Author's note: Welcome to chapter eleven, thank you to readers, reviewers, and to fan fiction which allows me to be nerdy in a very cool way. And I am sorry if Chuck Norris came after you in the night, I'm sure it was a very traumatizing experience. Alas on with the show.
Thank you to Scourge who during my flu epidemic managed to edit when I was too brain dead to think.
Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note. I will never own Death Note. I wish I used to own Death Note then I could be stalked by an apple loving shinigami too!
It wasn't often that Raito got a bad feeling about situations. Well, to be honest, that was a lie—he felt bad about situations all the time, and this time was no different. Hand-cuffs plus insomniac-paranoid-detectives equals damn. Literally and figuratively. Damn. The only thing that could possibly make this worse would be if his old-self happened to walk through the door. Then things would get really nasty.
Of course, the whole situation wasn't his fault. Not at all. Nope. Well, again, that was a lie. It was completely his fault. If only he had been more observant and not been hit by two cars, then maybe he could have run off into the night, tapes dropped at Soichiro's feet. That would have been the ideal situation. But ideal situations, being what they are, had tended to avoid him recently.
Hence, he was sitting on the floor staring at a steaming cup of coffee, unable to reach it due to the fact that the world's greatest living detective (everyone knew Sherlock Holmes was really the best) had just cuffed his hands for no apparent reason. Oh, wait. There was a reason. He wanted to play interrogation. He wanted to play interrogation. Was it just Raito, or did that sound like a hooker-role-play/date rape scene? Hell, they even had the hand cuffs.
He didn't regret it; he didn't regret killing the man at all. Sometimes he would feel pity towards the bastard, but then he remembered the hand cuffs. The lovely, cold, unrepentant, Godforsaken hand cuffs. Would anyone regret it?
"Would Nathanial-kun please stop staring at the back of my head as if he wished to murder me?" L's head turned a fraction of an inch away from the screen where Misa's hand-made videos played. Raito's eyebrows raised as soon as L deemed it unworthy to engage in a staring match. Kill him? Why bother? He'd done it once—no need to make his point twice.
"Who said anything about murder? I was thinking we could play torture the infidels, and I was thinking that you can be my first victim!" Raito's unusually cheerful tone caused L's head once more to turn slowly in his direction, along with everyone else in the room to lose focus.
"Infidels?" sputtered Ukita, Raito's latest witness to the effects of thousands of years of talking to practically no one and murdering thousands. Obviously, he hadn't gotten over the shock yet… not that anyone ever did.
"Figure of speech. You don't take jokes well. Why am I the only one who can take a joke?" It was a good question; of course, there had been a time when he also hadn't been able to take a joke. But that was a long time ago, before years of bitterness and depression set in.
For about the third time that night, the task force seemed to sigh in relief and turned to look at L questioningly, most likely thinking, 'Why is this loony here and not in a padded room?', then went back to work. What a day.
Of course, there was not much he would be doing beside this. He could, of course, track down Misa, but so far he was not feeling motivated to stalk his stalker. However poetic and ironic that would be, it didn't sound helpful, and it could end very badly. Besides L, there were few people he could hardly stand, and L he had grudging respect for, even if it was rapidly going down the drain. Misa, however—she had no such respect, and he would be dammed if he approached her of his own volition.
And he didn't want to confront her shinigami eyes face to face. Who knows what they would reveal to her, and subsequently, to L. She would be caught, that was certain, and then she would rat, because, unfortunately, Raito had looked in a mirror recently and what he saw was not impressive. While he wasn't fat, it wasn't great being on the starving side of the spectrum either. A tan would have been nice, and normal colored eyes—not a bizarre mix of red and brown. But the face that was reflected across the glass was someone he could hardly recognize; only years of seeing a stranger in the mirror had allowed him the ability not to be so disturbed by what he saw there. To put it bluntly, he didn't look human and he doubted that any woman would be dumb enough to fall for his (lacking) charm now.
"So, Nathanial-kun, where are you from?" Matsuda had been the quickest one to adapt to his rather dramatic presence; unfortunately, he was also the one who asked all the annoying questions.
"Japan." This, of course, was his usual one-word response to annoying questions such as these; he had tried sticking with just yes-no answers, but that didn't work with every question.
"Where in Japan?" continued the blundering idiot wonder. Raito always knew he had been stupid, but this was pushing it. To any normal person such as Aizawa, or even silent Mogi, Raito looked like someone who had lost his mind, not someone to start small talk with.
