A House of Cards

Misa was glad that the advertising shoot was finally finished.

Misa wasn't sure if she could smile all the way through another take without banging her head on the nearest wall (or better yet, bash her forehead against the uppity director's noggin, but that brash behaviour really isn't befitting the pretty lovely demure Misa-Misa, so she tried not to think about it and will it to disappear). The director was preposterously tyrannical, and she couldn't imagine why he was so famous. The staff all bowed to his wishes with a brisk 'hai, hai' with such repetition that she was reminded of bobblehead dolls even as they scampered away to try to avoid catching his attention at all. The director kept staring at her backside and breasts when he thought no one was paying attention with a creepy grin (really, she was used to being stared at, she's an idol, but that grin? It gives her goosebumps). The skimpy costume she had to wear was not so reasonable when one considers that summer is pretty far gone into autumn.

Basically, she was freezing her backside off for a grumpy old lecher who couldn't even be gracious about it.

"Thank you every one for your cooperation! Misa-misa had a most wonderful time!" Misa said in full spirits, bowing to everyone. Everyone cheered her in kind and replied her words with words of gratitude of their own.

"No, it was definitely thanks to you, Misa-chan!"

"Yes, Misa-chan is a darling to work with,"

"You're too sweet, Koizumi-san," Misa said to the cameraman, her smile all dimples. "Misa-misa suspect that Koizumi-san says that to all the girls he knows."

The cameraman laughed, colour high on his cheeks. "Of course not! Only for Misa-chan, isn't that right everybody?" There were many voices of agreement rising at that. "And of course, our great Director-sama!"

"Hear, hear, for Director-sama!"

Everyone grinned and smiled and chatted with everyone else as if it had been the most pleasant working experience they had gone through. The producer thanked the honourable director for deigning to grace them all with his expertise and everyone else said something about how wonderful the said honourable director was to them. It was the same Takashita-san who had been complaining about the same director when he was drinking with the other sound technician. It was the same Koizumi-san who always talked about how this was going to be his last shot with the director, that if the man kept being preposterous he was going to resign from the project there and then.

Misa smiled prettily, laughing and tittering at the right time to the right jokes with her lips hidden behind her small hands as the crew unwind themselves. All the while, she kept edging away carefully as she greeted one person after another as the crowd gently dispersed. She was moving towards her exit in small incremental steps as she subtly took her leave from everyone whose eyes she had caught glimpse of and gave an extra-cheerful wave to the director, just to make sure that he saw her as nice, preppy and absolutely great to have on the set. You know, just in case he talked about this project with everyone else in the entertainment industry. Everyone should be talking about what a nice girl Misa-misa was. In fact, just now she could hear him call one of his friends and praise her dedication and charming smile.

Success!

Though admittedly, Misa had to get out of here before she had the urge to barf on someone's shoes or jab their eyes out. She needed out.

She had expected Watari's signature Rolls-Royce (even if not always driven by Watari) to come up and pick her up.

What Misa didn't quite expect to see, was the presence of Ryuuzaki waiting under a particularly barren tree a distance away from all the commotion, a binocular around his neck and a not-so-hidden earphone stuck in one of his ears. If he was anyone else, she wouldn't have thought twice about calling the security about a stalker. She gave a delicate huff. If anyone had said a year ago that she wouldn't even blink having a pervert within an arms length, she would smile and show them how far she could throw them with arms trained from carrying hundreds of shopping bags. He took one glance at her before throwing a comment.

"Why did you even say that it was a pleasure to work with the director? He has done nothing but criticize every action that everyone else did." Ryuuzaki said without much ado. He probably has a bugged the set, Misa thought easily, and resigned herself to the weird fact that it didn't annoy her as much as it once did. She found the words she had been repeating at interviews.

"Because he's been wonderful teacher and a great help—"

"—which is complete politeness and lies—" he cut through her words with the same blunt ease. She sent him a look. Did his parents drop him on the head as a baby? Of course it is! That's the proper way to do everything! But obviously he's one of those people who can't read the air.

"Because that's what you're supposed to say," Misa said, her voice still heroically nice and sweet as she tried to save the conversation. "It's the polite thing to say when all's finished and done, Ryuuzaki."

