I hope everybody is staying as safe as they possibly can during these trying times. Protect yourself and others my lovelies.

.

From the corner of his eye, Light watched as one of many talon shaped fingernails graze past his workbook. Bone pushing in and lazily peeling back the membrane of wood on his desk. The loose shaving curls up and circles once, twice, before going limp.

Around him, the classroom was filled with nominal sounds of scratching pens on paper, hands on clock tick tick ticking away, and lethargic sighs and groans.

Nobody solely but Light could hear the deep and reverberant humming coming from the God of Death.

If he focused hard enough, Light could make out muttered words here and there. Mixtures of language some he could pinpoint, others he couldn't.

He asks Harry what he was humming at the end of P.E after volunteering to pack away the basketballs.

Harry snoops around the shed containing all sorts of physical education equipment. Smiling a taut smile at a CPR dummy.

"Just a bit of everything," he answers. "This is very wrong," having picked up the dummy by its silicone pink shoulders, he cocks his head to one side.

"Of course it is," Light found very early on in the week the Death God has stayed with him, that agreeing passed time much quicker than disagreeing.

"This contraption is intended to resemble a human," he tossed it up and down, turning to Light. Incensed, "why, this is positively inaccurate!"

Light went to…. what he doesn't exactly know, but whatever the words might have been die in his throat.

"Much better!"

Crimson blood drops to the floor in one huge wave. Drenching Harry's velvet slippers and pale ankles. Liver, intestinal track and all sorts of bodily organs splatter and slip over one another. Now Light isn't majoring in biology, but he's pretty certain pink squishy bits aren't supposed to pour out like a burst fishing net.

It quickly occurs to Light that the man severed from waist down was still alive. Not for much longer, he internally corrects. Mouth pulling into a grimace.

The unknown, middle-aged man gasping in a blathering stupor stares up at the grinning God. Trying to formulate some sort of words, likely a plea. A question as to why, or what.

"Just who is this?" He asks. Watching the man's neck give in and slump.

As always, Harry doesn't answer straight away (enjoying silence more comfortably and more languidly Light had initially thought possible). Instead, with disturbing care, he crouches down to place the corpse next to the pile of organs. Of which digs a a hand into. Picking up an intestinal track and studying it as though the entire concept of the body system was foreign. Maybe it was.

Light found the entire scene to resemble a kid examining their earnings of candy on Halloween night.

"Some lad in your notebook," he stretches the intestine like play doh, "He's supposed to die in, oh, say the next quarter hour."

Light is very much aware of the blood pooling out from the corpse by now - body not yet set into rigour mortis - and tiptoes around it to get a better look at the man's frozen profile.

It takes a handful of seconds.

"Dante Aldente."

A pedophile recently released after three years in jail. Too light a sentence if you ask the good people of the world.

This seemed more appropriate an ending.

"Bazinga," Harry lolled to a stand, hands decorated in red as though he had just finger painted a Jackson pollock painting. Admiring his work, he declares. "Much better. Anatomically correct and life-like."

"The Dummy is supposed to help us learn CPR," Light breaks the news non-so gently. "Not anatomy."

"…CPR?" Harry whispers furiously.

Yes, Light thinks. Mentioning a life saving technique to the God of Death was as ironic as it could get.

"Please, if you wouldn't mind…" he gestures to the scene resembling a B-Horror film.

With a click of Death's tongue and snap of fingers, the dummy was back and Light didn't have to worry about burying a body in his school's decorative garden.

.

As a general rule, Harry doesn't kill people.

Not the ones that had some life left ticking in them. Despite popular belief, there are rules to the universe one must follow to keep order.

People that didn't adhere to them and lived in a lifeless void of novelty nicknamed 'miracle', 'anomaly', or 'paperwork' as Reapers liked to call it, were free pickings.

And as another general rule, in these trying times of Light sprouting more of these miracles, Harry had a bunch of overworked Reapers doing their earnest to enforce order to sanity.

Harry was watching another episode of Sayu's drama when a skeletal figure in a tattered, hooded cloak materialised through the tv set.

"Pardon the interruption, your Dreadfulness."

"Ah, my dear Gopher," Harry said with a welcoming smile that sent spiders jittering down its vertebrae, "I am happy to see you. Doing well, are we?"

"Horribly, my Dreadfulness. It's awful. That's why I'm here - "

"Charming television program this is, Gopher. Though their portrayal of reapers is staggeringly off."

Gopher didn't have saliva to swallow, so instead he chose to unblinkingly stare at his Master sitting comfortably next to that very alive mortal girl, "H-how so my liege?"

"To save you agonising suspense of watching the show and figuring it out yourself, these mortals are under the impression the dead can't die. Well, what is death if not a series of prolonged nothingness. An endless torment of darkness spent in liquid tar of memories."

Gopher didn't understand anything his master said apart from that not-so-thinly-veiled threat to his continued deathly existence. "Right so!"

Harry's gleaming green eyes burned as bright as coal.

"-Your dreadfulness!" Gopher fretted.

"Rightly so," Harry grinned, all teeth. "Now," elongated fingers knitted together over a crossed knee, "what is to be the bother of the night?"

So then Gopher went on to explain they were outgunned by the totality of 'miracles' coming through on the hour.

That night, and nights soon to come, the world saw Death draw his sword.

.

Waking up to find Harry not floating about, humming one of his strange tunes or poking through his stuff wasn't unusual. Light could typically find the God downstairs watching tv with his sister or examining his mother's cooking techniques if it were the case.

Today proved to be an exception, because for the first time in a week, his morning was well and truly scarce of the deceased Deity.

It lasts until he receives a text from his mum after school to pick up some cupcakes Sayu forgot to buy for one of her friend's birthday parties. He was in line in a patisserie, debating whether to get red velvet or classic strawberry cream when Harry appears.

"Isn's it wonderful," he whispers into his ear and Light doesn't flinch. Doesn't feel the warm, oxidised air that comes with breath. Or the presence of another beating heart. There's a cold chasm behind Light, and he turns to face it with all the blandness he could muster.

"Red velvet or strawberry cream?"

"Foul stuff red velvet," Harry said and leaned in confidingly, "you don't want to know what these fae put in it."

"Fae as in Fairies?" Light finds himself mirroring Harry's posture. Side eyeing the nose-pierced teenage girl behind the cash register catering to an elderly man in a fedora. "Really?"

"That's what I heard."

No wonder people found the food here so addictive, Light thought. God damn Fairies were putting weird stuff in the mixture.

"Strawberry cream it is then," and asks, "What's wonderful?"

"That man there in front of us, in the fedora and funny little pinstripe suit, is the last person I would have expected to see around here. Around you," Harry gave a short chortle. "You humans and your fickle, wibbly wobbly, timey wimey timelines. So delicate, so sensitive to even a minuscule, insignificant change. That even as we speak paths are interlocking quicker than anticipated. Round and round they go, where they stop nobody knows," he spins a spindly finger in the air along his sing-song tune, green eyes sparkling and grin perverse.

That sounded as ominous as it could have, and Light was instantly on guard.

The patisserie is a small one, and Light is arrogant enough to bet all his earnings that if he stepped into another patisserie five streets over he would find the architecture there identical to this one. What he was getting at was, the place is so tiny and basic, Light is a direct target for the door.

Harry sensed the tug of fate's strings intertwine like the gentle kiss of a mistress.

The old man turned with a package of strawberry cake just as the door opened for a new customer and smacks Light forward. Harry watches the human catapult away like a captain of a ship watching their prisoner take a swan dive off a plank into shark infested waters.

This was going to be fun.