Part II: A Drunken Confrontation
OoOoO
~Timeskip~
Raito couldn't sleep at night. It had been months since this paperclip had first begun to haunt him, but he still hadn't figured out how to do away with it. He thought obsessively about the paperclip, pondering its secrets and dreading the next day that he would have to face it. Raito had not killed a single person in these past months because he had been so preoccupied.
One weekend, when everyone in Raito's family had gone out to a play, Raito was so depressed and disheartened that he did something you should never do: he drank alone.
Once drunk, Raito watched the entire third season of the O.C. straight (somehow accomplishing this in a few hours) and then killed the entire cast with the Death Note because he hated the ending. Afterward, Raito stumbled downstairs into the living room and fell into a drunken stupor on the couch.
What was he going to do? He couldn't concentrate on anything, his grades were suffering, and L had been calling more and more often recently to ask why Raito was skipping out on investigation activities. All because of the paperclip.
Raito's eyes crossed as he stared across his room, sinking more deeply into the couch. The colors of his home around him seemed to bleed and melt together in a haze of pigments in his drunkenness.
Then, quite suddenly, Raito saw the paperclip standing before him, life-sized, holding a piece of cake on its metal tale.
Raito blanched and stared at it with his mouth hanging open before getting unsteadily to his feet.
"Wha.......wharyou doin here???" Raito slurred in horror, raising his fists in a threatening way. "Ya......ya've already got my computr.......ya get outta my house!"
The paperclip giggled. "I'm you're friend!" it said. It took a bite of the cake on his tail.
"No ya're not my friend, ya bastard......!" Raito garbled angrily, swaying dangerously as he lost his temper. "Yar......ruinin' ma liiiffffeeeee......."
The paperclip giggled. "I love you."
"Ya bastard, I'll kill ya!" screamed Raito, lunging at the paperclip, but falling straight through him, since after all, the paperclip was just a figment of his imagination.
The paperclip giggled and began to drift up the staircase.
"No....NO!!!! Com'back ya no good bastard an' face me lika man..........I'll kill ya!!!!!!" Raito bellowed.
Desperate to stop its progress, Raito grabbed a candle that was near him and hurled it at the paperclip. Obviously, it went straight through him and instead it hit the tablecloth of the dining table, setting it alight.
"Oh, shit." Said Raito, sobering up somewhat.
Soon the whole house was on fire. Raito only had time to grab his laptop and the Death Note before he went coughing out the front door and called 911 on his cell phone.
XxX
Half an hour later, the Yagamis no longer had a home. Sayu and Raito's parents had come home from the play that night to find firefighters surrounding the house, hosing down a charred frame, while Raito lay flat on his back on the lawn, clutching his laptop to his chest and saying, "Damn! I almost had him that time! I almost had him!" over and over.
Since it was pretty apparent that Raito was too dangerous to be kept with the rest of the family any longer, Raito's mother had to tearfully kick him out.
"I'm sorry Son, but you're just too dangerous to be kept in the house," she said, crying. "Your behavior these last few weeks has been inexcusable, and now we have no home. What choice do I have?"
"But Mom, it wasn't me! It was the paperclip. It was the paperclip!" Raito cried.
"I'm sorry..." she said.
Raito's lip trembled. "Where…where will I live?" he asked finally.
Raito's father cut in, "Fortunately, we have an answer to that," he replied. "L has very kindly agreed to take you in."
"L?" Raito said in disbelief. "Why would he offer me a home?"
"It's not exactly a home," Soichiro explained. "More like a permanent place on the investigation team."
"But.....why?" Raito asked.
Soichirou shrugged. "I think he said something about feeling bad for wrongly accusing you of being Kira..." He said. He paused. "He might have also mentioned bondage……"
Raito paled. A series of quite disturbing pictures flashed through his mind. "Isn't there anywhere else I could live?" he begged.
"Sorry, Raito, but he's the only one who would take you in," said Soichirou. "And he seemed very…eager. I think he likes your company."
Raito threw up a little bit in his mouth. Nothing he said would convince his parents out of their decision.
And so the next day, against his son's will, Soichiro took Raito to drop him off at L's place.
"Please don't make me do this, Dad," Raito begged, as Soichirou dragged his son up the stairs to the investigation room. "I'll never do it again, I promise!"
"Raito, this is for your own good," said his father. "I'm sorry that I have to do this, but there really isn't any other option considering how you behaved. Ah, we're here." Soichiro stopped before an ugly metal door that L had picked out on his shopping trip to IKEA. He knocked twice.
In the 1.5 seconds before the door swung open, it occurred to Raito that he could have just killed his father with the Death Note to stop him from doing this. But then the door opened fully and L's strange face came into view and Raito knew that he wouldn't have enough time to whip out the Death Note right now and kill his father without L noticing.
"Hi, hi, HI there!" said L in a happy voice.
Raito stared at him. "That was so out of character," he said.
"Hm, you're right." L cleared his throat and spoke again in a much deeper and less expressive voice, "Yagami-kun. What a pleasant surprise."
"You invited me here. How is this a surprise?" Raito asked, nonplussed.
L chose to ignore this question, and turned to Soichiro. "Thank you for bringing him over," he said. "You may leave us now. Assuming that Raito-kun has all his possessions…" he added, glancing back over to Raito and nodding at the dark blue backpack on his shoulders.
