AN: Made it into the thirties!! Whoooo!! :D There's not that much left to post, thank goodness! Only about... oh... twenty more... erm, never mind.

Yeah, that last chapter was kinda boring, I know. Believe me, something actually happens in this one.

May 28, 2011
5:45 PM

For the next week, Miyano did the best that he could to ignore the man following him on the train.

The guy was fairly tall, with messy black hair and glasses. He was always dressed in a business suit whenever Miyano saw him, probably to disguise the fact that he apparently had no life other than following people--HIM--around. Whenever he thought nobody was looking, he would sneak glances at Miyano... which was kind of weird. They weren't really menacing or, God forbid, perverted; they were just observant, nervous looks in his direction.

That didn't mean Miyano wasn't slowly losing his sanity.

Over the past few days he'd come up with as many ways he could ditch this guy that he could think of. But there were problems with all of them: they didn't work, they required a change in his routine, or they were too risky to pull off. The best one he could think of was to kill the guy with the Death Note (which was, for him, an obvious solution), but the damn shinigami following him around refused to intervene, and he wasn't about to make the eye trade just to learn the guy's name. He was obsessive, compulsive, and a bit eccentric at times, but he wasn't a complete moron. Half his life wasn't worth getting rid of a stalker.

But... what if it was?

His nails were gone: he'd bitten them all off due to his anxiety. He'd barely slept. Miyano had even convinced himself that his hair was turning gray and beginning to fall out.

The stalker glanced in his direction, and Miyano unintentionally held his briefcase a little bit tighter.

I need a drink.

I need a plan.

Hell, I just need a name!!

...

Or did he?

"I'm outside his apartment again," Yamamoto said on his cellphone. Miyano had gotten off the train and walked home, apparently without noticing Yamamoto even once. Said police officer sighed. "Nothing happened today, either. Again."

"I see," said Ryuzaki on the other end of the line. As always, Yamamoto was having issues trying to distinguish any sort of emotion in his voice. If he were to guess though, he'd say Ryuzaki was almost disappointed. "Nothing unusual at all?"

Yamamoto shook his head, then realized that there wasn't even the slightest bit of a chance that Ryuzaki could know he was doing such an action over the phone. "Nah," he said aloud. "Same old, same old. He got up, went to work, and he came home." He kicked a pebble as he walked slowly down the street towards the place where Aizawa was due to pick him up.

"...Alright then." Ryuzaki paused, then added, "We probably need to--"

CRACK.

The air around him was split with a gunshot, and Yamamoto never got the chance to learn what Ryuzaki would have said.

"Take that, you bastard," Miyano slurred.

He stumbled away from the window after the man he referred to as a "stalker" fell down bleeding on the sidewalk. With some difficulty he tossed his gun aside and managed to sit at his kitchen table.

Ryuk didn't stick around to watch him drink another shot of scotch. With a bemused expression, he passed through the wall into Miyano's bedroom.

He wasn't entirely used to the human world, but he knew when someone had just screwed himself over, and that was exactly what this guy had just done to himself. The cops are gonna be all over this...Ryuk doubted Miyano would even get to spend another night outside of a jail cell.

When he thought about it, it wasn't totally unexpected for for the shinigami. Miyano was kind of weird and OCD and all, and the dumbass had been so nervous about being followed for a week that he'd gotten out the alcohol. Then... POOF. Before Ryuk knew what was going to happen, Miyano had pulled a gun out of his closet and shot at the stalker--a Masato Yamamoto, as the eyes revealed--from his living room window. It kind of surprised Ryuk, because the only instances he'd ever personally seen like this took place on daytime television, but he also found it oddly hilarious and depressing.

Hilarious because... well, he always got a kick out of this kind of stuff. Humans fighting and getting hurt were pretty amusing most of the time.

Depressing because he was about to head back to the shinigami realm again. If Miyano was put in prison, Ryuk sure as hell wouldn't sit around and wait for the idiot to die.

Ryuk pulled out his Death Note and a small pen, but before doing anything he briefly reconsidered. There wasa small chance Miyano would get away from the police...

After a moment or two, he put the pen away.

Mamie's safe enough... for the moment.

He would die eventually. Ryuk knew that from his experience with Light.

The only question left to ask was: how long was he gonna wait until he killed him?

AN: Holy sonofagun! (No pun intended...)

Yes, I did just frigging do that.

And yes, like I said before: so NOT near the end, although it probably looks like it. Looks can be deceiving, people. o.O

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