"You don't owe him that. You have no obligations to say that at all to someone who can't even respect you," Ryuuzaki said casually. The petite blonde stared at him as if he was nuts—which he probably was. It wasn't as if she didn't know that the director did not begin to appreciate her before she showed that she had grit, that she could take whatever he was going to dish out and still emerge as the ever-wonderful Misa-Misa.

"But Misa-misa does not want to lose other opportunities. And Misa-misa is still new. Do you think Misa-misa shouldn't learn how to work with many different people?" She asked him, wide-eyed. She was biting her lower lip because she was at the edge of her tether right now. The alternative to not biting would be shouting. And Misa-misa will not be baited by Ryuuzaki. Not after she survived the director this morning. Ryuuzaki was as blind to her moods as usual.

"I think that an angry Misa-chan is going to make herself sick if she keeps it to herself. I think it would serve the incompetent fools right if she yells at them and the director could benefit from being taken down a peg or two. You have been perfect as always all day—I've been watching since the beginning of today's shoot." Ryuuzaki said, his words as flat and unadorned as simple truth.

Misa's throat felt tight. Had he been here since the morning? Did he actually see that Misa-Misa's smile did not even falter the slightest? His raccoon eyes were unreadable. Ryuuzaki, please shut up. Please, don't say anything else. Please…

"But…" Misa faltered.

Ryuuzaki continued obliviously, his thumb half-bitten inside his mouth. "No one should have said that you didn't look earnest enough that you need several more retakes. I think he just wanted to see you splash in the pool some more. Those were some idol-worthy poses, Misa-chan, they'd look great on a gravure calendar."

Ryuuzaki handed her a box of low-calorie carrot cake that she preferred from her usual patissier and a coat she didn't even remember forgetting. Ryuuzaki shrugged.

"Desserts always cures my bad moods. You could also yell if it would make you less tense. I never cared being yelled at."

Misa stared at her shoes while she tried to swallow the burning lump in her throat.

"Misa-chan? Misa?"

'-

"Uwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!"

To Ryuuzaki's utter confusion, Misa actually burst into tears for the second time in his presence. This time, he was a little more prepared with a spare handkerchief on hand for her. This time, he was still not used to the way she suddenly glomped him and pressed her face on to his shirt and he stiffened considerably for a moment or two before relaxing again. He patted her on the head oddly, the way one would when petting a cat one was uncertain to be feral or not and was wary of being suddenly shredded by claws.

It seems that he was responsible for Misa-chan breaking into tears again, but from the tightness of her arms around him and kept him close (instead of kicking him away), he vaguely inferred it to mean she didn't hold him to be the one responsible for her misery. Well, he was relieved she wasn't going to start throwing objects his way anymore. Yet the way her nose pressed against his collarbone with her warm breath and her tears trickling just below his neck was starting to give him a new kind of discomfort. Maybe it also had something to do with the way her breasts were pressed against him, which was actually a rather delectable sensation in its own right. Still, the discomfort increased just after his thoughts ran in that direction. He cleared his throat.

"Misa-chan…"

"I hate him.I hate him, IhatehimIhatehim." She said, between sobs.

He made an uncomfortable polite cough that Misa seemed completely oblivious to. So. This is awkward. He supposed it meant that he had to find a new topic now.

"Well, it's all over now, isn't it?"

Misa nodded, her breathing turning a little more regular (he tried to shift her a little, so that she would be a bit farther from his neck, but it wasn't working—she clung tighter than a barnacle). His throat was turning very dry indeed and he contemplated on pouring himself a cup of tea once he was back in the car.

"Ano… Misa-chan?"

She had settled into a series of small, sad whimpers that made him feel off-kilter. And useless, mostly, because he didn't know what he was supposed to do about them. Yet just because he was currently rather occupied did not mean he was any less circumspect. The first paparazzi that aimed one of their long-barelled lenses to Ryuuzaki had a stone hitting his camera so hard that he dropped it (Ryuuzaki had kicked a stone up to his hand and threw it the moment he noticed the reflection from the lens). No picture was going to be forthcoming from that instrument any time soon.

