DS
Disclaimer: Frank Zappa's goatee owns all.
Me: Homigawd. I love you guys.
Chibi L: Me?
Chibi Raito: Why?
Chibi Misa: Yeah, why?
Me: Because you get me reviewers coming out of my ears.
Chibi L: Right.
Me: Thanks! All you reviewers make my day. Please, continue to make my day, even though I won't be updating as often as I should. I'll try, I promise, but I have another fanfic, a guitar to play, and drawings to draw.
Chibi Misa: Yeah! She loves you! But… she just really wants a Gretsch White Falcon. And her parents will only let her get one if she learns how to play.
Me: Rawr.
Chibi Raito: So stick with us.
Chibi L: It's not like you to say something like that, Raito-san.
Chibi Raito: I know.
Chibi L: It's…
Chibi Raito: Weird.
Chibi Misa: Yay! Another chapter for you to read! Read, review, and relax.
D S 3
Raito was still uneasy. He hadn't killed another person in two weeks. L found it very amusing. He'd put on quite a show of confidence when he killed his first criminal.
But saying and doing were two different things.
As Raito Yagami had found out.
Through many glasses of water, pills, and bags of ice, Raito had gotten rid of his fever and the shinigami hadn't visited him since. That was decidedly good.
He was currently sitting in his desk, twirling his pencil in one hand and resting his chin in the other. Raito Yagami, ace student that Ryuzaki had found out, had completely spaced during class.
"Yagami-san, could you translate that last line?" Raito blinked and nearly dropped his pencil. It was a slight movement though. Ryuzaki was almost sure he was the only one who saw. Kira instantly regained his composure. He stood up, thumbed through a few pages in his book, cleared his throat, and delivered a philosophical speech in English with a perfect accent.
"Impressive," said L once Raito had sat back down. "Your English is almost as good as mine."
Raito gave him a sidelong glare.
L absorbed it like it was nothing, then concluded that he'd walk around the room in a circle three times because he was bored. He stretched his arms, yawned, then began his relentless march. He glanced at Raito every once in a while to find that he was following him with his eyes.
How strange.
"I find this classroom to be quite boring," L said, "Your teacher has no taste in interior decoration."
Raito coughed.
"Something wrong, Yagami-kun?" said the crinkle-eyed teacher.
Raito apologized, and then said that no, there wasn't.
Class went on as usual, much to Ryuzaki's displeasure. He had half a mind to accidentally bump into the stack of books that the teacher had so meticulously put together. Who knew, maybe he could start a ghost rumor and have Raito spread it around.
No.
He'd have to have a girl do that. It was very un-Raito.
Hmm…
It wasn't like L to be this rash, but with no intellectual stimulation, he was getting desperate. "Raito-san, I'll have you know that I am extremely bored." He announced. "If nothing happens soon, I will not be held responsible for the massive amount of objects that will suddenly appear all over the floor."
Raito folded his arms and rested his head on the desk. "There are cookies in the cafeteria." He whispered into his sleeve.
Ryuzaki stuck his thumb between his lips and chewed. "But if I leave you here alone, the probability that something will happen to you rises to seventy percent."
Raito turned to face him. He gave L a very peculiar look as if to say 'And you care because..?'
"It would be quite a tragedy if you were to die young, Raito-san," explained L with one pointer finger extended.
Raito turned his face the other way and breathed a deep sigh through his nose. So he wasn't going to pay any attention to him, eh? L narrowed his eyes, huffed at him, and stalked away to lurk in a corner.
Six minutes and twenty one seconds later, a book had mysteriously fallen off the shelf and every time a breeze blew through the window, a single page would turn. The wind had blown a total of one hundred seventy four times.
Hey. There was a storm outside.
Class was over. And, in what seemed like an eternity, school was over.
There were five books on the floor. A Good Samaritan offered to pick them up, but they would only mysteriously fall back onto the floor again. Someone made a comment about how freaky it was, and sooner than L had expected, he heard rumors everywhere that Raito's classroom was haunted.
"Actually, I find it quite fascinating," said L as he padded along in Raito's shadow. The brunette turned to face him. "Well I don't," he grouched, "That was especially immature of you."
"Ah, perhaps. I warned you though."
"And what was I supposed to do about it? Sing?"
"You can sing?"
"I was joking."
"Oh," said L, quite disheartened, "Can you dance?"
"We're getting off topic here."
"Quite," said L.
An overly dressed woman and her Pomeranian walked by. She raised an overdone forest of eyelashes at Raito and her dog started barking like crazy. L drew his upper lip into a snarl. He hated dogs.
"Maybe you should stop talking to me, Raito," remarked L, "You'll attract attention."
Raito quirked an eyebrow at him. "Who's talking to who?"