"He doesn't have much," said Soichiro. "Our house burned down, so he basically lost all his possessions. He doesn't even have any clothes."
"Oh, that's great!" said L, his creepy smile widening. "I mean—"
He suddenly realized who he was talking to, and coughed awkwardly.
"I mean, Yagami-kun can borrow my clothes. That's fine with me." L said happily.
"…thanks." Raito said, although in his mind he was freaking out. Why had his father gotten him into a house with the biggest pervert/pedophile in Japan? WHY? Damn you, Paperclip!!!!
"Come in, then." Said L, stepping aside to allow Raito into the foyer. Soichiro made a move to follow him in, but L quickly said, "Raito's been here before, he doesn't need help settling in." before slamming the door in Soichiro's face.
"Now, now, now," said L delicately, once they were alone. "I have a feeling we're going to get along famously! Let me show you to your room."
L lead Raito up a staircase and down a long hallway before opening the door to a reasonably spacious room with a large window and a potted plant in the corner.
"You will stay here," L said, although it was pretty obvious.
This isn't so bad. Thought Raito. At least he's not doing anything weird like handcuffing me to him.....yet.
"I'll leave you to get settled in," said L, stepping outside. "I've an intercom system in this place so you can page me whenever you need anything. And feel free to visit me in my bedroom, which is right next to yours if you need anything else."
"…"
"…right. I'll do that," said Raito, all the hairs on the back of his neck standing erect.
After L had left him alone in the room, Raito dropped his backpack on the floor. It was pretty light, considering that all he had was his laptop, the Death Note, and a red toothbrush that his father had bought for him on the way to L's place.
After examining each of the three items, Raito chose the laptop and opened it up, pressing the 'on' button.
"Now it's just me and you, Paperclip…" Raito hissed under his breath, opening a Microsoft word document. "There's no house to burn down, and no parents to freak out…let's see what you've got!" he viciously began to type out a school paper that was due in a few weeks, trying to make it as perfect as possible. This was a new habit that Raito had developed. He tried to beat the paperclip by writing papers that were absolutely perfect so that the paperclip couldn't prove itself better than him.
"Yes…yeeeeeesssssss, we'll see who's better NOW!" said Raito crazily, continuing to type.
XxX
"What odd behavior," L said out loud, as he observed Raito from his perving/investigating cameras down in the lobby. "He seems to be having a battle with his computer. What does it mean?"
L pressed the intercom button.
XxX
"Yagami-kun, is there anything wrong?"
Raito screamed and jumped as L's disembodied voice filled his room.
"What—where are you?!" Raito cried, looking around at the plain gray walls, terrified. "You can't scare me, Paperclip! I'm safe here!"
"Yagami-kun, it's me," said L. "I'm on the intercom."
"Oh." Raito now felt like an exceptional dumbass. "Uh, hey. What's…up?"
"I was going to ask you that," said L. "You seem a little disturbed up there. Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fi—wait, how do you know what's going on in here? Are you watching me on your perving cameras?"
"For your information, they are very high tech important investigation cameras," said L, idly tracing his mouth with one finger.
Raito knew that had to be a lie, but then he was distracted by a far more pressing matter: When L had scared him by suddenly paging him on the intercom, Raito had jumped and accidentally pressed the wrong key on his computer and had consequently misspelled the word "sesquipedalian". Why he was using the word sesquipedalian in one of his high school essays was anyone's guess.
BUT, most importantly, this minor spelling error had caused the computer to put a red squiggly line under it and then.......
The dreaded paperclip came up, telling Raito that he had misspelled a word. A little speech bubble came out of its head reading,
"It looks like you misspelled that word. Did you mean…
Sequester? Senile? Secular? Soup? Etc."
"Why, you horrid little bastard!" Raito shouted, forgetting that L was watching him. "Did I mean 'soup'? Did I mean 'soup'? How in Kira's name do you think that I would accidentally spell 'soup' as 'sesquipedalian'?! Moreover, do you really think I am so stupid that I wouldn't know how to spell the word soup?" Raito broke off, panting. L watched in silence.
"It looks like you're experiencing some computer difficulties," said L finally. "Want to come downstairs and use one of the desktops?"
Raito twitched. The way L had posed that question sounded exactly like how the paperclip would have asked it.
"I'm fine…" he said in a constrained voice. "There's nothing wrong."
"Really?" L cocked his head to one side. "It seems like there is."
"There's nothing wrong! I'm not having any problems whatsoever! I'm certainly not having any problems with a paperclip on my computer!"
"Why won't you tell me, Raito? Why won't you let me in! After all we've been through together?"
"We hardly know eachother!" Raito bellowed. "And it's NOTHING!"
Raito turned furiously back to his computer. He gasped.
His school paper had disappeared. In its place was a gray box reading,
'Microsoft Word has performed an illegal operation for no apparent reason and had to shut down. We're sorry for the inconvenience.'
"Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!" Raito screamed, gripping his hair with his hands and twisting in his agony.
XxXxXxXxX
Dinner with L that night was quite an awkward affair. And not just because L served cotton candy followed by black forest cake, culminating in cinnamon custard.
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Hope you enjoyed! :D