Of course he was holding another one. Just in case.

His other hand ignored the call of logic and higher brain functions and had somehow settled in the upper curve of Misa's backside (and it was, without a doubt, a very lovely backside, though still not on par with her breasts, but that was not the fault of the backside at all). Ryuuzaki was faced with the dilemma of how to remove the hand from its current, troublesome position without actually allerting Misa to it (which he was sure was going to earn him a hit from her, if she was aware of it). Or well, whether to remove it at all.

Dilemma, dilemma…

'-

Misa put on her long, wavy, black wig the moment she got on the car and a pair of prop glasses out of habit by now. It was odd to know how much better she felt once she had gotten it all out. She felt slightly guilty that she had dumped it all on Ryuuzaki, but he didn't seem to mind much beyond his usual awkwardness (vaguely feeling horrified at herself that she had latched on to Ryuuzaki so quickly and easily—may Light forgive her for that moment of weakness, not that the taller girl needed to know. At all). When she finally let go of him, she noticed that he had caught the cake and her coat in one hand. How he could be awkward without being clumsy, Misa didn't know. She vaguely remembered throwing them all away when she hugged him.

He was shifting on his feet in a way that was seven kinds of awkward. She had to smack herself on the forehead twice when the thought that it was more adorable than weird cross her mind.

(Not. Thinking. About Ryuuzaki. That. Way). No. Nope.

She didn't ask him why he was holding a rather large stone in his other hand, one that he dropped right before entering the car.

'-

"So, does Ryuuzaki miss Misa-Misa that much that he has to pick her up today?" She asked, finally cutting the slice of cake with the plastic knife in the box and speared the piece with the fork. Compared to what Ryuuzaki ate, hers was a tiny morsel indeed.

"Mmmhmmm." He murmured, his attention drawn by something outside the window. The car was slowing down. It wasn't a surprise since this was Tokyo, and in the middle of the day, at that, but she could vaguely see that there was a road construction crew setting up a roadblock as well.

Misa pouted, feeling slightly disappointed even when she knew full well that Ryuuzaki wasn't completely listening to her. She knew from the beginning that he did not go out of his way just to pick her up either. That wouldn't have made any sense. Not if she was the prettiest girl in Japan, or even in the world, would Ryuuzaki do that. For him, there was only work—not even when Light-kun deigned to give him her attention. Misa felt that while she was a bit slow in thinking things through, she wasn't delusional. She was sure that Ryuuzaki prioritizing anything but a case falls squarely under that category.

It was just by this smallest, slightest attention to detail that Amane Misa reached the conclusion that there had been some development in the Kira investigation.

"It's not really nice to pick girls up and then ignore them all day, Ryuuzaki. You should at least try to make some conversation," she pointed out, eternally trying to be helpful since she was now in a much better mood. She wanted to show him that Misa-Misa could be very gracious too. Really, he probably needed all the help he could get. "You'd be hated even if you were the best customer in the nightclubs, even if you were the most famous person in the world."

"Do you want to go shopping?"

Ryuuzaki asked this question with barely a glance her way, sitting on the other end of the seat with both of his feet up carelessly up, completely oblivious to the cute idol on the opposite end of the car. She glared at the back of his head—not that it seemed to have any effect.

"I'm serious about the conversation! You're not making any effort and definitely not making sense." She whined.

"I'm serious in asking if you'd like to stop and buy some clothes. Somewhere in Ginza, perhaps?" Ryuuzaki asked quietly, still with his eyes cast out of the window. "I recall that you haven't been out for more than a month. You must be bored."

Misa opened her mouth to complain further before staring at him wide-eyed. He turned to her with a worried look when he thought it was getting too quiet (more like a defensive worry, she thought). When he found out that she wasn't going to burst into tears anytime soon, he seemed to be satisfied enough to stare back into the streets of Tokyo—looking for what she had no idea.

"Well…maybe, if we weren't taking too long," she murmurred, uncertain.

"It's not a bother at all," Ryuuzaki said again, easily, and Misa stared at him as if she had seen him grow horns.

"We're going to Ginza first, Pullman." He instructed his driver (still not Watari, Misa noted).

