A/N: I'm sorry that this is nearly indecipherable madness, but all of our sanity anchors are steadily getting more and more insane so it's becoming difficult to find a POV that actually makes sense. It's like that part in Hamlet where Ophelia out-crazies Hamlet, except in our version, Horatio decides to join in.

In the meantime, feel free to review to express your anger and confusion.

CASUAL CONVERSATIONS

The mirror on my wall
Casts an image dark and small
But I'm not sure at all it's my reflection.
-Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall, Simon and Garfunkle

"This isn't a war." The journalist didn't look to see if the demon was watching, to see if his blue eyes were trained on the weary figure of the writer or on some distant future. God or devil: Neal no longer cared; he no longer knew what disguise he was wearing and couldn't force himself to look long enough.

"It's not a war; it's something else. Something worse." War had purpose, war had ideals and motives—it had a reason behind it. What did this have? It had a Shinigami, that's what it had. It had a being, it had a thing caught between angel and devil, it had his blue eyes.

He had always thought it was the documentary—he had thought it was because of him. He was wrong. He could see that now. Everything was wrong: he was the distraction, he was the red herring. He was what the war was supposed to be about; or at least that's what everyone had thought. That's what they had told themselves when they could come up with nothing else.

It's what he had thought; it's what he had thought for years. It was still true, but only partly true—because then there was the Shinigami. The Shinigami that had always been there, his blue eyes watching every move, placing every piece upon the chessboard. It was the Shinigami's game, and no one was winning.

"You don't want to win." Neal finally turned to look at the childish demon, the thing that hid behind the masks the world had given him: divinity, humanity, war, death, and those wide blue eyes.

"Your world needs someone to curse, Nealan." The Shinigami finally spoke, sounding neither like a demon or a human. The Shinigami had always been wavering between God and devil, though he resembled neither. "Whether it's me or you, L or Yagami, they need someone to throw bricks at. I give them the reason."

"There is no reason. It's an illusion. You have no motives, no goal—nothing that drives you. You are neither God nor the devil."

The thing turned to look at him, its eyes baleful, the blue glinting like silver. The god of death began to smile.

"As I said, it's you who needs someone to curse, someone to worship and condemn. But you and I will both remember who picked up that Notebook and who decided to use it."

Neal interrupted before the white-haired child could continue. "I never used it! I never wrote a word in the damn thing."

"Oh no, you did something far worse. You revealed it. Did you ever imagine, with all your hopes and dreams, that people wanted to know? That they were merely the food source for a few apathetic gods of death?" He laughed, the mention of his own people causing his grin to widen and his eyes to sharpen.

"You need me, just like the world needs you, because without me, how would you ever face your guilt?"

"Yes, we have our own gods and demons, just like you."

The demon's bitter tone was a familiar one; it was the one that painted the grim nights, the one that haunted his nightmares and dreams, the one that distorted reality and turned his life into a vision of masked death. Neal had always been able to recognize that tone of voice.

"I didn't ask." He never asked. Why bother? The answers were always backwards, riddled and confused, mumbled and jumbled into a mess of philosophy and reality. No, he never bothered to ask; he merely listened to the twisted path of the answer and tried his best to avoid choosing at the fork in the road.

"We're not so very different from you, in that respect. The difference lies in the fact that we have never doubted our gods. They have always been there and they have always been present. Even as we curse them and rot into our graves, we know who to aim the curses at."

Lost in the dark—without a thread, without a mark. He never asked because, as fortune had it, he never particularly enjoyed the answers. The Shinigami was human enough. The eyes may betray him, but only if he looked too closely.

"There is our creator, then there is our death. That's all." The words drifted back in the labyrinth from which they came, the omniscient child continued to watch the inner workings of his not-war, tracking the movements of his not-quite enemies.

That's all. As if he had asked for conclusion, as if he had ever asked for answers. Or at least he had not asked for them since he had been a young man, since he had been a fool, since he had first held the notebook. He had not asked for answers since then, because he knew they came with too hefty a price.

(And he still remembered the Shinigami, with his wide blue eyes and his ghostly face framed by white hair. "The price is misfortune, the consequence is death." He hadn't asked the question then either, but now he knew what the question should have been and he wished he had understood sooner.)

"I suppose it's the same for us, then." The present god who chose to be absent, the ever-present death who never chose to leave. He could see it; he had been living with it long enough. He could see its blue eyes.

"If you have a god, I have yet to meet him." The demon sighed, his bandaged hands reaching for the black notebook hanging at his side.

"Kira—he isn't a god, then?"

The blue eyes glared at the sheer arrogance, the assumption, the presumptuous nature of the escaped questions. The wrong questions—why were they always the wrong questions?

"He was a man. Now he's a corpse."

The fledgling Shinigami sat together around the gambling pits, waiting for inspiration to strike. With nowhere to turn, they turned to guilt. Where to lay the guilt? Because it had to be somebody's fault, after all. The older ones were dead or dying; they wouldn't talk, and what information they gave was next to useless. They had inherited the mess, and they wanted to know on whose head they could lay the blame.

"So who do we blame for this mess? Ryuk had the idea… Isn't he the one that started this?" asked the first Shinigami, looking around to his brothers for approval. They shook their heads grimly, looking towards each other.

