This fic was written as a one-shot for the LJ community 30 nights (no link because HTML is evil here; Google it) for the first prompt, "You are never mine to begin with." In case anyone cares.
Reviews and/or concrit are appreciated. Please don't flame until November, because it will be cold then and I'll appreciate it more.
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To Hate Love
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Every night for the past few decades, the Death Note rule # XXXVI had been the bane of Ryuk's existence.
Not that the rule itself forbade Ryuk from doing anything he really wanted to do. Heck, he wasn't even capable of breaking the rule. The problem was that the rule carried thousands of years of prejudice.
Many laws and decrees carried some form of bigotry with them. Human laws in particular showed this. People that owned a certain amount of property were given special treatment; that was bias against the poor, or even the middle-class. Men, not women, were allowed to vote; sexism against females. Light-skinned and dark-skinned humans used different schools, restaurants, and even toilets; racism against blacks. Marriage was unity between a single man and a single woman; homophobia against anyone who deviated from the normal path. As often as rules were used to keep order, they were also used as a governmental decree that some person was lesser.
The latter was the exact purpose of XXXVI. Ryuk had spent enough decades brooding over this rule to be sure of it. It looked like common sense at first, but with a slightly deeper probing, it was just another prejudice.
Ryuk had the rule memorized. The first half of it was perfectly fine, as far as he was concerned:
There are male and female gods of death, but it is neither permitted, nor possible for them to have sexual relations with humans.
Well, that was fine. Who'd want to do that with a human, anyway? Ryuk had seen humans going at it many times, and it seemed pretty gross to him. (Though it was fun to kill one of them in the middle of it and watch the other one freak out.) And the rule was right. Shinigami quite literally didn't have what it takes to have sex. Some, like the ones that were pure skeleton, didn't even come remotely close to having the necessary equipment.
But that was what made the rule suspicious. If it wasn't possible, why bring it up? The rule might be handy to reference if some human with a Death Note started hitting on the Shinigami possessing it, but otherwise it was pointless. It was like stating "Apples in the human realm taste better." It wasn't a law; it was a fact of life.
The second half of the rule gave away its purpose. Here was the half that Ryuk hated:
The gods of death also cannot have sex with each other.
That was obvious to any Shinigami who'd ever figured out how to take off his pants. The statement was the epitome of wasted information. It wasn't even there for the benefit of humans. Of all the places it could have been scrawled, why had it been promoted to the rulebook?
It took Ryuk a while to figure it out. In fact, it had finally hit him right after the American Civil War. (He'd had a grand time during the War. Ryuk had fought for South, convinced a guy named Bakuto to fight for North, and gotten together a few days in July '63 to do a full-fledged battle. Some human came later to give a speech about the battle that the humans seemed to like. Ryuk thought it was called the Gettysburg Address.) After the war, the freed slaves were given a bunch of new laws to let them do all kinds of things, but more laws were passed to keep the ex-slaves away from their new rights. They had everyone's permission to be free but society's, and society was working to make sure that didn't change.
That was when Ryuk figured out the purpose of rule # XXXVI. The ban on sex wasn't about sex at all. It was just a way to ensure Shinigami kept thinking a certain way.
The Death Note rule # XXXVI made Shinigami hate love.
Once Ryuk discovered this, it was easy to see. He'd known for ages that Shinigami had become detached from the human world. Some Shinigami even had trouble writing in their notes because they didn't recognize the characters used in their victims' names. But now, he saw that Shinigami had become detached from each other. They were afraid to make friends, and mocked everyone around them to make sure they wouldn't. It had reached the point where if someone asked someone else to pass a gambling piece, they would throw it two feet rather than hand it over. No physical contact. The rules discouraged friendliness.
What bothered Ryuk the most was not the prejudice itself, but where it was aimed. Specifically, it was aimed at him. At least, it would have been if the rule hadn't done such a thorough job before he'd met Rem.
Rem was different from most modern Shinigami. She held on to the old ways, watching humans and getting involved in their activities. She wasn't satisfied with what the Shinigami realm had become. Ryuk was willing to bet that back when Shinigami were still concerned with humans, Rem had been one of the few that willingly dropped notes on a regular basis simply to see the human world up close. Ryuk wished he'd actually spoken to her back then, before the Shinigami realm had changed.
When an entire society changes, even the citizens that resist the transformation must adjust to it. Though he still spent his time watching the human world, Ryuk knew that he'd drifted away from everyone else over the past millennia. And Rem, as far as Ryuk could see, didn't have affection for others anymore. It was all because of rule # XXXVI that Ryuk had lost Rem.
He brooded over this every night, wondering if anything could be done now. Rem was smart – a lot smarter than Ryuk – so even if she hadn't noticed what the rule was doing to them, if Ryuk told her she would probably get it. And after that… nothing.
Night didn't exist in the Shinigami realm. However, there was a passageway down to the human world that was completely open at the bottom, utterly exposed, unlike the small windows the Shinigami used to find victims. Ryuk spent hours down there, on the nighttime side of the human world, sitting on the very bottom stair before the drop-off. He liked to think about how society was conspiring against him and Rem.
But the truth was society had done nothing to them. From the very start, Ryuk never had Rem. He hadn't lost her. Before the Shinigami realm had changed to its current state of apathy, Rem and Ryuk had been two completely normal Shinigami, and they'd never had a conversation as far as Ryuk could remember. Rem only became special after the change, once all possibility of romance was gone. And Ryuk was well aware that he wasn't nearly as bright as Rem, so what chance did he have with her, even if the rule didn't exist?
The worst part was there was no one Ryuk could vent any of this to. Shinigami wouldn't have any sympathy for someone who'd emotionally regressed so far as to be capable of falling in love. Ryuk was alone.
Ryuk spent every night on the boundary between the Shinigami and humans, watching the world go by below and wishing Rem loved him too.
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For the past few decades, the Death Note rule # XXXVI had been the bane of Rem's existence...
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