The lady who had just walked past was eyeing them again. Well, Raito anyway. She couldn't see L. She and her yipping hairball waddled over to a policeman on the corner and she started whispering in his ear. "Yes, you should definitely stop talking," L concluded. Then he added in a whisper, "Walk faster!"
----
Raito Yagami speed-walked home, speed-climbed up the stairs after speed-talking to his mom, and then speed-fell into his bed and plummeted into a very un-relaxing speed-sleep.
He was still angry at Ryuzaki for his puerile actions concerning the books and ghost legends and whatnot. Thus, he didn't bother talking to him or giving him any cookies. Just hit his mattress and fell stone dead asleep. He was already on edge as it was. What, with the sudden ability to kill everyone and all.
He had to think of a battle plan. A plan, dammit! He, Raito Yagami, had the past two weeks to think of one.
And he had done nothing.
Absolutely nothing!
Raito needed a plan. He always had a plan! Studying for college entrance exams and trying to figure out what the fuck was happening to him at the same time was proving to be a fatal error.
Hah… Fatal.
Even his humor had gone to hell.
Gone to hell… hah, hah…
Oh God. Much more of this and Raito was going to crack. Crack… hah. Why was that funny again? It was at this point in time that Raito realized that he was asleep. He would never find something like that funny. He was dreaming. And he was having a half-logical, totally relevant dream on top of that!
He needed to let loose. Maybe he could sneak out of the house and go downtown. Find himself a lonely girl. Or maybe he could call one of the infinitely many who had left him their phone number. Yeah. That's what he needed.
Boy, Raito could really use some-
"Dinner!!!"
Damn.
That wasn't quite as good. But Raito hadn't eaten all day. He was starving. He sighed, rolled over and blinked the sleep out of his eyes. The first thing he saw was what looked like a huge, black and white bull's-eye that flashed once. The first thing he said was "Ryuzaki, you have to stop doing that."
Ryuzaki's monochrome eye drew down at one corner, then he snorted at Raito and his face vanished from view. Raito groaned. He'd woken up to a similar sight on Monday, and it had nearly scared the shit out of him.
Nearly.
Raito had opted to express his sudden surprise by trying and failing to reflexively smack Ryuzaki right in the face. He made contact with nothing and Ryuzaki blinked at him and then phased through the mattress and into the floor.
The same thing had just happened. He noticed Ryuzaki, and as a result, the mini-death had melted into the bedsheets and disappeared.
Honestly. Raito had no idea what was wrong with him.
As Raito picked at his dinner, his father made several comments about how strange the end of the Yokohama case had been. He said that the culprit died of cardiac arrest, cause unknown.
Interesting.
"Raito."
"Yeah," Raito responded distantly.
His father finished chewing on a dumpling, then said, "Matsuda says he's glad you're better."
"Tell him thanks," said Raito, who had taken a sudden interest in a grain of steamed rice.
"You seem kinda' out of it, Raito," commented Sayu.
"The college entrance exam is soon. I've been studying, so yeah. I'm kind of tired," Raito lied skillfully. Then he heard a dish crash into the sink, followed by some swearing and scampering across the kitchen floor.
"I wonder what that was," Raito's mother commented before leaving her food to investigate the kitchen. Not long after, he saw the form of Ryuzaki slinking around the wall with a cookie jammed in his mouth and another five or ten stuffed down his shirt and in his pockets. He crept up the stairs and tried to go through the bedroom door, but The cookies he had packed away refused to go through.
"Shit," muttered Ryuzaki. "Raito-san! Open the door!"
As payment for the creative torture Ryuzaki had put him through earlier in the day, he stabbed another dumpling on one chopstick and stuck it in his mouth to show him how much he really didn't care. "Raito-san!" Ryuzaki whined, "I'll have to eat these here then!"
Was that his attempt at a threat? Raito let him complain.
He watched out of the corner of his eye as Ryuzaki visibly deflated and crunched on the cookie he had in his mouth. Raito, knowing he had won, righteously speared another dumpling just for the heck of it.
"I think I'll go back up to my room and study," Raito announced two dumplings later. (He was full up after the third dumpling, but he was gloating. That entitled him to another one.) Raito's mother waved at him before he swung the door open. Ryuzaki, who had limited himself to only the cookie he had just eaten, slithered into the room, hopped on his chair, and stuffed two in his mouth at the same time.
"That was cruel, Yagami-san," Ryuzaki mentioned coldly around the two gooey, chocolate-sprinkled cookies.
"Yes," said Raito as-a-matter-of-factly. "That's part of my job, isn't it?"
"No."
"Really?"
"Just because you're Death doesn't mean you have to be cold about it," Ryuzaki munched.
