Mysterious Guest: Thank you, and you too! ...If I haven't said that to you yet. I forget.
I've actually been to two funerals myself. One was for my grandpa, and the other was for my grandma. Hmm... I'll tell Sierra what you've said~
Dead Bite by Hollywood Undead? I love that song! I actually think of it as kinda both Light and BB, you know? It's a song that has a little bit of every person that might, you know, kill someone. I actually think of every line as a new person. Like, one might be Light or BB, but another might be Jeff the Killer, or Matt, or someone from some other anime. You know? It's an everyone-who-kills kind of song~ At least... that's how I think of it. .u.
You're transferring, huh? I hope you find friends there~ I'm sure you will. :) Even just a few friends, even only one, is a wonderful thing.
Kayaking sounds fun. I don't think I've ever kayaked, that I can think of... I went in a canoe before, though. And a raft. ...And a boat.
My 4th of July was great. I spent it with my nieces, and Real-life Anna's mom (along with my brother; the nieces' dad) took us all to the fireworks. c: It was nice.

Mrs. Lawliet: You know, I feel bad for her too... Yeahhh, I did spend a lot of time purifying him, didn't I? ^^; Maybe that's why it made me so sad when he started getting corrupt all over again... Blah...
Mhm, Matt's story~ It'll be a bit before it comes in, though. It's actually something I haven't written yet, haha.

Amy: They are, aren't they? Ahh... That's a good way to put it, too...

Real-Life Sierra would like me to tell all of you wonderful readers that she says hi. So yeah.

Enjoy the chapter~

Hoshi Takahashi was found the next morning in Ginza, which L had apparently been expecting. Takahashi was a stiff-looking man with a perfectly shaven chin and a trim haircut. He'd had been burned on the cheek; branded with the universal symbol of hatred known as the swastika. L made the background check on him immediately, for he was finding the backgrounds to be rather important: Takahashi was the head of a Samsung company store in Ginza, but as L knew, Samsung wasn't a very popular company at all in Japan. It only made sense that his rival was the head of the Apple company store, and the two men had hated each other for the longest time. Swastika; the symbol of hate. Hatred between two rival companies. Hoshi Takahashi's trouble to society was hatred.

Beside Takahashi's body was a small turtle figure with a bag upon its back. In the bag the brand used to burn the man's cheek had been found. This could only be the clue to the next location, but L couldn't make anything of it quite yet.

He'd known today's murder would be in Ginza, though. Why? At Misa's murder scene, there had been a box at the foot of her cross, and in it, there were two coins. Old coins, from the old silver-coin mint that had been established there back in the 1800's.

Now… the symbols engraved into Misa's skin was all in Greek, and L could decipher each word. 'Humanity,' 'cruelty,' 'death,' 'regret,' 'sin,' and 'end' were all words inscribed there. One other thing, though, scrawled across her shoulder blades, were the words 'Pandora's box.' All of the other words etched with what was most likely a knife were caused by the old Greek myth of Pandora's box, in which Pandora, the first woman on Earth, opened a forbidden box and thus released all of the horrors of the world.

Now, there had been four murders thus far in these murder cases B had created to challenge L. The pattern of which person he was to kill next had to do with a specific trouble to society, and the victim's background had to match their specified hindrance. Sayuri Sakamoto, for example, had sickness. Then Kenta Gakusha, the second murder victim, had obsession. Misa Amane had Pandora's box, and, finally, Hoshi Takahashi had hatred. Sickness; obsession; Pandora's box; hatred. Now the only thing was to find what the pattern with those was…. Something was out of place with Pandora's box; could that be it…?

What's more, B had led him to a little discovery the other night. Thursday; you know, the day Sam mistakenly kissed B. It was a little thing that he noticed; that was all. It was an implication that could mean a lot if only he could prove it. B had sedated L, and it hadn't affected Sam, you see. It didn't surprise him, really; in fact, it was a given that sedatives would only affect the one sedated, whether the person was Bonded or not. However, B had drawn his attention to it, because it implied that there could be a loophole in the Bond.

Two people Bonded together had the same injuries, and so would die at the same time. Everything that happened to one would happen to the other. Yet, when one was put to sleep with sedatives, the other wasn't affected at all. Could this mean, then, that there were other things, like sedatives, that could affect one, but not the other? For example, what if one of them had an accidental overdose and died, would the other live on or would they still die together anyway?

It was because of this little development that L decided to test it. He wasn't going to kill anyone, but was going to use something a bit less lethal to make his tests. All he needed was to get someone who was Bonded drunk, while the one they were Bonded to had absolutely no alcohol. If it affected only one of them, then there was indeed a loophole in the Bond. If both of them were affected, then the Bond stood strong.

