Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note.

A/N: Is anyone interested in co-authoring this? If you'd like to, please say so in a review.

After this chapter, it would probably switch to first person, and each subsequent chapter would switch between Light and L, unless anyone else has a cooler idea. :D

Light Yagami, overworked, underpaid new recruit of the NPA, sat at his desk, staring at a file that he absolutely could not force his mind to process. He had been up all night last night. Again. It was the third night in a row, and if he didn't get control of the situation, he was going to become very prissy very fast. Light did not like to be prissy. Light also did not like to hallucinate, but if he didn't get some sleep in the very near future, giant chartreuse cicadas in top hats would be waltzing around the room and Light would need a whole lot of very serious therapy.

He wasn't entirely sure why he had decided to stay awake for the last 72 hours. He had no idea how he had ever come to believe that it was a good idea, or, even if it was a bad idea (and it was, it was such a bad idea, he wanted to sleep, dammit!) how he had come to believe it was necessary. Light was very intelligent. Usually. This particular inexplicable action was disturbing him greatly. Certainly, there was nothing so important that he had to sacrifice his personal health...

Ah, but wait. Now he remembered. Oh yes, he remembered, and only a very sleep-deprived mind could possibly have allowed him to forget for even a moment the reason he kept hearing waltz music and the scritch of giant cicada feet.

It was that damned roommate of his.

Light was flat broke, so he had found the smallest, cheapest apartment in the city and batted his eyelashes at the landlady until she gave him a discount. He still couldn't afford to keep the apartment for another month, so he put an ad in the paper.

'22 yr old male seeks roommate for cheap crappy aptmnt.'

He figured that at least he would get someone with a sense of humor.

He didn't know, however, that what he'd get would be a freaky insomniac with crazy hair and an unhealthy obsession with mystery novels, sweets, and living in what Light considered to be filth.

Light reflected that at least he would someday be able to tell friends and family about the lunatic roommate he once had. He would receive looks of deep sympathy and outright pity, and some very hot, slightly older man on par with Johnny Depp would offer to let him move in to retroactively compensate for his trauma...

Light needed to sleep.

The apartment was one room, with suspicious claw marks on the pitted walls and unidentifiable stains on the thin, ragged carpets. Needless to say, Light's furniture consisted of no more than a desk, a single, slightly broken chair (which you had to sit on just right and NOT. MOVE. or it would collapse), and a mattress. There was no window, couch, television, shelves, or anything of the sort, and there'd be no toilet if it hadn't come bolted to the floor of the room. There was certainly no heat, about which Light did not allow himself to worry despite the fact that it was October and one of the outer walls had a crack he could stick his finger through.

Light refused to sleep on the bare floor and so, apparently, did his insane roommate. So they cozied right up and shared the mattress, curled up onto themselves to conserve heat under the threadbare comforter Light had seen a half-frozen hobo throw away as useless, had immediately snatched for himself, and had promptly held over his head, arms raised in victory.

Between his roommate thrashing around and his own developing case of hypothermia, Light hadn't slept. And he couldn't sleep at work because he was new and they'd fire his ass in about one point five seconds if he so much as put his head down.

And so Light had been awake for 72 hours and counting.

He kept himself awake by fantasizing about ways to annoy the hell out of his roommate. Why him? Why had he gotten the nightmare roommate? Light supposed the man could have been a murderer, and that that might have been worse.

That depended though; did the murderer intend to kill him? Or was he just a miscellaneous murderer?

Light wondered if telling his roommate that he'd prefer to live with a murderer would make him move away. Would pretending to be a murderer make him move away?

Except Light needed him to keep paying half the rent.

And anyway, Light was convinced that nothing he could do would make the man leave. He just seemed like that kind of guy.

Light rubbed his eyes until he saw spots, then slapped himself across the face. The person in the cube next to his looked at him like he was crazy, so Light flashed him his I Am Perfection smile. The man smiled back, already forgetting what he had just caught Light doing.

Worked every time.

Satisfied, he returned to his files.

A moment later, the phone rang. Light automatically scooped it up, tucking it under one ear, waiting for the other person to talk first.

"Light-kun?"

It was the roommate from Hell.