Alright… I'm a bit nervous about posting this, but I had this idea a few days ago and couldn't keep myself from writing it. I dearly hope this idea is original, please tell me if it isn't, because even though it's one of my goals in life, I haven't read yet every Death Note fic there is :p

The story comes from a question I asked myself : it's a rule of the DN that when a person's name is mispelled four times, he can't be killed by the Note - what would have happened if Raito hadn't found Takuo's name's right spelling, and that he didn't know of this rule?

This will be yaoi, LxRaito, but anyway would you have come to read this if it wasn't? :D

Well, what else?... The original manga series "Death Note" certainly doesn't belong to me, I can't draw to save my life we seriously own Takeshi Ohba and Takeshi Obata for this.

Last, but not least, please correct me if you detect any mistake, I'm in the difficult situation of being a maniac about mistakes writing in another language than her first. ;) Same if the sentences don't seem like they flow well together, please tell me!

Prologue: Spelling Problems?

Takuo Shibuimaru. Death in a car accident.

Well? Raito thought impatiently as the fated 40 seconds came and went. The loudly boasting man didn't seem to be in any hurry to die, and laughed louder still as the elegantly poised young man thought this, as if to mock him. Raito then blinked, and put his pen down once again. Of course…

His mind quickly calculated that there were eleven different combinations of kanji possible to write the man's name and that it would take him approximately 48 seconds to inscribe the deadly words if he kept his current pace. He watched himself do so, in a trance-like state, waiting with baited breath to see it confirmed that this was it, that he had indeed killed someone yesterday, that it was his chance to make a difference, his chance to change the world…

But 88 seconds later, the man was still there. Raito clenched his teeth, and his hands gripped the two thin books in his hands. And yet… What had he expected, exactly? There was one chance in four hundred thousand that the man whose name he had written down yesterday could have died of a heart attack at the exact moment he had predicted him to, true, but the the chances of the Death Note's existence were still incomparably lower.

He pursed his lips as he closed the magazine he had used as a decoy for the Note; he had never really believed in coincidences, but it seemed like this time, he wouldn't have a choice.

Already, his sharp mind was berating him for loosing so much time with such a useless and stupid notebook; and why had he even done so, in the beginning? Because he had felt a dark energy coming out of it? Please…

He left the shop, starting to run through his few school assignments in his mind, relieved when he didn't find anything due tomorrow. He felt much too drained to do much more than pretend to read through his lessons this evening, and yet he couldn't have skipped over any assignment. After all, Raito Yagami was never anything less than perfect…

Thrown in a nearby thrash bin, the Death Note quietly suppressed its discontentment. Raito, as observant as he was, never noticed his own features slightly relaxing as he walked away, or his shoulders loosening a bit, leaving behind aching muscles which complained about the unusual tension that had straightened them for 27 hours.

He put the strange experience in the darkest recesses of his mind, where even he never ventured, not forgetting about his temporary folly only because it wasn't like him to forget anything. But the Death Note wasn't to be ignored for long.

Precisely 56 days later, on the 7th of May, Ran Hizorushi died of a heart attack.