"Er…. Japan?" Raito was not unaware of the great detective L's eyes once more turning from the screen. Best not to mention any city—Japan was a large enough country. He couldn't narrow him down from there. Right?
"Oh… okay. How about your family? Got any siblings?" After being deterred for only one second, Matsuda fired the next question, causing Raito to grow in awe of the man he had once thought absolutely useless.
"Yes, I had a sister." No use in lying. L couldn't find out anything on him through siblings. There were plenty of two child families in the world… and in Japan.
"Had? Where is she now?" Obvious. That should have been Matsuda's name. Captain Obvious.
"Estranged. My parents abhor me. I doubt they even know I'm living; probably think I was shot to death in a warehouse by the police…."
"That's terrible!"
"Hmmmmm, I find it ironic, but that might be because I'm old."
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L stared blankly at the television screen, which was now alive with static and white noise. The situation was not good—for one thing, there seemed to be more than one Kira on the loose, and secondly, this Kira didn't seem to have any qualms with making demands via television and letting the magic of the bloodthirsty mob do its work. If the police agreed to help 'Kira', then L would, as a sign of good faith, be forced to show himself on public television. And, of course, saying no to Kira would just have the same effect… only people might be a tad bit more angry when he didn't show.
But the worst thing of all was that, if his hunch was correct, he had just managed to handcuff this second Kira for questioning in his hotel headquarters. Rash, impulsive, cunning—these were not the traits of the first Kira. These were the traits of someone much more likely to demand his face publicized on television. Nathanial.
Said suspect seemed bored out of his mind at the moment, as he was questioned about his personal life by an ever eager Matsuda, who was not deterred in the slightest when he got only vague one word answers. Of course, this was probably more annoying than Kira asking to see his face on television.
"Oh, thank God, Ryuga, the home-videos are over. Can we please get this role play over with so I can leave?" said Nathanial begging with his eyes—a very eerie thing to watch, since Nathanial looked so out of place as it was.
"This is an interrogation, Kira-san, and I would expect that you take this seriously." L tried to ignore the unsurprised looks on his task force's faces; clearly, they were on the same thought track as him. Also annoying. The world's greatest detective shouldn't be matched in deductive reasoning by Matsuda.
"Alright, agent Smith, fire away!" The pale youth tried to pull one hand up to possibly salute L, but then seemed to remember that it was hand cuffed along with his other hand behind his back.
"Nice try Kira-san, but you're going to have to do better than that." L had indeed nearly responded to the jibe, but caught himself in the nick of time before he could launch a useless bickering match with Nathanial.
"Are you trying to distract me, Smith? It's not going to work."
Once again, L stopped himself from answering back in a less than friendly manner. He took a breath and continued from the line of questioning he originally intended.
"Why did Kira-san go to collect the tapes from Sakura television when he so obviously planted them himself?"
"Is that loaded question a blank? Because I don't have a bullet proof vest, but if you have to shoot someone, shoot Matsuda." Nathanial looked down at his dark attire in disappointment, obviously wishing he had brought some sort of garment to stop bullets.
"That did not answer my question in the slightest, Kira-san. Does Kira-san need more persuasion?"
"But it was a stupid question—you already answered it. Why would you want to hear the same answer twice?" remarked Nathanial casually, seeming to lose interest in L's evaporating interrogation. To be frank, L was losing interest as well.
"So then you did send the tapes to Sakura."
"I wish the Goblin King would take you away," muttered the suspect softly, glaring at the detective's uncovered feet.
"What did you say?" said L, not quite wanting to believe what he heard.
"I wish the Goblin King would take you away! God dammit, I thought that was supposed to work. Oh well, what did you say?"
"That's it, Watari bring out the mace." L motioned to Watari, who was standing stalk still, mouth hanging down to his knees like the rest of the task force, and apparently not in any mood to take orders from L no matter how great a detective he may be. Of course, though, Matsuda was the quickest to respond and point out the obvious.
"Isn't that illegal?" Matsuda's face was sculpted into a look of shocked horror at the prospect of torturing Nathanial without any reason or warrant allowing him to do so.
"Of course it's illegal,l but Kira-san is a hardened criminal who must be stopped!"
"Ryuzaki, he looks like a drug addict." This seemed to be the common thought of all the men on the task force, each one staring at Nathanial's bizarre clothing and dilated eyes.