Now, of course, he couldn't just get himself drunk. L was not a drinking man, if you couldn't tell. Besides, he'd be drunk, and he was the creator of the experiment. That wouldn't do at all. Sam was nineteen anyway; the drinking age in Japan was twenty, and he wasn't going to take her to Korea nearby (where the drinking age was nineteen) just for the sake of this experiment. Besides, if the Bond really connected them in a way that both of them would be drunk… well, he just didn't want to be drunk. He hated it. A slower reaction rate and an obvious lowering of deductive abilities, plus the possibility of acting more on impulse than by thought? …No. That didn't appeal to him in the least. Now, the only other two at the final stage was Light and I…. Of the two of us, he figured I was the best choice. …And there was a part of him that would love to see me drunk, but that was just Sam being Sam.

Well then. Now he was working the Kira case, B's case, and he was concocting a plan to make me drunk. His hands were getting full.

How fun.

"…I still can't believe that Misa died…," Sierra mumbled from the floor. She was lying flat on her back, one of her arms shielding her eyes.

"Yeah. Me neither," Matt replied as he rolled up a computer wire. It was almost time for the next move. "Who'd've thought that she'd be murdered during this case, of all things that could have happened to her."

"…Eh… one of us is gone…." She rewound what she just said in her head, then played it again. Oops. "…Why did I say 'us'?"

Matt shrugged. "Maybe because you were her friend?"

"…Yeah… that makes sense…." She'd actually said it because she was one of the Kiras… but that was a good cover-up. Thanks, Matt.

Matt continued packing his things; Mello eventually came in with a chocolate bar in his mouth, waiting for Matt to finish. The blond waited irritably, leaning on the couch for a while before asking with a frown, "How long are you going to take, Matt?"

"I can take my time if I want to take my time."

"I don't have any patience."

"I, of all people, should know that, Mello," Matt pointed out, eyeing his best friend through the goggles.

Mello sighed irately in response. "Sierra, you've got your stuff together, right?"

"She does," Matt confirmed, then put his last piece of equipment in his bag. He smiled slightly, satisfied. "Alright, I'm good." The redhead then shouldered his bag and stood, looking back to Sierra. The chocoholic straightened up as well. "Hey, Sierra, c'mon. We've gotta go."

They didn't receive a response from the girl on the floor.

"Sierra, get up," Mello frowned.

"She's not dead, is she?" asked Matt, cocking an eyebrow. He looked to Mello.

"What're you looking at me for?" he snapped.

Matt shrugged, then set his bags on the floor as he spoke. "I don't know; I figured you'd know whether she was dead or not 'cause of the mind sync thing you've got going on."

"Of course she's not dead!"

"Right, 'cause you'd be devastated if she were," he replied, adjusting his goggles and smiling crookedly. He began making his way over to her. "But that's fine, since I'd be pretty wrecked too." He crouched beside Sierra's motionless form, then took her shoulder and shook it lightly. Mello, meanwhile, was making his way over as well. "Hey," said Matt. "Hey, Sierra. We've gotta go. You didn't pass out, did you?" No response. Matt sighed and lifted her arm from her face to find her eyes to be closed. "Well… she's sleeping."

"Has she been sleeping enough lately?" Mello asked dully.

"Nope," Matt replied. "As a Wammy kid surrounded by people like you and Near and L, I didn't think much of it."

The blond narrowed his eyes slightly at being placed in the same group as Near, but snapped out of it when he saw Matt was picking Sierra up. Then he just looked at Matt questioningly.

"Here," Matt said with a smirk, holding out Sierra to his friend.

Mello only looked at her like she was some unidentified object that he didn't know what to do with.

"Well, look, she needs to sleep, and we need to leave, so we've gotta carry her. I have more stuff than you. She's yours." He continued holding her out to him.

Mello glared at him.

"Look, I'll drop her if you don't take her," Matt informed Mello flatly, shoving her towards him.

Mello automatically held her so she wouldn't fall, then scowled at Matt. "What the hell?"

"Think of it this way," the video game lover replied nonchalantly as he went to pick his stuff back up again. "If we tell her she had to be carried by you, or – even better – if she wakes up in your arms, it'll give her a reason to get more sleep. She won't fall asleep in random places, and so she won't have to be carried by you. If she gets more sleep, she'll be healthier. Alright?"

Mello muttered something like an 'alright' in return, and Matt just gave a curt nod, smirking happily.

In any case, it was time for them to move out.

"What the hell, Mello?! Put me down! Why the hell are you carrying me; what the hell?!"

