... This is excessively discouraging. I just replied to all of the reviews and lost it because firefox crashed on me! Dx Epic fail, anyone? Ithink yes.

I really don't want to try that again D'x -grumbles about stupid computer-

On a happier note, hey, new chapter! :D

And sooooo many reviews! I love you guys so much! :'D -glomps you all-

So without further ado, here be yer chapter!

Dicso-clam: I don't own Death Note. At all.

Warnings:... well, same as any other chapter, really.

Quote!:
If L couldn't trust his only true friend, then he wasn't sure there was anyone he could trust.

I despise Rabbit. The bastard had better be happy I don't have that death note on me. I'd power ranger his name outa my ass and write it in that notebook faster than you can say shinigami.

He refuses to tell Minime that I'm even alive. And I lied to myself, Ant. I did one hell of a fucking job of lying to myself. You know how I said I thought he would be all right if he was at least ten before I left? I was wrong. I think that my sticking around for that long affected him worse in the long run. The entire time I was there, I only used him as a crutch. My only purpose was to redeem myself, not to help Minime. I've corrupted him.

You know, maybe it's better that he doesn't know. It's like Rabbit said, he would probably come after me if he did know. And the last thing he needs to do is run away. If he can beat out the sheep, then he'll be next in line to be the Llama in his age group. If Llama dies now, it would be me, but he isn't going to die now. Don't ask me how I know, you damn notebook. Anyway. I know he won't die. With all the cases he's solved in the past, even if this one is a bit more difficult, he'll get it.

Then again, if he becomes a duck, I might also have to take over.

All right, all right, I'll stop referencing internet songs….

But in all seriousness, again. I know it's better for him this way. I just really don't want to admit it. It won't make me happy – it won't make Minime very pleased either – but things in life than make people happy aren't always the right thing. In fact, it seems they're hardly ever the right thing.

I didn't think I would be able to write that tonight…. I'm sure you notice my handwriting, so even if someone reads this page, they won't understand a word of it. It's too sloppy. My hands were shaking too much.

I doubt I'll sleep, but I guess I should probably give it a shot. So, I bid thee adieu, Ant.

Alpha closed her notebook and once again stuffed it under her pillow. She rolled over onto her back to stare up at the white pattern of dots and bumps along the ceiling, trying hard to blank out her mind. Her boots were off now, lying on the floor next to the bed and beside her messenger bag, but she still wore her clothes from the day. It was how she normally fell asleep, especially during her past few years spent tracking down L. She would normally be too tired by the end of every day to change into anything more comfortable, would fall asleep in one hotel room and then another the next night. The schedule had been haphazard. Despite the fact that they were going to be required to switch hotels once every week or every other week, this still offered more stability than her previous lifestyle.

If L had any idea what she had done to locate him, he probably would have had her thrown in prison.

In Britain, after leaving Wammy's, she found herself back in Yorkshire and stayed with a member of the gang she had once been a part of, one who had managed to break out of the low security prison he had been placed in. She kept tabs on L from there, but it was difficult. Even with her expertise in hacking, it wasn't long at all before she realized she would need to be close to him if she was going to keep up with him. That proved difficult, but she managed. It was easier for her than it might have been for some. Friends of friends of friends (though she considered no members of that gang friends anymore, it was really the only way to look at it) – there were enough connections in the underground that she could get help getting across countries.

But no one ever did anything for free. They would get her from place to place kindly enough, and they would help her, but only if she would help them. Wammy's had been her refuge from all of this, and it seemed even more wrong to her than it had before, after she left Wammy's. There were shootouts, there were scams to be run, there were break-ins, robberies. She made so many narrow escapes, and it still amazed her even now that she didn't have her very own dingy little prison cell.

