figure out how to get back to his own time and to the Shinigami Realm.

"I won't. I want you to go up to your room and straight to bed when we get home, Raito." Her tone was firm and left no room for any argument.

"Yes, Kaa-san." Raito managed a weak and faint smile while his mother just sighed and continued driving them to their home. He had no need to return to his human ideals and to try to create a utopia free of evil. He wasn't human anymore, even if he was back in a human body. He didn't know how this would work out though.

The rest of the drive was spent in silence and when they pulled into the driveway Raito waved his mother off. "I can walk, Kaa-san." He lead the way up the steps and into the house, his mother's worried gaze on his back. He gave her a smile over his shoulder to ease her mind then went upstairs to his bedroom.

"I'll bring you something up at dinner time," she called after him.

"Okay, Kaa-san." He went into his bedroom and shut the door. She wouldn't come in without knocking first, and it was likely that she would warn Sayu off about bothering him, so there was no need to lock it. Trudging over to his bed, he sat down on the edge and opened up his backpack. The Death Note was still in there.

"This was unexpected, King of Death."

Raito went still, his gaze going from the Death Note in his backpack to flit about his room at the familiar voice of the Divine entity from before. "Have you come to kill me for failing in my task of restoring the Shinigami Realm?" His voice came out in a whisper as fear gripped him.

"We are not so cruel, little King. You shall still have your chance, but it is regrettable to say that you can no longer go back to the time you came from."

"I can't… go back?" So he was stuck here? In the past? "I don't have my Note, but it is here! I can feel it!"

"The way back has been sealed. You would do well to use your knowledge of what may come, should you choose to walk the same path."

There was no sign of the entity present, apart from its voice. Shifting on his bed, and still glancing around his room, he set his backpack down before moving to lay on the bed. "I won't put my family through that… I can do things differently. I only need to kill to keep myself alive, right?" If he was in the past, he wasn't sure what did and did not apply anymore.

"You need to regain your White Death Note. With that you will no longer be fully bound to your human body, and you will be able to enter the Shinigami Realm here. Do take care, though, for you can be killed while you are separated from your White Note. You are protected from the Death Notes, but not from physical attacks."

"Where is it?" It felt very far away.

"It will make its way back to you in due time."

Raito shook his head and frowned. "That doesn't help me."

Silence answered him, leaving the once more seventeen-year old Raito to sigh and trace a finger over the white lettering on the cover of the Death Note. "At least I still have a chance." His gaze flicked to the TV on his desk as memories of what had transpired in his own past surfaced. "Otoharada Kurou has those kids and that teacher as hostages right now." The man was indeed a known killer. He couldn't let anything happen to those innocents.

"If I kill him like I did the last time…" No. He wasn't going to revisit that path. Raito grabbed a pen from inside of his backpack and opened the Death Note. Ignoring the instructions that had been written inside of it, he jotted Otoharada Kurou onto the first page of the Note, followed by instructions to release the hostages and to go to the roof where he would commit suicide. Once he was finished writing that down, he shut the Death Note and put the pen on his bedside table.

A few minutes passed and then a strange feeling passed over Raito. He felt revitalized, in a manner. Blinking, he sat up, looking at his hands. Nothing seemed different. After shoving the Death Note between his mattress and box spring, a safe place for it at the moment, he got up and made his way to the bathroom. Raito turned the light on then approached the mirror over the sink and stared wide-eyed as his reflection.

His irises were crimson and his skin was pale, but not in an unhealthy way. His complexion, which had been pretty damn good as a human, was absolutely flawless now. What was even more baffling was that his reflection had the crimson wings of his Shinigami self, but they were tied with some sort of black cord. He turned to the side to get a better look at his wings and the cord, which appeared to go through his shirt?

Raito lifted his shirt up in the back and nearly dropped it in surprise when he saw that the cord went into his skin below where the wings came out. Rubbing the area, he frowned as his hand passed through the cord. Is this what the entity had meant when it had said that he was bound to this human body? He let his shirt drop back down and retreated back to his bedroom. "What did that thing mean that it would make its way back to me?"

-KotDG-

L watched in morbid fascination as the supposed Shinigami, which looked more like an angel (not that he believed in those either), consumed his sixth apple. The White Death Note, which was what the Shinigami was calling it, sat on the table between them, which was also host to the bowl of apples that he had Quillsh bring to him. "Who is this King you mentioned?"

Ryuk paused mid-bite and blinked at the detective. After a moment of silence he finished the apple off then reached down and grabbed the last one in the bowl. "He's the King of the Shinigami. The Divine appointed him 'cause of what he had done in his life as a human and cause he can bring the Shinigami Realm back to life." He at least believed it would be possible for Raito to do that.

"Your King used to be human?" L frowned at this information, his gaze going to the White Death Note. He wanted to believe that this was all just a hoax, but here Ryuk was, still hovering overhead and packing away apples like there was no tomorrow. "Why does the Shinigami Realm need to be brought back to life? What happened to it?"

"As human as you are," Ryuk answered without hesitation. He wasn't giving very much information away about his King, and he knew better than to give the detective Raito's human name. There was no telling what would happen if L got ahold of that and did something to the Raito of this time. "Our Realm used to be like this one, just without all of this technological stuff. It was nice, and the apples there were delicious. It started decaying because the old king got greedy with the power. He diverted the life energy that was going to the Realm to himself. I suspect he also gave his second-in-command some of that power, but it didn't matter once the Divines decided to put him in Mu in place of my King."

"Mu?" That meant nothingness in Japanese. "What is this Mu?"

Ryuk contemplated telling L as he ate the last apple, his gaze on the White Note. "All humans will, without exception, eventually die. After they die, the place they go is Mu."

L blinked at him in a manner that made him seem owlish. "So they don't go anywhere, because there is nowhere for them to go to."

A grin stretched wide across Ryuk's face as he looked up at the detective. "Got it in one." At least he didn't have to explain it any further to the detective.

"What will happen if I use this Death Note?" L picked up the Note in question, and opened it to blank pages. It didn't appear to be anything of significance, and there were no words on the cover to denote what it was, like Ryuk's own Death Note.

"I don't know." Ryuk answered truthfully, because something like this had never happened before. The King wasn't bound by the rules, and the same applied to his Death Note. Now that it was in human hands… "You will have to give that back to him though."

"I make no promises." L monotoned as he thumbed through blank page after blank page. Reaching the back of the book, he blinked at the inside of the back cover. Faint against the white, only a shade darker was two words. A name. Yagami Raito. "Yagami Light." His gaze quickly flicked up to the Shinigami, who had noticeably tensed at the name and then cursed.

-KotDG-

There had been a great disturbance, one that instilled a fear deep within his core. Whatever it was, it bode ill for him. "Armonia Justin Beyondormason, I summon you."

Not even two seconds passed before the Shinigami appeared in front of him, looking as troubled as he felt. "My King?" His second-in-command bowed before him, a slight tremor in his body.

"I task you with finding out what caused that disturbance. Do whatever you deem necessary to erase what caused it."

Justin bowed again, his jeweled eyes glowing brightly in the dimness of the room. "As my king commands."