"Don't talk with your mouth full," Raito reprimanded.
"Why not?"
"It's disgusting and childish."
"You're not the bossa' me," said Ryuzaki.
----
L felt something he had never felt in his life. When he didn't eat a cookie in a long time, he had agonizing withdrawals. A sharp, smoldering, burning pain in the pit of his stomach.
Hunger.
And it was scaring the crap out of him.
Did this mean that he's eaten too much human food? Bad things happened when a member of the psychopomp race ate a lot. He'd read about it in books. Of course, he'd given up reading those books at first. They had microscopic print, no pictures, cheap newsprint pages, broken bindings from the moment of purchase (seriously, the very second after he bought one, its spine snapped in half. It looked so great on the shelf, too!), and were far too large to be about the single subject stamped into the cover.
And the shopkeeper who sold it to L would smile.
Just because he liked to watch young, unsuspecting readers tear their own heads off in torment.
As time passed and L had nothing else to read, he picked up One Thousand and One Things not to do in the Human Realm, and the rest was history.
He had been the first one to read it all, cover to cover.
The One Thousand and One Things stated clearly that the worst of all human cuisine was the sweets category. Particularly baked confections, and chocolate was especially deadly.
Deadly, you ask?
Well, through eating too much food too fast, a psychopomp could easily become an object of the human realm and thus become mortal. L didn't know exactly how it worked, but it had something to do with too much nutrients in his system, forsaking his own realm, sugar content, and the kitchen sink.
He couldn't help but find his tasteless realm a bit inferior to the awesome power of the homemade deluxe triple-chocolate sprinkle cookie.
L did not have any desire to die just then.
Nor did he want to experience any of the strange side effects associated with the consumption of human food. One would become attached to a food. Then, he would have stomach aches until he ate it, much like L had now. In advanced cases, he would have mad seizures. A recorded interview with one unfortunate individual described in detail the horrid effects of addiction. He would fantasize about pink, plastic, garden flamingoes wearing top hats, canes and dress shoes and who only sang and danced to Frank Zappa songs.
Suddenly, one of the cookies sprouted a panda's head and chanted "eat us."
It was at that time that L unloaded all of the cookies he had hidden away. He placed them on Raito's desk and pushed the pile as far away from him as he could. Then he got off of the chair to assess the mess he had made. Crumbs were everywhere. He sighed through his nose, fell to the wooden floor, and sat there.
"Eat us."
He plugged his ears.
"What's wrong?" said Raito, who had taken a break from his relentless studying to care. L frowned deeply. "They want me to eat them."
"Who?" Raito asked incredulously.
"Eat us!"
"The cookies," said a defeated L.
"Ryuzaki, do you seriously think a cookie can talk?"
"Eeeeaaaattt uuuuussssssss…"
"Well, yes and no," explained L, "It goes against all logic, seeing that cookies have no nervous system, muscles, lungs, or vocal cords to speak of. Yet I can definitely hear them."
"It's all in your head," said Raito.
"EEEAAATTT UUUSSSSS!"
"Yes, perhaps," nodded L, "but your parents can't see me or hear me, yet you know I'm here. That is illogical."
"Not in the same way that a singing cookie is illogical."
As if on cue, a chorus rose amongst the baked goods that went something like this: "Creamy filling, creamy filling in a chocolate Oreo…"
"You just had to make them sing," lamented L.
Raito groaned, rolled his eyes, and then hit his face with the text book and left it there. He took that to be a sign of frustration. L tilted his head at him, the Oreo music fading to mere background noise. What a peculiar human Raito was.
"I need to kill something," breathed Raito.
"Well then what are you waiting for?" goaded L, "You have a television up here, do you not?"
Raito eyed him suspiciously before hefting himself to his feet. "I suppose," he groaned. "After all, I don't leave any sort of evidence."
Not quite.
He pressed the red button on his remote and the television crackled to life. He went straight to the news channel. L scampered off of the seat when Raito coughed at him.
The cookies had since stopped singing.
So L ate them all.
You know, just to prevent their singing later.
----
Ryuzaki was right.
If he wanted to kill something, he'd kill something. After all, there was no evidence he could leave behind. He could be miles away when it happened. No records, no DNA, no weapons, no nothing. Just Raito and his mind.
With complete control.
He watched as the face of a serial killer flashed on the screen. Raito breathed a shaky sigh and snapped his fingers. It didn't feel too bad… Minutes later, a story about a convicted rapist revealed itself. Once again, Raito snapped his fingers. He began to think of how boring and repetitive it was and the initial shock numbed somewhat. It was just too easy.
On the other hand…
All of these criminals were dying of heart attacks from an unknown cause. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later that something was going on. A pattern. They'd realize that a higher power was passing judgment on such criminals.