The hardest case for her to find anything out about had been the Los Angeles BB Murder Cases. L had guarded that one the most carefully of any of them, and it was for one sole reason. If information on the case was leaked – if information on the suspect himself was leaked – then information about his own past would also be leaked. B was his past as much as he was Alpha's. Similarly in this case, Alpha was L's past as much as B had been his. She was a nuisance, and she could see that, but if L was going to live through this one, then he needed help.

The hardest thing had been breaking into L's own files that time, during the BB Murders. It had been even harder than accessing the FBI's systems to get information on Misora Naomi. L had been very careful then. Now, during the Kira case, he was being even more protected. For any information about him to leak would be terrible. It would mean more than just exposure of the Wammy's House and its residents. It would mean the death of the world's greatest detective, the trump card for the police. It would mean that herself or Mello or Near would have to take on the name of L. Alpha couldn't handle it, and Mello and Near were just too young for it. It was true that L started… well, being L, when he was sixteen, but Mello was thirteen, Near only eleven. They weren't even done with their schooling yet.

And Mello was just as likely to act irrationally if L died as he would be if he was to find out that Alpha was alive and well, working on the Kira investigation.

She had to agree with Roger there. If Mello was as much like Alpha as he said, then his coming to find her would be problematic. Alpha had resorted to criminal activity to find L. She didn't like the idea of Mello getting involved in gang activity to do anything. She also couldn't imagine it for anything, but if Roger was right, then it was possible.

And worst of all, it was her fault.

Alpha groaned as she reminded herself of this for the hundredth time and rolled over onto her stomach. She put a pillow over her head to try to suffocate all of those thoughts to death, all the memories she wanted to be rid of, but it was to no avail. Her grip slackened on the pillow and she simply stared at the white sheets her face was pressed against, glaring with a hatred she wouldn't have been able to explain in words.

With a heavy sigh, she lifted the pillow and rolled back over to lie on her back. Sleep was definitely going to be evasive of her tonight. All she would have to do would be to stare at the ceiling and wish that sleep would come find her.

"Back. Where the hell'd my apples go?" Alpha closed her eyes in annoyance and pointed to the nightstand at the other side of the bed. "Oh."

There was a barely audible whooshing sound as Akino flew overhead. A moment later, a loud crunch! issued from next to the bed.

"'S long as you're over there, mind grabbing chocolate bar out of my bag for me?"

"I'm not your slave."

"I could cut off your apple supply."

"And I could kill your friend out there." Alpha opened her eyes to glare over that the Shinigami, who was just swallowing the core of the apple whole and grabbing another. "I'm just stating facts, here. You already knew that. It'd be his damn fault for sticking me in prison with that crazy bastard."

"He didn't know he was sticking you in prison," Alpha pointed out. "Just B, and he needed to be locked up somewhere. Maximum security prison or insane asylum, either one."

"Still. I was stuck in there with the bastard."

"He's dead now. You'd still be stuck with him if he hadn't been convicted in the first place."

"Yeah, but if the son of a bitch out there had things his way, B would still be in there and not dead. Because Kira's a criminal or some shit, I don't know. Honestly, I'd like to thank the guy for that."

"You're not looking at the downside of things." Akino raised his eyebrow. "Now you're stuck with me."

He shrugged. "You're not half as bad as Birthday Boy was."

"And I'm bad about my nicknames."

"Seriously, Llama?"

"Let's not start this discussion again."

"I can if I want to," he said with a shrug. "I'm a Shinigami, I can do what I want. You can't cut off my apple supply because I can just swoop into a store, grab a few apples, and all the people there'll see is a few apples flying away. It'd scare the shit out of 'em, but that would be funny anyway. And I could also fly through a couple walls here and eat my apple out there right in front of the insomniac."

"Which would be bad, considering the message Kira left him in a few letters from convicts before they died…"

"Oh?"

"Read left to right instead of up and down – there was three of them – they read, 'L, do you know reapers only eat apples?' And you know, if you can do all of this, then I'm wondering," Alpha said slowly, "why don't you?" Challenging a Shinigami – especially one like Akino – probably wasn't a good idea, but she was in a sour enough mood to do it solely out of spite.