"I do not look like a…. Oh my God, I do, wow, I would have killed myself if I had ever thought this was conceivable. But I am handcuffed, being interrogated for something I didn't do, and I look like a drug addict. This is pathetic." Nathanial then shook his head in dismay, a wry smile forming its way across his face.
L, feeling discouraged, decided to act by applying the mace directly into Nathanial's eyes. He would have used something a tad more potent, but unfortunately hotel rooms were usually not equipped with the standard torture merchandise.
"Ouch! I forgot how terrible mace tasted, ew, it will take me weeks to get this out of my mouth." Coughing and gagging, Nathanial squinted his eyes shut, possibly annoyed but not nearly as ready to confess as L had hoped.
"Is Nathanial-kun Kira?" asked L calmly, spraying the mace once more into his suspect's eyes.
"You are asking the wrong question, and using the wrong tense. But either way, my answer is still no," said Nathanial equally calmly, his eyes watering slightly but his amused smile returning. His face grew darker with thoughts L could not hope to perceive.
"I don't believe Nathanial-kun." L raised the mace a third time, prepared to spray it with little effect upon his victim.
"Hey, I have a better idea. Put away the mace, Ryuga." Nathanial visibly brightened, his good mood returning spontaneously, causing L and the other task force members to blink.
Clearly interrogating was going to get L nowhere, and torture didn't seem to affect the young man either. That left him basically two choices: one, he could continue to interrogate and threaten torture until Nathanial broke or two, he could stop where he was and launch into yet another battle of wills with a man who seemed to be bipolar.
"I'm not sure if you've realized this, but I am an extraordinarily talented individual. Many of my talents include bullshitting, negotiating, and, my personal favorite, inconceivable acts of escape. That's not to say I don't get into these situations easily, but I get out of them with a few minor gun wounds; we'll not mention those." Nathanial smiled slowly, an idea clearly brimming beneath his red-brown eyes. It made L uneasy, "So I propose we make a bet, Ryuga. If I lose, I answer all your questions and more. Yes, that means everything, and when I say everything, I mean everything. However, if I win, I walk, free of hand cuffs and any recording system of any kind."
"What exactly does this bet entail?" asked L warily. He was negotiating with a suspect who wouldn't respond to torture or questioning. L wondered idly if Nathanial even felt pain—his last gruesome display of blood would have been enough to kill a normal man, but all he had done was scream a few curse words.
"Strip poker. We all have to play. You keep the clothes you win and lose the clothes you lose. In other words, once your pants are gone they're gone." Nathanial finished his statement by taking a card deck out of his coat pocket and beginning to shuffle it between his pale hands.
"Nathanial-kun, you want to play strip poker…" repeated L dimly, feeling his hopes of a psychological discussion going down the drain.
"Well, I don't want to, but I am in no mood for torture. Neither of us has the time; we're both busy, you with your investigation and me with my… meandering. And besides, I've played my way out of many a situation before. I once got myself out of being assassinated by playing strip poker. You'd be surprised what you can accomplish with just a simple deck of cards and a disgustingly thin figure." Nathanial, to L's infinite surprise, looked completely serious, as if he believed what he was saying.
"Nathanial-kun wishes to play strip poker with me in order to gain his freedom?" asked L again, more slowly this time to make sure he enunciated each word with precision.
"Trust me, this is not the worst thing I have done to get out of a bad situation. Besides, you have a chance of winning, and then you'll have all the answers you'll ever need to know. Probably more than you need to know. Or, for that matter, will want to know."
"You said yourself that you were a liar. How will I know that what you tell me is the truth?"
"Well, Ryuga, to me, lies are lies and promises are promises. Lies are just words—meaningless. A promise is a shackle, something that binds me to my decisions, so rest that assured if I lose I will tell you the truth, whether you want to hear it or not."
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Raito only won strip poker every time he played for two reasons. The first was cheating, and more cheating had always gotten him the winning hand… although it is hard to hide cards up your sleeves when you lose your shirt. The second reason was the one he never liked to admit—people just didn't want to see him half-naked.
In truth, Raito had lost a quite a lot of pounds over the years and he had never been considered overweight before—not to mention his skin pigmentation had gone down the drain ages ago. Pale starving men were not something most people wanted to see. Normal people, that is, and Twilight fans weren't what he considered normal.