Yes…
Yes!
A god!
The God of Death!
Grim feelings about his job completely reversed, he rose from his chair and thundered down to the kitchen, where he asked his sister for all of the newspapers between now and last week. She brought him to a cardboard box in a closet and asked him why he needed them.
For studying purposes.
He hauled them back up to the room, set them on the desk with a papery clash, and then searched through them while he listened in on the television. This was brilliant. Raito was brilliant.
This was what dreams were made of. Raito's dreams, anyhow. A bit morbid, but nevertheless, he could ask for nothing more.
With his right hand, he would justify humanity and banish crime from the face of the Earth. He would create a Utopia for all mankind.
He had snapped a total of twelve times before Ryuzaki spoke up. "You're in quite a hurry, Raito-san," he said mischievously.
"I only have so much time," Raito cackle-whispered, "I still have to study, get enough sleep to keep my grades up in school…" He paused, breathed a triumphant laugh, and stared at his right hand as it literally shook with excitement. "Ryuzaki, do you understand how incredible this is?"
"I thought you might say that," Ryuzaki growled.
Raito wasn't listening.
Every time he snapped his fingers…
Boom!
Someone's soul was ripped out of his or her body.
Dead.
Dead!
Well, he had no immediate proof, but he'd see soon enough. The world would see soon enough! Twelve people within an hour, all dying of unexpected, unexplainable heart attacks. Now this would make it on the news.
This sudden resolution to punish the world came to Raito the minute he heard that the Yokohama terrorist died, but… well… he never thought it would be this easy. He kept thinking about how difficult and planned out it would have to be. He always had a nasty habit of thinking too much.
It was incredibly easy.
Impossibly easy.
In a snap, quite literally, Raito had found his plan.
----
Well, wasn't this nice. Kira was a psychopathic, bi-polar, homicidal, hormonally challenged, teen-aged maniac with a God complex. L found it disturbing, and at the same time he found it exciting. There was something electric about sitting in the chair next to a serial killer.
As L was now.
Raito had gone to school, just like any other day. Only, now there was something more sinister hanging in the air around him. An oppressive and moody atmosphere crackling with a sinister, dark tension. Raito was a self-contained, mini-thunderstorm.
L thought it best not to bother him. Chances were, he was thinking about something he deemed important, and if L interfered, pain and humiliation would follow. Not just for him, but for Raito as well. He'd probably start yelling at and arguing with nothing. Upon which, he would be sent to the psychiatrists and the doctor's for good measure.
And some other unpleasant things were bound to happen.
L didn't bother racking his mind to discover them. Though, thinking up scenarios would definitely keep him busy. The school day was almost over, but L could no longer contain himself. Every day, at about this time, L would lose all interest in school curriculum and become marginally destructive.
He melted into the floor and popped back up near the bookcase, where he pulled a pre-loosened book out by its binding. The second it hit the floor, umpteen pairs of eyes were suddenly trained on that little, insignificant bundle of paper.
Expecting it to move.
L was feeling especially irritable, so he humored them. A page turned.
"Oh my gawd! Did you see that?"
"Holy shit! It moved!"
The reaction was predictable. Considering that everything concerning himself had been hectic lately, L appreciated the predictability. The teacher tried and failed to recapture the class's attention. Someone dared to creep over and turn the page back.
L found this quite entertaining. Even more so than his book. Now, it was not in L's nature to create mischief. However, his time on Earth had left no room for order. Order would bore him to death. Besides, he was hurting no one. He was the friendly neighborhood ghost.
That said, L befuddled the crowd by immediately flipping the page back. A collective gasp rose in the room. "Don't make it mad!" an anonymous girl yelled.
Another guy replaced the previous dweeb as the official poker and prodder of all things supernatural. In a daring move, he swept the book up in his hand. This was an interesting change. In no time, yet another book had fallen from the shelf.
Face up and open to page one.
"EEEK!"
L bit his thumb to keep himself from laughing. But where was the harm in laughter? They couldn't hear him. Only Raito could, and he seemed uninterested with anything but himself.
So he laughed a little.
Raito looked over his shoulder for a brief moment before rolling his eyes and turning back to his work.
L made a face at him.
"I think it's the ghost of that manic depressive librarian!"
A chorus of squealing.
It was at that point when L decided that he should stop before things got out of hand. He left the book where it was. "Raito-san," he announced, "I apologize."
Raito disinterestedly inclined his head.
And L knew that would have to be enough. He mulled about the room, once again noting the room's particularly deplorable décor. "I hate this room," said L for the ninth time that week.
Raito rested his head in one hand and gave him a look that clearly said, 'Come here, Ryuzaki, and let me strangle you to death.'
