A note to the readers that this is a side fic to the OC insert story God of the Machine. It's mostly intelligible without reading that first but if you want context for some of their conversations as well as Anna Jones as a character I recommend reading that first.

"What do you mean I don't know how to act like a normal person?"

Light had found that after school had ended and they had yet to enter To-Oh he and Anna often fell prey to recreational bickering. Usually it was over nothing serious, nothing involving Kira, but occasionally Light would feel more offended than others.

These usually happened when the topics of conversation drifted from Anna Jones' nonexistent pop culture references to her opinions on Light himself; such as her unshakeable belief that he was terrible at acting like a normal teenager.

"I mean you eat lunch by yourself and smile maniacally as you do it, you say the most generic things to people who talk to you, and you have no real friends, you're really weird Light let's face it."

They had taken the day to walk through a park and appreciate the cherry blossoms, he had not thought to do that this year, he couldn't remember the last time he had stopped to appreciate any sort of flower. The boredom before the Kira case had been so overwhelming that everything had seemed to fade until only the ennui remained and then when he had become Kira small things like that became distractions.

It was nice though, he thought, just spending the day looking at the pink flowers with the blue sky above speckled with clouds. Or it would have been nice, if she would stop talking.

"Eating lunch by yourself is not bizarre." He said but she cut him off before he could finish.

"No, that's Breakfast Club material… I mean weird." She said as she realized that he most likely had no idea what a Breakfast Club was.

"And I do have friends." He said to which Ryuk, who had been floating behind them, started laughing to.

Anna seemed in agreement because with raised eyebrows she asked, "Name one, Light."

And he tried to think of it, to think back to before he had become Kira even, and he found himself stretching to name anyone. As embarrassing as it was there was no one truly close enough to be a friend, acquaintance perhaps, but not a friend. He was generally well liked, known as being polite, charming, and altogether charismatic and according to Anna there was more than one girl who would accept an invitation to Space Land from him but that being said he tried to remember the last time he had truly invested time in another person.

It was hard to recall if there had ever been such a time.

"You." He finally said and looked at her, "I'm friends with you."

That seemed to stun her, her face morphed from the smile into a stretched and awkward grimace, as if not sure what to make of that statement or even what to do with it, "You know I asked you that earlier and you said we weren't, so I'm going to go with not, we're acquaintances of contrived circumstances."

He knew that she thought the same though, somehow, over the past few months they had become friends. Perhaps it was simply that she knew who he was and accepted it, she may not have liked it and if given the opportunity would hightail it out of the country just to get away from him, but that didn't change that she didn't question him as Kira too closely. It seemed to her as if it was almost a given that he was Kira, as if he could somehow not be Light Yagami without first being Kira, and strange as it seemed that confidence in him and his position was something he appreciated.

There was also the fact that aside from Ryuk if he wanted to discuss the Kira case with anyone, the true Kira case from his perspective, then she was the only one he could go to. And most of the time, when he did so, she was very quick on the uptake. Perhaps she wasn't as intelligent as her falsified test scores implied but she was intelligent, he didn't have to explain his thinking or motives to her, and it was refreshing to have human perspective when otherwise it would have simply been himself and Ryuk.

He wondered if he would have liked her even had he not become Kira, if she had only been the exchange student from America and him so terribly bored of everything, most likely she would have faded into the background with the rest of humanity but even so he liked to think that he would have seen something in her.

But without Kira Anna Jones as a persona had no reason to exist so there was little enough point dwelling on it.

"You know, it's funny though, you really are one of the more normal people in this story. So much so that your weirdness of eating by yourself and your plain bizarre reactions to certain things are kind of glossed over. I mean compared to… Well, let's just use Ryuk as an example for now, compared to the apple addicted shinigami you're basking in normality."

And that was where she crossed the line for the day.

"I'm telling you that I am a perfectly normal acting person!" He stopped in the middle of the pathway and said it perhaps more forcefully than it needed to be said, causing to his dismay a few people to turn and look at him, as well as for Anna to stop and look back a few paces ahead.

"Really, you want to test that out?" She asked and judging by Ryuk's laughter as well as the speculative look in her eye whatever she had in mind was not going to be pleasant.

Nevertheless this had gone on long enough. It wasn't every day or even every week but he'd receive comments again and again from her on how bizarre it was that people didn't find him odd and that secretly had no social skills.

So it was later that they found themselves an empty park bench overlooking a small pond. "Alright, unfortunately as neither of us have any real friends since you're a sociopath and I'm from another dimension the invisible Ryuk is going to have to be our judge on realism."

"You're having Ryuk judge?" Light had asked before glancing at Ryuk who gave them what appeared to be the shinigami sign of approval, "How do you know he knows what normal even is?"

"Are you kidding, Ryuk is kind of the human expert, hey Ryuk do you think it's weird to date four girls at once? Or wait, no better example, do you think it's weird if when declaring your love for someone you say with the Hannibal Lector expression on your face 'I love your eyes'?"

"Oh yeah." Ryuk agreed.

"He's good." Anna said.

"That was a bit of a loaded question, you practically told him the answer!" Light said while looking around to see if anyone was paying enough attention to notice that they were addressing an invisible god of death. However they had picked a fairly secluded bench and as far as Light could see no one was walking by.

