It was the weekend. Sayu was reading a fluffy manga in hopes of clearing her head, and Ryuk came floating down through the ceiling.
She had gradually grown more accustomed to his presence (though his floating through walls was still unnerving), and had taken to asking him questions whenever they were alone. The shinigami of his world seemed very oblivious and self-centered, and Sayu couldn't blame him for wanting to leave, even if he brought the chaos of the Death Note with him.
His relationship to Light disturbed her somewhat, though Sayu supposed that she didn't have much ground to stand on, considering she only heard Ryuk's side of things. Try as she might, she couldn't bring herself to talk to Light about what he was doing. (Was it because she was afraid for herself? Afraid of what he was becoming? Or of what she might find out about her brother, of the decisions he had made for himself?) Everything he did now seemed suspicious, and made her question his reasons behind it, making her itch with paranoia.
These conflicting and disturbing thoughts whirling through her mind, making her wary as always, she opened her mouth to say hello.
"Don't talk," Ryuk warned. "L's set up cameras and wiretaps in the house."
She smoothly turned her greeting into a yawn, desperately trying to suppress her alarm as her pulse quickened. So the NPA had stooped to breaking the law – and Light had made some kind of terrible error that made him a suspect. Raw fear coursed through her, and if she hadn't been resting her arms on the floor, her hands would have been shaking.
Her big brother was in way over his head, and for all their wiles, this wasn't something she could ever protect him from or help him with, even if he believed her when she revealed herself. In all her life, as short as that life was so far, Sayu had never felt this helpless.
"They don't seem to think you're a suspect," Ryuk continued. Well of course they didn't – they had no reason to. Light was the only one who, very publicly, might have a motive. God, big brother, for someone so smart, how could you be so stupid?! "And Light doesn't even think you know anything." This he cackled at. "You sure have them all thoroughly fooled." His tone turned curious. "Why do you hide it from them, anyway? Your intellect, I mean."
Sayu yawned again, extra wide and extra loudly, to remind Ryuk of the wiretaps. "Oh, right." She closed her manga and pulled out her sketchpad as an idea occurred to her. Maybe they could hold a conversation anyway.
She started with drawing a brain. Ryuk, seeming to get the idea, peered over her shoulder as she drew. Around it, she started drawing a cage made of objects. "Pencils, workbooks, textbooks, rulers – school, maybe? Is school a prison?" Looking down at her sketch, Sayu nodded as if pleased with it. "That doesn't explain why you hide." Shaking her head, as if realizing something was missing, she added a glowing lightbulb over the cage. "Wait – for Light? School is a cage for Light!" Ryuk clapped his hands like a child. "Heh, this is almost like a game!"
Sayu smiled in spite of herself, and made a mental note to introduce Ryuk to more things in the human world, both for her own amusement and to gain more knowledge about shinigami in general. She flipped a new page over the old one, and traced over the brain, adding a little bow on top to make it clearer. "You?" She made the tools for her cage scant and few, scattered around her and overcome with weeds whose roots traced back to her brain. There were hands trying put the cage together, but the weeds struggled against it. "You're stronger?" Sayu shook her head, as if dissatisfied. The weeds were her personality – the thing that prevented them from seeing her the same way they saw Light, from trying to restrain her.
Ryuk tilted his head. "You saw what was happening to him – so you fought back? You escaped by playing dumb."
Her eyes slid up to look at his face – she almost let her guard down, but Sayu kept her face carefully blank. She had never thought of it that way before. It was true that she had always known her parents would have put the same pressure and struggles on her if they had been given the chance, but she'd been assuming it had more to do with being the younger child. Perhaps she had, on some level, seen Light's unhappiness, and unconsciously hid herself. It seemed like a strange idea, but people all over the world developed similar defense mechanisms all the time, without even knowing it was happening. Children were especially susceptible.
This immortal alien had somehow seen the bigger picture, the entirety of what she and Light were only able to catch glimpses of - the trap of performance, in its many forms, snaring them both in its grasp and binding them to this mundane sphere.
Ryuk's crimson eyes glinted in the dimming light of the late afternoon. "You thought it was just because they had different expectations for you, didn't you?"
Even if she had had the freedom to speak, Sayu could not have brought herself to. She realized that instinctively, she had always tried to look away from Ryuk even as she tried to get to know him, as if he were something to be avoided, something no mortal should be seeing – which, in a way, was correct.
But now, she was seeing him – really seeing him, in a way she suspected Light would never even think to. This alien, knowing being, as different from a human as anything she knew, yet with just as many layers and as much complexity as any self-aware person, stood before her and he observed. He observed in a way that never came naturally to Sayu, never came naturally to any human animal, but that she always aspired to mimic.
A strange wonder overcame her, a feeling she couldn't name. She felt as though she should be floating, just like Ryuk was now. Or at least be singing a Disney song (not that any Disney song could fully capture what she was feeling right now).