So whenever Raito ended up too close to losing his pants the other players would bail. It was a win-win situation, as his legs didn't get cold and the participants' eyes were not permanently scarred. Of course, the last time he had played strip-poker was to get himself out of having to play politics with various inhuman creatures from heaven, and that had been a very long time ago.
"So, gentlemen, which one of you will be the first to lose his shoes?" Raito smiled as he shuffled the deck, watching each one of their unnerved faces; oh, they were making this far too easy.
"I hate to inform Nathanial-kun that I am not wearing shoes." Everyone, that is except L. He always had to make things exceedingly difficult.
"It was a general statement, Ryuga. The world does not revolve around you." Damn right, it revolved around the one and only Light Yagami… but he didn't have to know that.
"I insinuated that I believed the world was in orbit around myself?" said a bemused L. Of course, he felt he had to throw in the fancy wording, just so Matsuda could sit there and look like a dead plant.
"So then, you do believe the world revolves around you. And I thought I was arrogant." Raito shook his head in what most would perceive as disappointment, but what L would see as an insult to his intellect. Before L could interrupt with a witty comeback, Raito dealt out five cards to each player.
"Um, how does this help the investigation?" asked Matsuda, whose question was no doubt running through everyone's minds at the moment.
"It doesn't. It's just amusing to watch middle-aged men squirm." Raito's answer, predictably, didn't help at all and only made the taskforce less enthused to play cards with a complete nutcase.
"So, then, we don't really have to play, do we?" Aizawa glared at Raito, which was something that had happened, even before he had shown up as the red-headed wonder. Aizawa had never been too keen on Raito; apparently his death hadn't changed his opinion.
"No, I suppose you don't, but where's the fun in that?" Raito paused, laying his cards face down on the table. "But that, of course, means Ryuga loses the bet and I get to walk out of here scotch free, and he most certainly doesn't want that."
If there was one thing in the world Raito knew for sure, it was that L hated to lose. L would rather lay dying on the floor with his enemy smiling down on him than admit defeat. Kira was the same way, but that was a long time ago and frankly, at the moment Raito felt his survival was higher on his list of priorities than the petty need for victory. L had lost the battle, it was true, but he hadn't lost the war. It had just taken him five more years and two idiot apprentices to achieve victory. But then, who cared about details like those?
"That's it, I'm leaving. I can't stand this nutcase. Strip poker?! What the hell does he think this is, anyway? Playtime?" Aizawa stood abruptly, his afro remaining firmly gelled in place. Raito watched him with a smug smile; they really were making this fun.
"Playtime? Please, Aizawa, I'm not a five-year-old. I'd prefer to call it an educational opportunity." Raito briefly wondered if he should have blurted his name, but then forgot about it as the taskforce member's eyebrows crashed down like lightning.
"See, he doesn't even pretend to be remotely serious about anything! I don't even know why he bothered to get those damn tapes!" shouted the policeman, his eyes staring down at Raito in a boiling rage. That was when Raito's good humor started to fade; he could only take so much criticism from humans who had no idea what it was like to be him.
"I got them because you would have botched it and then someone would have died. You people are so prone to fits of anger. That's what your problem is. If you only calmed down a little and analyzed the situation you wouldn't be stuck here with me." His voice had lost most of its upbeat quality and now reminded him of a younger version of himself, more sober and serious far too concerned about the world's affairs.
"Why do you think you're so great? Who made you so special?" He remembered why he had disliked Aizawa now—possibly more irritating than L himself.
"Hey! I do not have a god-complex! If I were God, why would I even bother talking to the mortal fools? I'd smite all you hypocritical bastards. Who made you so damn special, Aizawa? Because it sure as hell wasn't me." It was true; Raito remembered having more fun killing the humans than he had saving them.
"You know, I think I would rather play strip poker than listen to you two argue." Soichiro mumbled incoherently, Mogi nodded in agreement, and Matsuda coughed nervously.
"Well, why didn't someone say so? I was waiting for the law abiding folk deciding whether or not to gamble." Raito chuckled mentally at the suppressed anger on all the men's faces; even L looked ready to break into a tantrum.
Ryuk was right in one respect: humans were fun.
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The one thing Naomi hadn't expected was for everything to remain the same; to find herself back in the Tokyo she had died in. No flying cars, no teleportation—just normal people walking about in normal clothes.
