#9 Pain
Matsuda was like a magnet for accidents. He'd known that since he was five years old and his class' goldfish had spontaneously leapt out of its bowl and out the window five minutes after it was announced he would be in charge of feeding it.
It wasn't his fault, and it wasn't as though he was clumsy per se, he was doubly-careful of much of his work simply because he knew if it could go wrong, it would go wrong for him.
Still bad things just seemed to happen around him. And despite this, he also seemed to have an unbelievable amount of luck when it came to actually getting promotions. He reasoned that people were trying to put him in a job where he couldn't cause any trouble.
And for a while that worked, he liked the office work he did working with Chief Yagami's section, and though he was considered the best with his gun, he preferred it now he wouldn't have to fire the damn thing so often.
He even began to believe that the curse of bad things happening around him was gone.
And then he chose to work with L. He should have known before he volunteered that his magnet-like tendency for accidents would come back when it mattered the most that he be careful and do no wrong.
It was back almost ten minutes after actually meeting the detective. His phone magically turned itself back on and began playing 'Carmelldansen' at top volume in the middle of L's explanation of something complicated.
L had glared at Matsuda like he wanted to kill him with a fork.
About three days into the investigation Matsuda tripped over one of the wires in the hotel room and fell against Watari, sending cake and coffee over L and knocking the air out of the old man.
L had carefully helped his elderly butler back to his feet, and then growled at Matsuda that if he ever did something like that again, he would live to regret it.
That night was the first night Matsuda genuinely felt like it was his entire fault.
He'd left the building early, intending to tell chief Yagami tomorrow that he was resigning from the Kira case and going back to his nice safe office job where he couldn't screw anything up anymore.
He wandered around Tokyo in something of a daze, feeling drained. Somehow it meant more that L had told him off, not the chief, Aizawa or Ide, but L.
He stared up at the neon lights of the city and mumbled to himself that L was right to be angry with him, what if Watari had been seriously hurt? Or that coffee had been hot when half of it spilt over L? He was just lucky no-one had been seriously damaged.
He was the problem. He knew it. He should just go and live somewhere where he couldn't cause anyone any more pain.
He heard a crashing sound that brought him racing back to earth. He stared in utter befuddlement at the two cars that had collided two feet front of him, then without thinking, raced over while viciously stabbing numbers into his phone.
He ended up rescuing a woman and her infant from one of the cars, all the time wondering if it was because bad things happened around him that the accident had occurred.
The next morning when he went into work he was told L had heard about what he had done and was impressed with his quick thinking.
And it occurred to Matsuda that maybe so long as he was good and quick at cleaning up the messes he made, he might stand a chance of being useful to the investigation after all.