"Yeah, but he wasn't the one who actually dropped it. He just had the idea. No, the real fault belongs to Sidoh, who dropped it in the first place."

A different Shinigami interrupted, this one's eyes freshly bandaged after too many hours staring at the mortal sun. "But he didn't actually get the Notebook himself. Wasn't his book—it was the human-looking one's. What's his face, Achos or something."

"Even after they dropped it, though, Kira picked it up. Kira got people looking for it, got people to notice it."

"But then it was Adessi who made the video."

"Yeah, but after that, Achos again. He went down there and stirred things up, kept the mask thing going. Killing everyone off. I say it's his fault."

"Ryuk was the first."

"What about Adessi? The humans blame Adessi, you know."

"And what about the King? What about him? Sitting on his throne all day long, never hear a word from Grandfather. Let the whole thing happen I tell you. You didn't hear him saying anything when the notebook was stolen, did you?"

"It's Ryuk's fault—I'm telling you, it's his fault!"

"Adessi. Everyone knows it's Adessi!"

"Sidoh's stupidity."

"Achos's Notebook, his problem."

"Ryuk's ideas."

"The King's silence."

"Kira's ambition."

Ryuk. Sidoh. Achos. Kira. Adessi. King.

And while the squabbled amongst themselves, they failed to notice the blue eyes in the distance, peering like stars down upon their circled arguments, the unlucky bones of the long dead animals, and the gambler's dice.

Naomi Misora's shadow had wings of a raven and the smile of a crescent moon. Stolen jewelry decorated his black and shriveled fingers; a silver heart hung from his ear. He grinned down upon her, casting a shadow far longer than himself.

"You said you came to watch the show," she said.

It laughed in response, and she wondered if it was affirmation or something else. Irony, perhaps—the world seemed to be full of it, of late. Full of lies and half-truths, but irony above it all. She could understand that.

"I didn't think that gods of death would care." She had assumed they wouldn't be watching him as well, watching as he slid down the crevasse. No, not slid—jumped, dived… he was going in head-first and leaving the rest of them to watch.

"Most don't." It (he?) chose not to elaborate, leaving her to draw her own befuddled conclusions.

"And yet you came down for a first row seat." Somehow, in spite of everything, in spite of its starvation and its damnation, it had come down to watch a single man find his way into the dark. What made Yagami so damn special? (She knew the answer to that, though; she had known it for a while. For who else dived into the dark?)

"Consider it a compliment. If you want. You mortals aren't usually worth our time."

She knew, she could see it. The gods never had time for anyone. They had been absent all her life and only now did they appear, when she needed them least. She had never asked for the presence of a god.

"So then why not talk to him directly—why through me?" Why not become his hallucination? Why not become one more image in the mirror, one more wavering line between reality and dream? Why not?

"He isn't dying fast enough."

She wasn't afraid to die. She had been ready when Raye had gone—or at least she had been ready to conquer death. She had been ready when she signed up for the war. She had always known she was unlucky; they were all unlucky. Why else would they wear fake faces like they did?

"Fun. I never expected a God of Death to be preoccupied with fun." But what had she expected, the grim reaper? Had she expected something serious, something that respected humanity, something that both hated and loved them? Why should she have expected such a gift when she had received none before?

She should have known when Kira first arrived, she should have known then. But it still hurt to know that they're practically worthless, that they're really only a source of amusement. It hurt more than she expected it to.

"Did you expect me to be after your soul?"

It had a point, and that probably hurt the most.

"Frankly, yes, I would have been happier if you had something more sinister than fun on your agenda."

Naomi decided that some things didn't matter in the end. Humans and Shinigami were only an insignificant few.

"I am not war. Neither am I plague, nor famine nor drought."

The third face of death stood before the world, a silver watch in his hand, his black gloves hiding the stains of blood. His amber eyes locked upon the crowd, watching as they gathered before him (beneath him). They looked upon him in horror and anger, for he had stolen their children away, he had burned their crops, he had caused their disease. His hands were dripping with their blood.

"I am all of these things."

The mothers were crying for their dead. His amber eyes continue to watch them, watching for any sign of rebellion. His hands were covered in their blood.

"You're death!" they cried, as if it were an insult. He cocked his head, his eyes turning to the watch in his hand, his people gathered beneath (before) him. It hardly mattered that they came with torches in their hands.

"Yes, I am death. I have always been death. I have always been here, in your homes, in your fields, in your taverns and your villages. I haunt peasant and king alike. I am everywhere and nowhere, and none can escape me."

"You've killed our children!"

"And I will kill your children again. I kill everyone's children. Does it really matter, though? I kill equally. I come for all your souls. But look at you—you take only the lives you dislike. And really, that's no way to live. I come bearing you a gift."

The audience stared in growing horror. One brave soul began to laugh, falling into hysterics beneath death's dark, human gaze. "And what great boon would death dare to deliver us?"

"I give you equality. King or queen, merchant or peasant…. Only nothingness awaits you. I give you time, just as I take it away. I give you a way that is fair. There is no luck, no fate or fortune. Only nothingness. And it is the greatest thing I have to give."