"Whatever, listen so the game is called 'park bench' hence the bench. The rules are simple, you pretend that you're someone just sitting on a bench and then someone else sits down beside you, you want to act as realistically as possible (like how you imagine a normal person would react to the scene) and Ryuk here will judge with points one through ten. We then switch and I remain on the bench acting as realistically as possible and you sit down next to me."

With that Light sat down on the bench and stared out at the water as Anna prepared herself for the game. He was already beginning to regret his decision, no doubt if anyone was watching it'd be highly embarrassing, but as it was he still found himself participating and even eager to begin and compete however meaningless the victory.

"Light, it's so good to see you, I haven't talked to you in like forever!" Anna sat down next to him and then looked at him with a hurt expression, "Light, don't you remember, it's Sakura from math class! I mean I wasn't very good at the math but… How are you, I hear you're going to To-Oh, that's great."

He stared at her for a few moments, her smiling cheerful expression, that of an old classmate delighted to see him even throwing in sempai, which Anna never used regularly with him, for effect. It was funny, given her introduction he had expected something more from her, this was far too easy.

He smiled back at her, "Sakura, of course, I am going to To-Oh but forgive me I can't quite remember where you're going. Wherever it is I'm sure you'll do wonderfully."

"I'm taking a gap year, I wanted to go and see more of the world outside Japan before I started university. But that's great Light, you've always been really smart and I'm sure you'll do great…"

They went on like this until the timer that Anna had previously set on her watch went off and they both turned to Ryuk. He held up seven fingers.

"Seven?! How was that only a seven? That was perfectly realistic!"

"Yeah but it's like you're trying too hard, you have the Stepford smile going and it's really creepy. You can kind of tell you're faking it, which given your distant relation to Sakura is probably realistic, but the fact that you try so hard and smile so wide just makes it a bit too weird to be a ten." Anna chimed in.

"On television they never give people tens." Ryuk clarified, "You'd have to be really normal for that."

"That was really normal!" Light hissed under his breath but Anna was shooing him off the bench with a mock expression of superiority.

"Save the Oscar speech for when you win, shoo shoo."

After a moment of staring at the lake, trying to think of a persona to take on when he had only ever tried to be 'Light', he turned and decided to use the same tactic on her and start out small. The normal class acquaintance who is a little too interested.

"Hi, Anna, I didn't expect to see you here today." He said before smiling and waving, "It's Takeshi, remember, from physics class. I sit behind you."

She looked at him blankly for a moment or two, as if trying to place just who Takeshi was, before saying, "Oh yeah, Takeshi, how's it going since graduation. You look, taller, or a haircut, I didn't recognize you at first…"

The conversation went on to how his was originally in the allotted time and once the timer had gone off they looked to Ryuk for the results.

He held up eight fingers.

"Eight?! Why does she get an eight?"

Ryuk looked over to Anna with a shrug, "I dunno, I just kind of bought it more…"

"It's because I didn't act super cheerful, cheerful yes, but also a little uncomfortable because I didn't remember who Takeshi was and didn't want to look like an asshole because I didn't remember who he was. Layers, Light, it's all about the layers."

It went on like this for some time, and for the most part they seemed at a tie, him either on par or a few points behind. He wasn't sure that she was that much better of an actor than him as she claimed but he did admit that she had a knack for it, for that ability to play at average, and perhaps his smiles were a bit too cheerful at times to be real but looking at her he couldn't see too much of a difference. After all, he had been feigning interest in the world for years, Kira had not changed that.

Finally they came to what was to be the final round with him on the bench. She was staring out at the pond as if in contemplation of something, some idea she wished to try, and it seemed to take her longer to come up with this final scenario than usual.

"No," She finally said turning back to him with a smile, "I don't think I'll do that."

Looking at her watch and the time she looked back up at him, "I'm out of ideas, I guess that means you win by default, you were right Light you are perfectly normal."

It was sad, he thought, how he instinctively wanted to object to his easy victory as Ryuk was spluttering behind them. But she was already walking away and he had won, there was no need to contest something like that, even if it did seem far too easy.

On the way back to the subway he asked, "What were you planning to do for that last round?"

"Hm?"

Ahead of them the path was mostly empty as the sun came closer to setting, the pink blossoms turning red in the light and the sky slowly darkening. At times like this her hair seemed almost the color of fire, red was everywhere today, he couldn't help but think.

"You had an idea but you changed your mind."

"Oh, just a terrible impersonation, it's not really important." She said smiling softly over at him with more affection than he had seen in eyes outside of family members as if they truly were friends instead of acquaintances of convenience, "It doesn't matter right now."

Later after meeting Ryuga Hideki, who had also introduced himself as L, he could guess who the object of her impersonation was and why she had chosen to refrain from it.

Kira, in spite of belonging in everything, had not belonged in the park that day.

Author's Note: Written for the 100th review of God of the Machine with a prompt by Moka-girl who asked for a fic displaying Anna's acting abilities and Light's lack of them, so we have them playing one of your typicalish improve games. Anyway thanks for reading and reviews are much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note