L blinked once or twice, then decided that he'd go take a look out the window and say nothing else for the rest of the day.
That was until, while he was admiring the lack of scenery, he saw something ugly, gangly, and feathery floating about against the sky. He instantly recognized it as the shinigami who had paid himself and Raito a visit that one afternoon. Seeing it again was somewhat unnerving. Why was it persisting in following Raito?
L glanced at the seething juvenile in question, whose smoldering glare tracked the shadow across the sky.
Good.
So Raito saw.
L glanced at the clock. "We have two minutes, then we're free," he stated. Raito sighed and continued watching the shinigami through his fingers.
The bell rang, and L had since lost sight of the grimy, vulture-esque thing. Raito yawned, looked generally bored, and then organized all of his books into his backpack before heading for the door. L followed close behind, scanning either side of the hall for any sign of the shinigami.
"Why me?" asked Raito when they were a sufficient distance from school.
Funny. L often thought the same thing. He glanced back over at the Yagami to see his brown eyes gazing indifferently back at him. L's mind registered that he wanted an answer.
"I know as much as you do," L mused to himself.
"You've got to be kidding me!" Raito roared, smacking himself on the side of the head for emphasis. This greatly alarmed L, who had heard of such acts of self-abuse, but had never partaken in one as he thought they were quite silly and made no sense.
"Raito-san!" L yelled in dismay. Said boy tossed L an exceptionally threatening scowl, which L caught and threw back before Raito's superiority complex could get to home base. L noted how surprisingly fast it ran.
Sufficiently and honorably defeated, Raito whipped his head back around, stuck his nose in the air, hissed, and bonked himself on the head again. "Raito-san!" lamented L, who felt like his skull was beginning to channel the damage, "stop doing that!"
"Why?" the brunette asked stubbornly.
"Why not?" argued L, "What good does it accomplish? I see no reason to needlessly hurt yourself."
Raito blinked his long, black eyelashes inquisitively at him. Then a smug, knowing smile spread on his lips. "Oh, Ryuzaki," he purred sumptuously, "I never knew you cared."
"No," said L flatly, "you're giving me a headache."
Raito's eyes widened and he gawked at L as if he had grown another head. He then turned around again and continued walking. It took him a while to regain his composure, which L found to be more like the Raito he first met.
Less like Kira.
And that was decidedly good.
----
Damn.
Just damn.
Ryuzaki had no idea how humiliating that was. Raito stalked home, stalked up to his room without saying a word to Sayu, and then stalked over to his desk and exploded in a fit of rage. He threw his favorite mechanical pencil at the wall, making it stick. Seconds later, it was joined by a blue erasable pen, a black ballpoint pen, another erasable pen, a click eraser (he'd seen Ryuzaki hide behind the closet door when that stuck), and twenty or so graphite smudges from brittle number two pencils.
He breathed in, and breathed out. Inhale, exhale.
Calm.
He needed to stay calm.
Raito was in control.
He was perfectly capable of getting back at the death god for that, but it wasn't his priority at the moment. He had criminals to punish. So much to do, so little time. He disregarded the mini-death completely and turned on the TV.
Within two minutes, his first criminal was toast.
Four minutes, the second one was just as well off.
It continued that way for quite a while. Snap snap snap.
Raito noticed with some degree of horror that it was getting boring. He was Death! This was his job! It was not supposed to be boring. He was killing people all by himself. That was exciting, was it not?
Of course it was.
Yet, Raito had no way of forcing himself to be un-bored. Gradually, his ears began to pick up a noise in the room.
He recognized the shuffling in the back of the room as Ryuzaki trying to keep himself busy. "What are you doing?" Raito growled as he used his foot to push himself about-face on the office chair. What he saw nearly made him jump.
Ryuzaki was posing in front of his mirror with a pair of Raito's good jeans tied around his waist, a pullover over his loose, white sweater, and a pair of boxers on top of his head.
Boxers.
On his head.
"You know you have everything on wrong, don't you?" Raito pointed out.
"Yes," brooded the mini-death with a thumb in his teeth, looking deeply thoughtful. "Why do you wear all this anyway?"
Raito sighed, "It's indecent to go out in public with nothing on. Need I remind you that you have clothes too?"
"No," said Ryuzaki, "But you don't have to have this many clothes." He gestured to Raito's Closet-O-Clothes with a great sweep of the arm.
The brunette's eye twitched. Ryuzaki was a complete dumbass. "You look ridiculous," he said as if that explained everything.
"Perhaps," said the boy with the underwear on his head.
Raito stared. It seemed to him that his point wasn't quite driven home. "You look like an idiot," he added for emphasis.
"Yes," said Ryuzaki.
"Why?"
"I find it much more fun this way."