Matt was laughing. Of course.

Sierra, typically, had woken up the moment they reached their next hideout, and had freaked out once she realized what was going on. She whacked him over head as a way to get away. He, then, dropped her in alarm, and she fell with a little yip of surprise. "Don't drop me!"

"Don't hit me over the head!"

Matt was still laughing, but he managed to speak. "Well, Sierra… if you don't want to be carried by Mello… don't fall asleep randomly like that." He finished off the sentence with a final snicker.

"Meh!" Sierra snapped in response, crossing her arms.

"Well, for the record," Matt grinned, "that was sweet of him; I don't know why you hit him."

"Matt…," Mello uttered in a bit of a threatening tone.

Sierra wasted no time in getting up, stalking over to Matt, and slapping him square in the face. "You shut up!"

He rubbed his cheek, snickering again. "Hey, that kinda hurt, you know…."

I wanted to go to NPA headquarters to train whenever I could. Light hadn't been trained with a gun either, but he evidently had better aim considering whenever he gave his help I did much better. This only made me want to try harder. I sometimes hesitated when I peered out from behind a corner to shoot at fake criminals because my mind didn't process immediately which figures were innocent civilians and which weren't. I was getting better at that, though…. I kept mixing up formation 3 and formation 5, too, but I'd always mixed up those numbers. It was getting easier to hold up a gun, too. Perhaps I was actually getting stronger….

On the other hand, Light would do his job in a different branch of the NPA. This job got information on tons of criminals that needed to be killed, and so it was a very useful job. Obviously.

Of course, this couldn't be done until Monday came. It was only Sunday.

At night I would go to Light's to help him with trying to figure out the Sinful Murder cases. Since we were kicked off the case, we couldn't work on it with the task force, but that didn't mean we weren't going to try to solve it together on our own. Our projected excuse? To avenge Misa. Our real reason? We wanted to find the murderer before L, as a challenge, and we wanted to kill him. After all, Near still had wiretaps in Light's house, and if he wanted secrets, he'd get them – just not the secrets he wanted to hear. The only secret we'd tell was how we were working on the Sinful Murder cases behind the NPA's back.

Light was the hacker in our two-man team. Technically both of us knew how to hack, but he was usually the one in that position. Then, while he did that, I would look at the information we already had to try to make something of it. Of course, we'd have to be careful what we said because of the wiretaps, but we didn't talk much anyhow because any interaction there was, at any point, was through thought. So, Sunday night, instead of him having dinner over my house, I ate there after working for hours on those cases, both of us thinking on how to solve it as we ate.

I actually ended up hitting upon something while I was zoning out, funnily enough. My thoughts had wandered to the cases Sam and L were on a few months ago, when she went to places like Italy and Russia and America in order to catch the killer. They'd even gone to L's hometown. I began to ponder on whom that could have been. As I did this, I remembered Sam had said it was the same killer this time…. As I realized this, I took note of how if we knew the killer of the first cases, then we would know the killer of these cases and thus only need evidence to prove it.

I got to work on trying to figure out who the killer was right after dinner, piecing things together bit by bit. First I looked up Axbrige, L's hometown. There, I discovered the eleven murders dubbed the 'Axbridge Massacre' that took place there back in March. However, the status of the case was simply 'case closed.' There was no information on who the killer was.

Next was Russia. I remembered Sam mentioning Moscow, and tried there first. There was only one murder there, and it had the same result. 'Case closed.'

Italy, now. I remembered even clearer that she'd gone here, because it was here that Sam told me she'd first kissed L. I didn't know if there were places gone to in between Russia and Italy, but for now I'd just work with what I had and see where it got me. I looked up any major murders there, but there was only two truly horrible men, and both of them had been judged recently. I didn't give up, though. Sam had said she'd nearly been burned alive…. So, I tried searching up fires in Italy within the right time period; late March, that is. There was one major fire in the catacombs of Rome, which vaguely confused me knowing stone didn't normally catch fire. This fire was the 'Catacomb Conflagration,' and it was this I latched onto as I looked through Rome's news to find what we needed.

Alright, here we are. A man named Francesco Lombardi was apparently the hero, who had saved an unnamed girl from being killed. When asked who the kidnapper was, he only said that he didn't know who he was, but that he had short black hair and the creepiest eyes….

Now, I was getting better at remembering names and faces. (This was a given, as being a constant user of the Death Note required this skill.) I also knew a lot of criminals; many dead, some living. I ran through the living criminals I remembered that fit that description. There was one, a black-haired man of the Italian mafia, that fit the description. However, he was last seen in Italy, and these murders most certainly did not seem like his work.