'-

She hadn't expected to wheedle anything meaningful from Ryuuzaki, just small talk. Yet his complacence to her schedule was unexpected. It was just odd to see him stopping in every store she asked him to stop by as if they had all the time in the world. He was humouring her, she was sure of it. The only problem now was, she didn't know why. It was rather uncanny to see him slunk away into some forgotten recess in a store while she picked and choose the clothes she wanted, and to suddenly came around again every time she was about to pay. Every time he did that, he called attention to how odd and unfitting he seemed to the finely tuned surroundings. Even in the more bohemian boutiques and experimental distros, he somehow always managed to stick out like a sore thumb.

She hid a small laughter from the way the sales ladies were trying not to stare too hard at both of them. Did Ryuuzaki know that he looked like a salaryman who was trying to appease a girl he had accidentally knocked up? Probably not. Even if it meant that she was probably thought to be on the way to marriage soon, with Ryuuzaki, out of all people, she saw more humour in the situation than genuine embarassment. After all nobody knew who she was. She was sure her wig was well-placed. She looked like just another teenage girl with a guy. And considering some of the salarymen she'd seen, even Ryuuzaki could still blow most of them out of the water—he was no slouch in martial arts, no matter how weird his posture. For a moment Misa was exuberant to know that she didn't even have to pay for some of the more expensive clothes, even if it was causing some gross misunderstanding with the clerks.

The next minute after that had her wondering what was actually happening lately. The fact that she didn't know what Ryuuzaki was doing now, or where Light-kun was these days added the growing shadow of unease in the back of her mind.

'-

It was in the third shop that she visited that Ryuuzaki threatened to make a scene again.

"Stop that." Misa whispered urgently.

Ryuuzaki gave her his usual blank look as he turned to her. "Huh?"

She gave him an elbow jab, to which she was afforded a mildly reprimanding frown as he rubbed his stomach, but not much else. "You were staring at the onee-san near the mannequins at the window display. Stop that. You're calling unnecessary attention."

"I just thought that the tattoo pattern on her left upper-arm that goes all the way to the shoulder looks familiar—"

Jab went her elbow again, and even if Ryuuzaki was faster in buffering the impact with his hand this time, it still hit pretty hard. He furrowed his brows again, half-distracted, as if he was at the same time contemplating the novelty of the sensation. She pulled him with her, deeper into the store before he opened his mouth again. They did not need to get noticed by the woman in red by the window who was served by a retinue of clerks like a proper queen. The main problem wasn't the onee-san herself, really. It was the six muscled thugs that followed in her wake like obedient doberman in black suits and sunglasses.

"She's just shopping," Ryuuzaki said, clearly feeling reluctant to be excessively manhandled. "We're not really getting in her way at all."

"You're going to get us dragged into a fight with the yakuza if you don't take care!" Misa whispered shrilly, trying hard not to panic and was on the verge of failing. Ryuuzaki raised his eyebrows a little.

"Oh, really? That's an interesting possibility I didn't thought was that significant. If you say that, though…" he mused, completely placid even as tension rose in her body.

"Ryuuzaki, you mustn't!"

He wasn't paying attention to her at all. She had both of her hands fisted as she grabbed his shirt for hold. It did not deter him much. He turned around with ease, as if to set off, "No wonder her tattoo was familiar. That particular rendition of the Hannya mask, I'm sure, is native to—"

Misa shook her head vigorously.

"No, you are not going out there again at all, or to try to talk to her or anything! We're not going anywhere near her! I don't care if it meant that we'd have to get out of the back door if the onee-san is taking her time!"

"You're too paranoid. There's still 50% chance that—"

"That I will throw a tantrum and bawl like a baby right now if you don't follow me." Misa emphasised with a rather scary smile as she proceeded to drag him even farther in, her heart hammering in her ribcage, each beat loud in her ears. Her palms were sweating, and if it wasn't for her religious application of anti-perspirant she was half-afraid she would have armpit stains. Ryuuzaki went with her without a fight, surprisingly obedient for once.

She was speaking too fast now, her voice too shrill. "And we'll be in the middle of a scene, Ryuuzaki, which I'm sure you don't like!"