Sayu nodded, careful to make it seem as if she were just deep in thought. Ryuk had a new expression on his face, as much as his face could have recognizable expressions. He leaned back, hands folded in front of his knees. "You humans are very interesting." So are shinigami, thought Sayu.
Later, when she was in her room, she drew up a plan for working around the cameras. First on the list was dealing with the pictures she had drawn for her conversation with Ryuk, as those could raise questions if discovered. Sayu considered destroying them, or scribbling over them and throwing them out, but that would only raise more questions.
She certainly couldn't hide them the way she did her journals, or even access those places in any way, as that would reveal that she was keeping secrets. And so she slipped them into her school binder, between her worksheets and her chibi doodles, and resolved to shred them while she was at school.
Next was deciding how to handle undressing and bathing. If her father was still on the task force performing this spying, then he would certainly protest this invasion of their privacy, Sayu knew him well enough to be sure of that. He would try to confine the viewing of private moments like these to himself and one or two others who he trusted, and as mired as he was in the concept of duty, Sayu did trust him in that regard at least. Being naked in front of her father would be embarrassing enough, but hopefully he would minimize the possibility of strangers seeing her. There was no way of avoiding the cameras without becoming suspicious.
Sayu tried to comfort herself with the thought that he had changed her diapers as a baby, and would probably be just as embarrassed and uncomfortable about this as she was. It didn't help much.
Would he notice, if she took shorter showers? Probably not, he was never at home when she'd taken them before. Mom might, but she wouldn't comment on it. The one she worried most about noticing such a convenient change was Light, as not much slipped past him.
The most effective thing to do, she concluded, was to change her shower schedule a day later. That way, Light wouldn't notice as much, and if he did conclude that she had found out about the cameras, at least he wouldn't suspect her of finding out from Ryuk. Changing her schedule at all was risky, but being fourteen and self-conscious, she considered it worth it.
The very next morning, while laying around watching her shows, Sayu learned that shingami could get addicted...to apples, apparently.
"Light made me search for all the cameras," Ryuk griped, twitching and squirming. "I can't eat apples in the house without it showing up on camera and looking weird." She gathered that he wouldn't want it looking weird because it would give away the game too quickly, and Ryuk would be bored again. "I'm screwed until they pull them all out of here."
Sayu took out her red and green pencils, and drew an apple with a question mark for a stem. "Why apples?" She drew a sun in the background – their agreed-upon symbol for a yes, as she couldn't keep nodding and shaking her head for no reason. "Well," Ryuk seemed to struggle to articulate himself, making gestures, scratching his neck and looking back and forth. "They're – they're juicy. They crunch. They're so full of flavor. They smell nice. There's no food in the shinigami world worth having; apples are like the opposite of anything I've tasted there. Everything there is rotten, or already dirt."
A world of death indeed. Sayu sketched a black skull in the middle of the apple. "Huh. I hadn't thought of it like that, but yeah. Everything is dead there."
Sayu could hardly wait until she could talk to him properly. Ever since their first conversation with the drawings, she had felt an urge to connect with him, show him things about his world that he hadn't known, even as he showed her things about her world that she hadn't known. Perhaps all they had ever needed was an outside perspective – she for her loneliness, he for his boredom.
Except – except she suspected that his boredom might be ennui, just another kind of loneliness. Perhaps an ennui no human could understand, and no shinigami either, if what he told her of his world was true. But this idea had sparked a fire in her, a desperation that drove her to tears the night before. Sayu was so tired, tired of floating along alone. Now she had met a being who (she was fairly certain) saw things the way she did, and she wanted nothing more than to reach out. She had never wanted anything so much in her life.
"It's like liquor, I suppose, at least that's how I explained it to Light. I think its probably a lot more psychological than physical though." Everyone else was out of the house, thank goodness, and her brother had asked to be alone in his room, so Light wasn't at risk of interrupting and wondering why Ryuk was talking to his sister. That, above all else, was something Sayu wanted to avoid explaining. She was comfortable with their relationship as it was now, and it didn't need to change. "My mouth feels so dry, and I keep twisting up into a pretzel. This is the worst," he lamented. She doubted he was serious, considering the punishments Ryuk had told her about for various crimes shinigami could commit. Still, Sayu sympathized.
Almost without thinking (she'd had a lot of practice sketching lately) she found herself drawing a girl with a bag of apples on a bench, holding up one that was half-eaten. Ryuk shook his head. "Can't. I have to stick close to Light as long as he has the Note – going out to get apples without him would be straying too far. Thanks for the thought, though."
Sayu smiled to herself (Hideki Ryuga was on, it wouldn't look too weird) as Ryuk floated away. She felt confident that they would remove the cameras soon – they had too many to have around and not risk being discovered for long. She'd already had to pretend not to see a few, and suspected Light of doing the same.
After an ordeal like this, a real conversation – maybe over some apples – would be extraordinarily refreshing.