And the hot, suffocating, thick air in the room rushed out just like that. It was amazing how fast an undergarment worn on the head could calm an uncomfortable atmosphere. To his surprise, Raito breathed another deep, refreshing breath in he didn't know how long. He wondered if, during that half an hour, he'd breathed at all.
Ryuzaki gingerly picked the thing off of his head and tossed it somewhere. He peeled the pullover away from his sweater and untied the jeans around his waist. He shook himself like a wet dog and then proceeded to crawl into and inspect Raito's bed sheets.
Raito rolled his eyes and turned off the television. The mini-death resurfaced and cocked his head. "Done already?" he asked inquisitively. Raito sighed and spun himself wearily on his chair. "There are only so many criminals on television in one night."
Ryuzaki slithered through the blankets and emerged on the other side of the bed. "That never stopped you yesterday. Or the day before that, or the day before that for that matter. Come to think of it, it hasn't bothered you at all until now."
Raito seriously wanted to smack him one.
"I'm taking a break," he announced in a tone that would hint to anyone else that he would say no more on the matter.
Anyone else.
"That's awfully unusual, Raito-san," Ryuzaki pointed out.
"Do you have a problem with it?" Raito asked coldly with his arms across his chest.
"Not at all," said Ryuzaki, blinking his murky eyes and withdrawing once again into the sheets.
Raito began to wonder what he was doing. He asked. Ryuzaki appeared again, popping out from the footboard like a warped and deranged bas relief sculpture. "I find it strange, how you humans can sleep underneath these for so long. They restrict movement and are generally impractical, are they not?"
"First of all, Ryuzaki," announced Raito irately, "People don't normally want to move in their sleep. Second of all, blankets keep me from freezing to death."
Ryuzaki's eyes widened. "Ah," he muttered, "I see. Keep your blankets." He melted into the floor and popped back up at the foot of the bed. "Though I disagree about the moving part."
Raito raised an eyebrow. "How so?" he questioned.
"You move a lot in your sleep."
Raito paled.
"And you talk, too," the incarnate of Satan added with a waggle of the finger. The Yagami didn't want to know the details. What he didn't know couldn't hurt him in this case. But he was curious in a horrified, dreadful sort of way.
"What did I say?" he asked suspiciously, narrowing one eye at Ryuzaki. The psychopomp's panda eyes glittered at him.
That eavesdropping little fuckstick.
"Oh, just killing people," Panda-Boy said innocently. Raito eyed him. Suspicious, wasn't he? Ryuzaki asked him what he was getting so defensive about. Raito growled to himself and told him that it was nothing.
Nothing at all.
He could tell that Ryuzaki didn't believe him. And that was fine and good. At least he didn't say anything else about it.
Raito leaned back in his chair and spun it around. He stared at the uneven dots on his ceiling until they wore perfect circles into his eyes.
He heard more shuffling and wondered if Ryuzaki was still fooling around. Honestly, Raito had no idea why he did it. If he was as old as his knowledge of encyclopedias suggested, he probably had enough time to observe the human race. If not through personal experience, then by the books he read.
But Ryuzaki knew nothing.
Maybe he just wasn't all that interested in what the human world had to offer. Since he was trapped here, Raito figured, he wanted to learn as much as he could about humans. Maybe to prevent future misunderstandings.
Raito sighed and let the dots on the ceiling wear fluorescent circles into his retinas.
He was called down for dinner a while later. He left his television, the dots, and Ryuzaki and headed downstairs.
"I'm going to tell you all straight away," his father announced over the aroma of chicken and fried rice, "I might not be home for a few days at a time."
Raito was very proud of himself. He knew why his father would be gone, but that didn't stop him from pretending to care. "Why?" he asked angrily along with Sayu. Soichiro glanced down at his son and daughter and sighed. "Some pretty strange things have been happening lately. Sit down."
And they did.
"Now, you've both heard about all the criminals suddenly dropping dead, right?" Sayu and Raito both nodded slowly. "Well," sweated their father, "I've decided to work double-time. The Japanese Police Force and I believe that these cases are linked in some way, possibly to a group of people or an organization. There are simply too many people who died of a common cause for all this to be a strange coincidence. So far, all of the victims have been Japanese criminals. We're investigating before this can escalate into a global affair."
Raito gave his father an appraising look through the vanishing rings in his eyes and nodded thoughtfully. So they were trying to figure him out, were they? Even his own father. He couldn't allow this to distract him. What could the police do to him anyway?
Raito was a god.
Let them try to defy him.
"I hope you catch whoever it is really soon!" pouted Sayu.
"Yeah," concurred Raito.
His father nodded tiredly, "I hope we do too."