Think, Natalie. Who do you think of when you think of a guy with short black hair and creepy eyes? Who comes to mind? Think; think…. Mikami popped into my head, but this only made me want to laugh. Then….

BB?

We'd seen him on the surveillance camera footage of Mello's escape; he was alive despite the fact his name had been written in the Death Note. Could it have been him? Light began checking the dates of all the murders for these cases…. May thirty-first, June fourth, June ninth, and June thirteenth. 31, 4, 9, and 13. It matched B's pattern in the LABB Murder Cases. The murderer who had killed Misa… was Beyond Birthday. A man who apparently wasn't affected by the Death Note.

Well… now there was only one thing left to do: crack this case. We knew it was B, now we just had to prove it.

It wasn't too long after that I called it a night and headed back to my own home through the dark. The night air was not quite hot and not quite cool; a perfect temperature. I walked happily among a thin crowd of pedestrians; there weren't many people out at this time. I reached home to find Anna was just preparing to go to bed. Sam was on the couch, leaning against the arm with a sketchpad in her lap. She greeted me with a small wave. Anna caught sight of me coming through the door as she was about to head up the stairs. She stopped and turned to me, glaring at me indignantly. I closed the door softly behind me.

"What took you so long?" Anna asked me, sounding rather annoyed.

"Sorry," I apologized. "We had a lot to do."

"What exactly were you doing?" Sam inquired, cocking an eyebrow.

I shrugged. "There are a lot of Misa's things that still need to be sorted out, Sam. A will doesn't necessarily clarify every single thing a person owned."

"…Oh."

"Still, did you have to take so long?" Anna huffed, crossing her arms.

"Again, Anna, I'm sorry," I said, "but there's a lot of things we have to take care of."

"Will you be going back again tomorrow, then?" asked Sam.

I nodded.

Anna breathed one last irritated sigh. "Whatever," she muttered. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight," I smiled, and Sam waved at her before she made her way up to bed.

The next day I trained at NPA headquarters. Matsuda actually visited me once, and we chatted for awhile before both of us returned to our respective jobs. Eventually, I returned home, and soon after making sure there was enough food for Sam and Anna to have dinner, I left for Light's again to work on the case. Light hacked into the NPA's system once again, gaining access to the information on the Sinful Murder cases. After this was accomplished, Light tried to work out more patterns while I tried to decipher the markings on Misa. Sometimes a word here or there would be hard to make out, and it didn't really help that I'd never seen the words before in my life. Once I could make a word out, however, I would try to enter it into a translator.

Eventually all the words were deciphered and all that was left was to figure out the meaning behind it. 'Pandora's box'…. That was the point, of course, but what could a killer be trying to say with 'Pandora's box'? He was, for one, implying that Misa, as Kira, had unleashed bad upon the world. But of course there was the suspicion of how he could know she was Kira… but that was probably just the hidden rumors of being taken in by L all that time ago; that sort of thing. Beyond was a Wammy kid too. Nonetheless, we knew to raise our guard, for if he wanted, he could strike against us as well.

We began noticing a pattern with the people, too. There was always some burden to society that the killer would point out. Sickness; obsession; Pandora's box; and the most recent one, hatred. It was this that must have been the pattern of who to kill, just as the alliteration of B or Q in the victim's names was such in the LABB Murder Cases. But what was the pattern supposed to be? There didn't seem to be any definite next thing….

We worked on this for awhile, looking back on all the murders to see what we could make of it. As we worked, it grew late, and my brain slowly began to die. I could only keep alert for so long, you know. I still tried to work my way through it and piece together the case, though. Before us, upon a table, were pictures from the case – of the victims, of the crime scenes, of the notes – as well as any connections we'd made. The interlocking patterns. The translations. That sort of thing.

My attention began to wander at some point, however, as I grew more tired. I would zone out when I was trying to think, then snap back to attention, shaking my head and mentally scolding myself. It kept happening, though, and I eventually reached the point where I couldn't even get my brain to work.

Half of me thought it was about time for me to retire, and of course this was Light being rational. This same half of me knew that it was just silly to have to go home this late, and this tired. It would be more convenient if I crashed here. I made a mental note not to stay so late next time so I wouldn't get so tired and therefore wouldn't have to stay here. I didn't want to be any sort of burden, even though I knew for a fact he didn't really care all that much.

Considering the fact I was practically falling asleep in my chair, I accepted it was time for bed. I was led to a place to rest by Light, and he left me to sleep as he continued to work. I fell into slumber almost instantly.

Fun Fact: Real-life Sierra does sometimes fall asleep in random places when she's tired enough...

Review? For sleep? :D