This must have been the Tokyo Light Yagami had lived in, killed in, and eventually, as the stories would have had it, died in. She felt utterly lost amidst the ongoing traffic of people.
Of course, when she had arrived she had been even more frazzled. When they sent her back, they hadn't explained she'd be in the exact spot where she committed suicide. Which, of course, had been the first pond she had found. She had been brainwashed. Brilliant ways of committing suicide and not being found had escaped her. She blamed Kira—if he had wanted her to do something fantastic he should have written it down that way.
Cheap bastard.
After much struggling underwater, trying to remove the cement blocks she had tied to her feet, she managed to reach the surface and cough up the water trapped in her lungs for about five minutes straight. Naomi noted that if she were to ever commit suicide again, she would avoid drowning at all costs; it was not worth the effort. It was only after getting rid of all the water did she notice the various families staring at her in horror.
She forgot that she had committed suicide in a park, of all places.
At first they had simply gawked at her, until one of them asked if she was a mermaid. She had asked them if they saw a fish tail anywhere near her.
That had defiantly been the worst part of the day; the next worst part was going back to her and Raye's apartment and trying to barter the landlord to find out what they did with her clothes. (She found her wallet soaked and useless in her back pocket) It turns out that her landlord didn't believe in miracles or missing people and simply thought that she was skipping her rent and therefore refused to say what the police did with her clothes.
Honestly, what was wrong with these people?
So, as a result, she had to sit in her soaking wet clothes with her soaking wet money thinking about her revenge that didn't look as if it would happen any time soon. Somehow, Kira had made everyone in this world more of a self-centered jerk than they already were. That, and they tended to stare a lot more than they used to. Or maybe that was due to the fact she had crawled out of a lake and tried to buy coffee with wet slabs of paper.
This was by far the worst day of her life. She found herself asking if it could possibly get any worse. Unfortunately for her, it could and did.
The gay clown started dancing towards her. When she said 'gay clown', she meant that the man's face was covered in a white powder-like substance and his blue lips were spread into a sharp-toothed grin that stretched (literally) from ear to ear. If that hadn't been enough to run off in the other direction, then maybe the clothes bordering on a Marilyn Manson want-to-be, along with every bangle and jangle one could imagine. That, and he seemed to be walking right towards her.
Naomi didn't always make the best decisions, but she was a relatively normal human being, so when she saw a seven-foot-tall clown dancing towards, her she did what most normal people would do: scream and run off in the other direction, cursing the lack of insight not to bring a can of mace with her, all the while hearing the chuckles of the possessed clown.
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"You can't be serious," muttered an incredulous Aizawa, staring at Nathanial's fifth consecutive winning hand. Anger had given way to awe then to exasperation and now to the faint suspicion that the red haired individual was somehow managing to hide aces up his sleeves without a shirt on.
Overall, L was grudgingly impressed, or at least he would have if he wasn't losing at strip poker with a man who would no doubt laugh his ass off when he thought about it later. L, strip poker: the words put together in a sentence made them meaningless mumbo-jumbo. Besides, L was worried he might run out of clothes.
L had already lost his shirt, and unlike the other men he didn't have many neck ties or socks and shoes to lose to Nathanial.
L didn't have the dignity to lose to Nathanial, of all people.
"Come on, Matsuda, strip like you mean it! Strip like a man! Well… a man who really likes pole dancing." Nathanial's words didn't convey as much sympathy as he might have intended; Matsuda sniffed as he removed his jacket.
"But what if I don't want to strip?" asked Matsuda after dropping his jacket in front of the grinning Nathanial.
"Too bad, look at the cards. They demand your clothing, not mine." Nathanial waved the array of aces in front of Matsuda's tomato red face. At least L wasn't the only one horrified with the prospect of removing his articles of clothing in front of Nathanial.
If L weren't so confused about Nathanial's seemingly-inhuman thought process he might have sworn that this whole charade was just a form of petty revenge. The terrible joy that would flash through his eyes and the dark chuckles were rather ominous.
"I love this game!"
In fact, L was positive this was a strange attempt at petty revenge or karma come to eat him alive. L dubbed it ceremoniously the worst day of his life thus far and decided that it couldn't possibly get any worse.
Author's note: You know what? Screw these update promises, I obviously can't keep them. So from now on I will update when I feel inspired, whenever that happens. Ah well.
Reviews are wonderful ways to motivate people, especially if I confused you all to death. But I couldn't resist, it was just too much fun.