Send Me An Angel

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By: Ryoko [Raiju]

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Chapter One

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"Tsuzuki! Oh god, Tsuzuki! C'mon! Aren't you listening?!" Hisoka tried and tried again, practically yelling into the man's ear as he daydreamed throughout the assignment session. "Let me try." Tatsumi smirked, pulling Hisoka gently away by the wrist.

He leaned over, putting his hand dangerously close to the brunette's weak spot. "Tsuzuki...?" he whispered. The man blinked, immediately coming back to life.

"Who, what, huh?!" he looked around like a bucket of ice-cold water had been dumped on him. Slowly, his eyes fell down to his lap and Tatsumi's hand.

The other man smiled, trying not to laugh at the blush and priceless expression on the shinigami's face. He retracted his hand, stepping backward. "Works every time."

"My god, how'd you do it?" the teenager thought about the possibilities for a second, "On second thought, I'd rather not know." His jaw had dropped at how easy it was to really wake the man up, and here he'd been doing it the hard way. "Well, we'd better get started. See ya later." He waited for his parent before leaving the room.

"So...WHAT'S our assignment?"

"Sometimes, I wish you'd listen to those meetings."

"I DO! Most of the time..." he whimpered the second half of the comeback.

"Exactly."

"Aww cut me some slack, will ya? So...what's our assignment?"

"It wasn't too clear...but first thing we gotta do is find his spirit..."

"His spirit? So we're looking for a guy's spirit?"

"Cain Asakura, age 16, supposedly he died due to suicide...but there's leads that say that it WASN'T a suicide. Basically there's no proof saying it WAS and no proof saying it WASN'T. It's annoyingly complicated."

"Sheesh...what was he? Was he...you know...?" he was uneasy talking about anything to do with suicides and suicide attempts, seeing as he'd been down that road as well.

"He was extremely suicidal, a cutter too, which made us believe it was a suicide..." they stopped on the edge of the sidewalk, waiting until the crosswalk changed. "His family never paid attention to it. If they HAD, everyone, including him, knew that the guy would be thrown into the funny farm."

"So they KNEW he was like that?"

"Very much so. Or so they told the authorities when they came to pick up the body."

"That's terrible. And what a shame, too...only a week before Christmas..." Tsuzuki mumbled, looking ahead of them. "Is that the place up there?"

"Yeah."

"Gotchya."

The day was frigid, being in the middle of winter. Snowflakes drifted down around them, blanketing the world in a layer of purity, the pure white making the world look a little less ugly than it usually did.

Not many cars passed them, and the streets weren't even packed to MINIMUM capacity for downtown Tokyo.

"It's really nice and quiet today...I wouldn't mind it slightly warmer though." Hisoka drew his winter coat closer as a gentle wind blew by.

"I know what you mean. But hey, at least we can't die of frostbite out here." He laughed, reaching the front door of the apartment complex.

The two sighed, "Here goes nothing."

The two moved at a casual pace, using the elevator to the fifth floor, and almost running to the apartment number.

"573. This is it." Hisoka murmured, slipping the piece of paper back into his pocket. The brunette knocked firmly, only to get no response.

"They're not home...?"

"Knock again."

He did as told, still getting nothing. Impatient, he pressed the side of his head against the door, listening for any sounds coming from the inside.

Silence.

"Well, nobody's home." The older shinigami tested the door, finding it open. "How careless..." the two stepped in, recoiling at the nasty smell of cigarettes and alcohol that infested the apartment. Hisoka looked around, pretty disgusted by both the smell and the appearance.

"This place is a dump." The teenager gagged, pulling his coat's collar over his nose.

"Let's just go do what we're here to do, and then leave. I just hope I don't pass out from being here too long..." the other one choked, stepping over a pile of dirty clothes.

The apartment, if you could seriously call it that, was a pigsty. Dirty clothes littered the living room, along with plates and random food that had been abandoned and sitting there, rotting, for weeks at the least. And there were no pictures or anything decorative of the sort in the entire area.

"Jesus Christ, which one is Cain's room?"

"The one over there in the corner." Hisoka pointed toward the smaller bedroom with the door half ripped off, hanging only by a single hinge. "Be careful." His whispered, watching Tsuzuki jump into the opening without tripping on the fallen door. Hisoka jumped over as well, looking around. "This place..." he hissed, holding his shoulders and falling to his knees.

"'Soka?! Hisoka, what's wrong?!"

"I can see him...!"

"Who? Hisoka, what do you see?"

"I can see him in the farthest corner, in he closet...he's...he's crying, he's screaming something...but there's no noise...like I'm deaf."

"The closet?" The man let him go, running to the closet and sliding the doors open. "There's nothing in here, Hisoka..."

"Look under the carpet. There should be an opening near the wall. Pull it up and there's a knife under it."

The shinigami did as told; pulling out the dagger, blood still covering the blade. "This one?" he gulped.

"That's the one used to kill him...or so I saw." He finally stood, regaining himself enough to control his own mind.

"Yeah, it's definitely capable of death." The man sighed, searching around for a box or something. His eyes fell onto a discarded shoebox. "There we go." He placed the dagger into the box and sealed it, standing up and searching around the room for anything else that could be of use. "Hey, what's this?" he knelt down, pulling a photograph that had been sticking out of the pillow on the bed.

Three happy teenage boys standing side by side, almost glomping each other as the photo was taken. He smiled, turning it over, but his smile soon faded to a confused look. "'He said he'd do it'?"

"Tsuzuki, we'd better get going...his family might be getting home any moment..."

"Yeah...sure..." he tucked the photo into the inner pocket of his trench coat. "All set."

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