Akino, however, only shrugged and took another bite of his apple. "I'unno. The Kira case is interesting. If I get you kicked off of it, that means I'll be getting myself kicked out."

"Then you could kill me and come back. You're a Shinigami, aren't you? You can kill anyone you want."

He raised his eyebrow. "Feeling suicidal? I really don't need to kill anyone anymore unless I really want to, I just found that out. I stopped by the Shinigami realm while I was out. I'm now a level two shinigami and I've got a good ten thousand years built up. It's not like I did that in a few years – I've been around for a while," he explained at the shocked look on Alpha's face. "In human years… eh, not exactly sure. Shinigami have been around for as long as humans have been around. I've been around for that long. It was harder to survive back then since there were so few of them to begin with, so we were all a lot more proactive. Now that there's so many of you, we can just pick out who we want to when we need to and no one does anything anymore. I usually go for younger humans; it builds up the years faster since they usually have a lot longer left to live."

"How young?"

"Usually teenagers." He laughed. "The leading cause of teenage car accidents isn't actually alcohol." What scared Alpha more than anything was that this seemed to genuinely amuse the Shinigami. "And anyway, besides that, I already said you're a major improvement from that B kid – damn near anyone would be – so you're all right unless you piss me off. Then I'd be glad to kill you or you insomniac friend out there. And be creative about it. Creative deaths are more fun."

Alpha flinched slightly and resolved not to piss off any Shinigami anytime soon. "Right. Guess I'll keep getting you apples, then," she said. "Now can I please have my chocolate?"

With much eye rolling, Akino picked up her bag and tossed it at her. She caught it before it could land on her face, pulled a chocolate bar out of its front pocket, and tossed it back at Akino. The fact that it sailed through him as though he wasn't there didn't satisfy her in the least bit. He gave a snort of laughter at the pitiful attempt and finished his apple without saying anything.

Not until five minutes later, at least. That was around the time when he started complaining about being bored. Alpha put a pillow over her head. It didn't do any good.

"Then go to sleep or something!" she said in exasperation as he complained, her voice muffled by the pillow.

"Shinigami don't need sleep."

"Oh, lucky me. Go start another war or something, I don't give a damn."

"I already tried that. It didn't work." Alpha decided it would be better not to ask for details.

"Do something good for a change. Find some overpopulated third world nation and kill off half of them so it's not overpopulated anymore."

"But I don't like killing to better humanity," he complained. "My name is not Kira. Or Duck, for that matter."

Alpha took the pillow off of her head and threw it at the Shinigami as she sat up. "Go away," she said in annoyance. "What could you possibly be gaining by bothering me all night?"

He shrugged. "It's more entertaining than doing nothing. I don't need to kill anyone right now. The King told me he might have to put out limits if I don't 'learn to control myself,'" he added in annoyance. "Old bastard sits around being lazy all day like the rest of the washed up idiots in my world and he thinks he's got a right to push me around… at least I'm getting actual work done, what the hell is he doing?"

"He has a point. If you kill so much that the world runs out of humans, then all the Shinigami are going to die, too." Akino scoffed in response. "It's true." He scoffed again. Alpha rolled her eyes and lay back down, turning her back to the Shinigami. "I'm not going to try to reason with you if you're going to act like a baby about it."

Another scoff came, and Alpha grabbed the pillow from the other side of the bed and covered her head with it. She might have to sleep with a pillow over her head tonight—actually, she might have to start sleeping with a pillow over her head every night. "Ear plugs," she mumbled to herself. "Need to invest in earpl—"

She quieted when she heard the door to the bedroom open quietly. Under the pillow, she gave a heavy sigh. "Are you ever going to learn to knock?"

After a rather long silence—Alpha imagined it felt longer than it actually was—she heard L's voice speak up. "Roger says he'll tell Mello if you want him to." Alpha sat up so quickly that she knocked the remaining pillow onto the floor. "I just talked to him."