He was silent all the way for more than five minutes that she was beginning to worry that she had prickled something in him and triggerred some unknown reaction. Yet when she turned back to look at him, Ryuuzaki only had that thinking expression on him. He was genuinely inquisitive as he stared back at her without a trace of anger that she was baffled for a second or two.

"That tactic … is childish, yet creative," he said, "and somehow oddly effective."

She sniffed. Obviously, he does not know Misa-misa that well yet…then all her thoughts ground to a halt.

He had tilted his head and brought his nose almost touching to hers, his eyes unnaturally wide in their fathomless black. The weight of his scrutiny was enormous. She felt she could imagine what butterflies caught with a net and brought under a magnifying glass would feel like, carefully tagged, weighed and measured down to the last grain under an all-seeing eye. Even beautiful things did not escape man's urge to define and quantify. It was unnerving and fixating at the same time that she did not quite feel she could just move away. His index finger ghosted over her cheek, not quite touching and not quite poking either but no less mesmerized, leaving goosebumps at the back of her neck.

What he said next was completely unexpected. "It seems that I have to start calculating and compensating for your interference in the future. You have grown interesting after all, Misa-chan."

'-

Every journey a thousand li starts with one step, they say. Thus it was to be expected that even a grand mess starts with something as small as something that goes bump in the middle of the night.

Perhaps it needed to be stated clearly that, farther back at the beginning, it was not Amane Misa's business at all.

In fact, she could've ensured that it stayed that way, if it wasn't for her damnable curiosity. No one had been telling her anything, her personal life was actually pretty standard for a teen idol lately and neither Light nor Ryuuzaki had involved her in anything lately. Yet being in the company of two geniuses that could easily leave one behind meant that it takes extraordinary persistence to keep up with them, and pure stubornness was something Misa had in spades. She definitely wasn't willing to be so easily sidelined and pushed away. Her gut instinct told her something was up, and she could keep up only if she kept her feet in the game.

So Misa had started to develop the habit of trying to remember the terms she could not quite understand between Light and Ryuuzaki's conversation, and to try to look them up later. She started to buy reference books she would never look twice at before and hid them behind the stacks of the gothic-lolita fashion bible, along with what what she regarded as a source of embarassment for her—a pair of reading glasses.

The shopkeepers at the bookstores she frequented were always confused as to why she wanted to buy all those thick books. She put on her widest doe-eyed look and said that she was buying them based on the list given by 'onii-chan'. That usually stopped any more questions.

There were some perks to being underestimated.

She had also developed the habit of poking into things that were traditionally not her business—like the boring, kanji-laden newspaper where updates in politics and crime are usually sighted, and she diligently cut them up for future references. She thought that Light might appreciate the additional information on criminals too. She scheduled more and more of her meetings with Matsuda to happen in his office, with the excuse that his was so conveniently downtown. That way, she could casually open the police database while pretending to open her Mixi and Twitter account, replying to all the messages by her adoring fans. Really, he should know better now than to keep his password memorized by his computer, especially when they're all supposedly going after a criminal genius. She wasn't going to complain out loud about it, though, since she benefited from it.

She memorized some of the ongoing police cases and investigations the way she had memorized her scripts—she turned them into stories in her head. The protagonist was the victim, meeting a painful fate with their encounter with the criminal, the criminal the villain. The story climaxes with death. Sometimes it ends with an arrest or a dead criminal. Sometimes it becomes a tragedy when all that remains is the person-shaped hole in the family, with the police not having any progress on who the criminal was.

For the first time in her life Misa wondered why school work couldn't be as interesting as real life. She was sure she could've done better if that was the case.

Most of the stories she made up in her head ended up as tragedies, of course. Hey, she was reading the crime section, after all, what could one expect?

Think happy thoughts, she repeated to herself, imagining that she was learning to fly, instead. Think happy thoughts. Think low calorie cheesecake, think a series of new outfit given away for free from Baby! Think Light holding you and kissing!

She tried not to think of the glimpses of black hair that her imagination sometimes came up with instead. As far as her conscious was sure, it was Not Happening.