And the rest of dinner was eaten in silence, except for the occasional complaint of Sachiko, who thought that it was incredibly unfair that her husband be taken away from her. Soichiro comforted her and eventually she accepted it.
"I'm going back upstairs to study," Raito announced. On his way up to his room, he peeked over the banister and said, "Hey dad?"
Soichiro looked wearily up at him.
"Take care of yourself," said Raito.
"Thanks, Raito. I will."
And Raito smiled pleasantly, thinking to himself, boy, I hope I won't have to kill you too.
----
L milled around in the blankets while Raito was gone. He began to think up exactly how many ways a mortal could strangle himself in such a mess. Now that Raito mentioned it, humans were subject to the elements, and had their own body heat to keep them warm. L understood that blankets trapped this heat and kept them warm.
Simple, yet effective.
He was still submerged when he noticed another presence in the room.
And it wasn't Raito's.
He cautiously phased through the mattress and underneath the bed, where he could see black-clad feet clomping around on the wooden floor. The owner of the feet was humming to himself. A little ditty about apples.
It was Ryuk.
"Why are you here again?" L asked from the safety of the shadows beneath the bed. The feet stopped, and the shinigami twisted its body around so that it could see him. "I got bored again," was all it could say.
L huffed disdainfully at how easily he was located. "Go be bored somewhere else," he spat. The shinigami gave him a peculiar look before asking him where the apples were. L replied that he didn't know. Then it mentioned that he knew last time.
L told it to shut up.
That was about the time Raito Yagami walked in the door. He glanced lackadaisically from Ryuk to the shadowed form of L and told them that they could both get the hell out of his house.
"No," said L.
"Do you have any apples?" asked Ryuk.
L watched from beneath the bed as Raito dug his nails into his eyes. The poor Yagami boy had a lot to worry about. Being a model student, studying for a college entrance exam, having sporadic visits from an unwelcome shinigami, living with a psychopomp, and being Kira.
If he were in Raito's shoes, L wasn't sure he would be able to put up with it.
"He wants an apple," explained L.
"You've got to be kidding me," Raito hissed.
"No, really," said the shinigami with a spoonful of melancholy. L could tell that this wasn't the answer Raito had been expecting. Nor was it the answer Raito wanted. He sashayed into the room as if he owned the world, and then proceeded to quietly, quaintly, and politely insult Ryuk in the most impersonal way L had ever seen.
"I hate your shoes."
L was stunned. Never before had he heard something like that. Sure, he could understand how Raito could hate his face, or his wardrobe, or his stupidity, or even the tone of his voice.
But his shoes?
L understood perfectly well why Raito had said it. He was tired and bored, and he deeply disliked Ryuk for showing up unannounced. He didn't give the shinigami a witty and cruel insult. Rather, he chose to insult it in a cold, indifferent way that required little to no mental effort on his part.
"I hate your shoes too," Ryuk yawned.
"I'm not wearing any shoes," stated Raito.
Ryuk looked down at the Yagami's sock-clad feet. "Oh," it said stupidly.
"Seriously, why are you here?" Raito asked boredly.
The shinigami scratched its head. "Well, I really have nothing else to do."
A stupid answer, as L had expected. He slunk out from under the bed and perched on the corner of the raised platform on which it sat. Raito gave him a look. "You messed up my bed," he said flatly. By then, L knew that this was his cue to feel foolish and apologetic.
He didn't like that very much.
"With all due respect, your highness," he groused, "I believe you have bigger problems at the moment."
Raito snorted at him, and then whipped his attention back to Ryuk. "I want to know why you're following me," he said viciously. "What do you want?"
"Apples," said Ryuk.
"Wrong," said Raito.
L concurred.
"Like I said before, I have nothing else to do. Basically, none of us have anything else to do. Shinigami, I mean. We just gamble or sleep. So I got bored. I overheard that there was a new Kira somewhere in the human realm, so I came for a look. Now they're saying you're killing people already. I had to come back."
"Already?" asked Raito, eyes darkening with pride. L snorted at him. Yagami definitely was the high-and-mighty type. "The other Kira tried his abilities out on his acquaintances before he went public," said L before Raito's ego inflated any further.
Raito scowled at him.
"Really? I can't remember," said Ryuk with a scratch of the head, "All I remember is that he had a thing for chocolate."
"That he did," said L disdainfully.
Fucking chocolate-blueberry muffins.
----
Raito's day had just hit rock bottom, and then it started tunneling. First, he humiliated himself in front of Ryuzaki, next, his dad had plastered a target on his heart that said 'hit me' in big, block letters, even worse, his job was getting dull.
And now, when he thought he was the king of the world, he turned out to be second best.
Second fucking best.