"How did you convince him?" she asked quietly.

"I told him he made you cry and he was apparently surprised that you have the ability to do so and felt bad."

Alpha's eyebrows furrowed. "You lied?" she asked slowly. "Why would you—?"

He shook his head slowly. "I didn't lie, I opened the door earlier and you were crying, then I went back out there to call Roger and ask what was going on." Alpha blinked slowly at him.

"I…" She looked over her shoulder at where her face had been against the bed—she could see the shape of her eyes in a mix of eye shadow and eyeliner imprinted onto the bed, surrounded wet spots from what were doubtlessly tears. "Okay, so maybe I was," she said uncertainly, looking back at L as she continued, "but you didn't have to tell him that." L blinked owlishly in response, and Alpha gave a sigh and lay back down. "You're a hopeless case, Llama," she said. She didn't even have to look up to know that he was blinking in that confused manner of his again.

"I am?" Alpha nodded. "Why…?"

"Probably because of that bloody orphanage," she said. "Anyone raised there automatically becomes a hopeless case." She tucked her hands behind her head. "Me more so than anyone else, I think, but I was hopeless before I ever got there." With another sigh, she sat up and stood from the bed. "I'll call Roger back myself." L watched her walk past him and out the door.

"Are you sure?" she heard him ask once she was a few steps away from him. She waved a hand dismissively behind her. L bit his thumbnail and stared after her. It wasn't as though Alpha had ever really made much sense, so he supposed he shouldn't expect any different from her now. Always either cryptic or sarcastic or an even stranger combination of the two, she didn't seem to have changed a bit over the past few years. He shook his head before glancing back into the room once more and starting down the hall.

Something caused him to stop, however, and back up to look back in, to see if—and he had seen it, a large bowl of apples sitting on a nightstand. He blinked at it for a moment, unable to keep that strange, cryptic hint from Kira's prison-bound victims from coming to his mind. L, do you know shinigami only eat apples? It was ridiculous to think such a thing, but it was….

Strange. He looked down the hall again. The odds that Alpha, of all people, was Kira were slim to none… or did he only think that because they were friends?

No. No, no, no. The chance was at zero percent—less than zero percent. Particularly given her past. She knew that not every criminal did what they did because they wanted to, knew that some were forced into the things they did if they wanted to live—she knew that not all of them deserved death without a trial. Didn't she?

He looked back into the room again, and his eyes drifted over to the notebook laying on her bed, the old spiral notebook she had stolen from her therapist before leaving Wammy's. Any answer to any question he had, it would be in there, in that notebook. Marcus Antonius the psychodiary. Ant probably held nearly as many secrets as Wammy's House itself by this point.

Information about her time there and before, so there would be plenty of information on actual residents at the place, including himself. It would tell of exactly where she had been for the past four years, how she had kept such close pegs on him without him even knowing. There would be information on the Kira case now, information that made that notebook such a top secret item that L wasn't sure Alpha could protect it solely by herself—leaving it out in the open like that, just asking for anyone who happened to wander into the room to read it.

But somehow more important than anything, it would detail why she left, give the details that she wouldn't even tell Mello then, wouldn't tell L now.

The curiosity itself was enough to kill him.

With a deep breath, keeping his eye on the notebook, he continued down the hall, turning his head to the floor only when that spiral-bound stack of paper was out of his sight. It was imperative that everyone working on this case trust each other, but they all undoubtedly had their secrets. If L couldn't trust his only true friend, then he wasn't sure there was anyone he could trust.

-sadface- Poor L. My cliffhangers even kill me sometimes.

Reviews are muchly appreciated, and your word of the day is "outswagger." It was the first word that came up on a random word generator and it made me rofl a bit, so yeah.

Review if you have the time, constructive criticism appreciated, flames amuse the heck of me, and so on and so forth.