'-

The politician looked uneasy, Misa thought critically. She was staring at a piece of Yoshiuri Shimbun that she had just cut up, and not really in the mood to read the article beyond the headlines. Yet there was something about the balding governor of Tokyo in the picture that caught her attention. She couldn't help but stare at him and turn the print this way and that, wondering what is it exactly that she missed.

She remembered that she had a similar feeling earlier that day when she was collecting from a different newspaper and she quickly searched for that article. Ah, there goes the gokudo-related headline. Yondaime of the Haneda-gumi convicted on several counts of tax evasion. She snorted at that, the same way that she did the first time she read it. For a man neck deep in gambling dens and various clubs, the best the Tokyo police could hit him with was tax evasion.

It was almost a joke, and she was sure she had gone over this. Yet Misa checked the article anyway as she followed her gut instinct and read it back to front again. Nothing odd or strange, Misa thought as she covered a yawn. Then, she checked the picture of the kumichou exiting from his garish chaffeured pink cadillac in front of the courts. He had a flamboyant fedora on his head, with a white scarf that stood out just as much.

She paused. Something changed, she was sure of it; she just didn't know the precise what.

"What are you looking for, Honey?" Rem asked her, hovering kindly over her shoulder. Misa frowned and shrugged, not knowing if she had any words for it.

"Something different," she said, and started going through the stack of articles she had accumulated before. She had seen this picture. It had given her a sense of déjà vu right now, but… "I know something's different now, from before, but I'm not quite sure…"

Rem, only followed in confused silence, but Misa knew she was on to something as that odd feeling at the back of her head surfaced again in several more news articles. One had a photograph of a drunk gangster, the next was a boring fluff that might as well be a company's public relations piece, complete with a picture of the company's head and the last had a bleached blond delinquent being dragged away by the police while (probably) raising his middle finger at the camera, his hand slightly off-screen in subtle censorship.

Thug Apprehended for Being a Disorderly Drunk in Kabuki-cho

Mr. Miyata Inaugurates a New Hot Spring Resort

Yankee Biker Blamed for Midnight Accident

She felt even more frustrated and sunk her face into a pillow. What do all these things have in common, anyway? And what on earth did she thought she had seen? It's not as if the pictures could change, could they?

'-

"Are you heading north now, Misa?"

Matsuda and Misa, both already on their way out to her next set, paused. It wasn't that the question was unexpected—it was the asker that was. Ryuuzaki actually paused from whatever it was that he was doing in front of his computer to look at Misa.

"Misa-Misa has a very important drama to shoot," Misa said, "Ryuuzaki better not be in the way of Misa-Misa's career. Misa-Misa wouldn't forgive him if he did."

He nodded. "Of course not. Good."

"Good?"

"It's safe there."

She waited, but there were no other words forthcoming. Misa handed her bag to Matsuda and marched all the way to Ryuuzaki's couch and even sat beside him, careless in her invasion of his personal space. "Safe?"

He blinked.

"Well, the director isn't yesterday's bigmouthed one, is it?"

Misa sighed as she pulled herself away. For a moment she half-thought he was going to say something else. She didn't know what, but just…something else. Ryuuzaki's reactions were too even, too flat for her to discern what he meant by that, or why he even felt he needed to ask it at all. "Yes, it isn't," she said.

He nodded. "Exactly. Safe."

'-

The proper beginning started at the end of an episode shoot of the TV drama Ultimate Love Honey.

They were in the penthouse that was supposed to be the dwelling of the male main character, and Misa found an appropriately out-of-the-way couch and dropped herself on it. The work was pretty interesting. Her co-star was handsome enough that his presence always made Misa felt slightly better; he was wonderful eye-candy. She could easily sigh and lose herself in his dreamy eyes whenever they were in the middle of a scene. Yet once it was over, she would rather be as far as she could from him. The poor guy had all the signs of someone head over heels and just about to ask her out on a date and she didn't feel in the mood to have to turn up her charm and let him down gently. She was going to be too brisk than he was used to.

He might not have enough guts to bear it well—he was still a newly rising star, even newer than her, after all. Poor Sumamori-kun might lose sleep over it when there really was nothing wrong with him. She was just…

She was just bored, really.