"You never told me about another Kira," Raito growled in his godly voice. Ryuzaki gave him a mild glance. "You never asked about him," he said simply. This made Kira very angry.
"This is the sort of thing you should have told me when you met me," Raito reprimanded righteously.
"I didn't think it was the sort of thing you needed to know," Ryuzaki answered.
"You're in trouble," Ryuk said before he walked through the wall in search of an apple or two.
"You didn't think so?" Raito fumed quietly.
"No," Ryuzaki said before becoming very interested in his feet.
Raito took this as a sign of submission. Encouraged further, Raito continued stomping all over Ryuzaki. "Why not?"
"Because."
"Is that all you can say?"
"You love to argue, don't you?"
"What about it?"
"Well I will not argue with you, Yagami-san," Ryuzaki stated obstinately.
Raito quirked an eyebrow at the obvious challenge to his authority. "Well I can argue with you as much as I damn well please," he roared. "Now tell me who this other Kira was!"
"No."
"Why the fuck not?"
"Because you're yelling."
Raito ran over to his bed, collapsed, grabbed a pillow, shoved it into his face, and screamed. Him! Yelling! Again! He had been yelling, hadn't he?
Fuck.
Someone probably heard him. He was in luck that no one had come up the stairs looking for him. Raito was no Kira. Raito was a fucking loony. That was what he was. Yelling at Ryuzaki and forgetting that no one else knew what he was yelling about.
"Raito-san!" Ryuzaki was tapping the pillow. Raito breathed a long and anguished sigh before exhaling an equally long and anguished "Whaaaaaaaaaaattt?"
"You were hurting yourself again," said the mini-death.
"Why do you care?"
"It's not healthy."
"You eat nothing but cookies. You shouldn't be talking."
"It doesn't affect me, Raito-san. Now please, stop it."
"Are you going to tell me about that other Kira?"
"No."
Raito hit himself in the side of the head with his fist.
"Raito-san!"
He hit himself again.
"Fine," said Ryuzaki, "Throw a fit."
And Raito did.
It was his own style of fit, of course. Raito had perfected the art of doing absolutely nothing in protest to something he didn't like. He lay there, with his face in his pillow, and held his breath.
He held it for a very long time. So long, in fact, that he had given himself quite a headache. Ah, well, he could bear it. It was for the greater good, after all. Judging by the way Ryuzaki was acting lately, he was worried about Raito's safety. It was extremely obvious.
Yet, as Raito's headache increased in its intensity, Ryuzaki did nothing. He was still sitting on the bed, making it tip slightly, but nothing was happening.
Hmmm…
Had Raito miscalculated something?
Of course not. He was going to press that information out of Ryuzaki. And since he couldn't punch him, he was going to have to resort to other means. Maybe if he held a razor to his wrist, the mini-death would do something drastic.
There was an idea.
Raito's lungs began to ache. He was rather uncomfortable and wanted to move, but he kept perfectly still.
No signs of weakness.
Raito was in control.
Complete control.
He felt Ryuzaki starting to squirm at the other end of the bed. He was probably shuffling his feet around nervously. Raito smiled into his pillow.
Any minute now…
But he did nothing.
Just continued to do nothing.
What the fuck was he thinking? Here Raito was, suffocating himself to death purely by choice, and Ryuzaki was sitting at the other end of the bed and twiddling his toes. Of course, Raito mused, once he passed out, his muscles would go lax and he'd breathe anyway.
So Ryuzaki knew nothing about human lifestyle, but he knew that?
No. He had a different reason.
Ryuzaki was watching time fly by because if he did anything about Raito's masochism, he'd lose his argument. Raito inferred from the time they met that Ryuzaki was an extremely inflexible, unyielding wall of stubborn.
And damn, was he right.
He was always right!
A new voice resonated from beyond Raito's vision. It sounded like Ryuk's. "I think he's dead," the voice hummed.
With that, Raito smiled, exhaled all the breath he had been holding, and passed out.
----
Me: Oh my.
Chibi Misa: O: That works!
Chibi L: Me oh my. Fancy that.
Chibi Raito: This is-
Chibi L: getting off topic.
Chibi Raito: I think we should-
Chibi L: End this author's note really soon.
Chibi Raito: I want a grilled-
Chibi L: Cheese sandwich with tomato soup.
Chibi Raito: 'Kay, this is-
Chibi L: Really weird.
Chibi Misa: Yeah. Sure. Anyway, like? Don't like? Want to huggle it to death? Want to huggle our dysfunctional couple and their nosy neighbor to death? Review!
Me: Totally! For freedom!
Chibi Raito: For justice!
Chibi L: For cookies!
Chibi Misa: Cookies for reviewers! Sit back in your chair, write a review, and have a cookie! Review, review, review!