Even now, Misa couldn't quite believe the answer she came up with. Bored? Really? He knew many interesting pop-stars, and certainly many interesting nightclubs! What kind of ridiculous excuse is that to stop her from just sightseeing around the town with him without commitment? It's not as if he would refuse if she asked that they 'remain friends for now', and he would gladly still hang out with her even if that were the case. He was that transparent in his love-struck delusions. She didn't have to worry about betraying Light at all, even if she was sure that Light would certainly see someone as beginner-like as Sumamori as completely no competition at all.

But she couldn't shake the feeling that she thought of Sumamori as boring.

Compared to Light's visions of an ideal world and her ambition, compared to Ryuuzaki's interesting observation of the oddest, smallest details of anything (her newest outfit, cakes, news), Sumamori's words about the who's who of the entertainment world did not prick her interest at all. Same old people doing rather predictable things—even her rival, AYA (whose real name was Nanasawa Ayako) did not exactly have a new insult to throw.

"Did you see that Sumamori-kun didn't even talk to you just now?"AYA had said.

Yes, because you've been monopolizing him since the director said 'Cut!' Misa thought, but the smile on her face did not lessen at that, only getting wider.

"Yes, thanks for that, AYA-chan!" Misa said with a light giggle, "How did you know that he bores Misa-misa? Misa-misa finds more experienced men to be more interesting, AYA-chan."

Misa gave a vindictive smile to see that she had sent the other girl into an envious panic, now definitely having second thoughts whether she had actually did the right thing in approaching him instead of tying her career down with an attachment to a new entrant (Take that, you jealous bint!). For all her apparent sugar, Misa-misa was an old hand in this industry.

Matsuda hadn't arrived to pick her up yet, so she settled with walking out to the balcony and enjoy the night winds and the city lights, away from AYA. No one would think of looking for her there, at least not until everyone was ready to go and that would still be some time. AYA still had a scene or so, while Misa was mostly free by now.

That was when she noticed the columns of black smoke rising to her southwest, in the city proper. She didn't do anything as she watched the wisps and curls, her attention drawn in by the complex pattern they weaved in the air. They were almost like clouds, she thought, only black. They hung above some district like uncomfortable dream jolting one awake in the middle of the night. Only the faint sound of sirens in the distance, reedy from being buffeted and stretched thin by the winds of this height, pulled her out of the haze of her musings. Only then did her eyes widen as horror struck her. She wasn't shooting anything anymore and this isn't a movie special effect. This is real.

Whatever happened in downtown Tokyo is real, no matter how serene it seemed at this distant.

It's safe there, Ryuuzaki had said before, and she felt her spine chill at the remembrance. Now she could see that he seemed vaguely pleased then. Satisfied. Now she knew why.

Down there certainly isn't safe at all.

'-

Misa had everything on hand and the moment Matsuda showed up, she pulled him by the arm straightaway. The usually easygoing policeman looked exhausted; Misa wasn't surprised by it.

"Let's go! Misa-misa is tired of waiting for too long! Matsuda-san is inconsiderate of Misa-Misa." She said, still managing a pout. Matsuda tried to smile, but even Misa could see that it didn't quite reach his eyes. She slowed down when it became clear that she was dragging him, that Matsuda didn't even try to keep up with her speed as he leaned back on the closest wall.

"I'm sorry, really," he wheezed. "But we can't."

"Can't what?"

"Go, anywhere, especially not downtown. Let's just stay here for the night, shall we? I'm sure they've prepared a room for Misa-chan here, right?" He looked earnest and pleading, and she was sure if she pressed him he would've begged that they stay there. She took a different tack.

"Is there a fire? Or maybe, a riot?" Misa asked innocently, knowing full well why Matsuda was suddenly coughing into his hand. "I could see the smoke from the balcony, you know."

Ignoring a wrong-footed Matsuda, Misa remembered that if she couldn't get out, she might as well just open the newspaper clippings that had been giving her a headache the day before. It was a good thing she had thought to carry them with her. She tossed her hair and swept away with usual magnificence. "Fine! Misa-misa is going to stay, but you better tell Ryuuzaki that I want to go clothes-shopping again and he better pay. Bye, Matsuda!"

She disappeared in a riot of lace and ribbons, to the confusion of her manager.

'-

The miserable pieces of newspaper cuttings in front of her did not give her an easier time as she spread them on the bed of the room assigned to her. No two people came up in more than one cutting, there wasn't any similarity in the type of news that she had chosen (other than how some were crimes and others weren't).

Where should she start? The feeling that something was different about them. Misa sighed and ran her gaze lazily across all the pictures, thinking that she isn't seeing the news website. Printed news don't change real time…

She gasped.

Something did. Something just changed, and she began to understand what (the floating numbers), more questions came in the form of why. Misa ran out. If Matsuda wasn't going to be cooperative, well, Misa would just have to go out alone, right? She wanted to know if her guess was right. She needed to know—she didn't want to be that girl who knew nothing and could do nothing again. She was done being that girl. At the very least though, she was sure that she knew something neither Light nor L knew. She just had to make sure that it was actually worth something.

'-

L was in the middle of a fracas.

Well, that was a euphemism he thought lightly, currently in an outfit patterned with varying shades of dark grey urban camo, his face hidden as much as most of everyone else's—well, most that wasn't law-abiding citizens cowering and running away, that is. Some stores were smashed, but no looters would dare to enter the combat zone at all for only a few trinkets, not when everyone was in a rage.

The gokudo had kept their principle of not involving the katagi, the normal citizens in the furor, but L was curious if it would hold up as the week goes on. Well, that was why he was here after all. To watch. To see how this developed.

This mess would probably only show up as a few informative lines on page three in tomorrow's newspaper, this inter-gang war. If it had only been confined to a few streets, it might have still come up a little low on the front page. The front page news would be below the news of kickback scandal involving a certain large dam that had several members of the Construction Ministry under fire that would certainly surface tomorrow. Yet a mess this big at the heart of the city (even if it was a rather shady side of the city) wasn't going to make the Tokyo Metropolitan Police look good. It wasn't going to let the government look good.

Hence, it would be out of the media.

It wouldn't be hard to do so. Several small tokushu hojin (more or less state-owned corporations) owned controlling stakes in various major mass media. They were organizations with mundane name and boring descriptions that have eluded the spotlight for years. If any of them received unwanted attention, it was also not hard for the government to disband them altogether and make a new one, with a different name, with the exact same functions. It would be so easy to clamp any news, L thought as he avoided a hotheaded young man with a katana in hand. He moved outside of the man's sword arm, pushed his arm upwards to neutralize him while throwing him over hip. He flung the man back in the direction of the main fight before prowling away quickly. He had to make sure he did not venture too far from the shadows of the buildings like he just did. There was no use in getting carried away, not right now.

He was here to see if Haneda-gumi's Godaime could take on Tsurumi-gumi with not much bloodshed. In fact, it wasn't even supposed to turn out like this. The two groups had gotten on the same table three weeks ago and a merger was a very close option, a peaceful resolution for everyone. Of course for a group as local as Tsurumi-gumi, their head was still quite involved in affairs in the field. The downside of that was their head would be vulnerable if the organized crime division of the Tokyo Met ever got their hands on some evidence. The head had gone into jail. Kira caught up with Tsurumi Kosuke the same way he (or she, L corrected privately) caught up with a good portion of other gang members that happened to be in jail at that time.

Tsurumi Kosuke received Kira's brand of divine justice, along with several high ranking members of other yakuza families and all hell broke loose.

There was a large power shift after that, a disequilibrium of underground Tokyo, and the city was boiling beneath the surface as power vacuums occurred in various levels of different gangs with the death of many members in jail. It was not going to be a good thing, but Ryuuzaki couldn't help the slight upward curve of his lips. Any plans made long before now would have to be discarded now as their foundation turned as reliable as quicksand. It meant that many of his longer-termed plans no longer mean anything either, but it did not sadden him. It was exhilirating. The winds of change was blowing, challenging him.

What would you do now, Light? I'm sure you didn't take into account that your actions unbalanced the status quo. Did you know that the city you live in is as fragile as a house of cards?

'-