Dedicated to Acey Dearest, on the occasion of her birthday. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it counts as crack het…!

Detach

"You are one cold piece of work," Matt said idly, rummaging in his jeans pocket for batteries. Cheap things didn't survive long when both his video game and his surveillance equipment were on non-stop.

An old-fashioned, flip-lid cigarette lighter whistled through the air, barely missing his chin. He pocketed it; Mello might be a lunatic, but at least he tended to find things Matt had lost. God knew when nicotine withdrawal would kick in.

"Shut up and get back to work."

"I'm just saying. She's cute, you know, I don't know how you managed to do something like that to a little girl."

"So long as the ends justify the means, I don't care what you don't know. Unless, of course, it costs us Light Yagami's head. Then I'll just kill you and you can apologize to L."

"Right, whatever." He was already back to level grinding; mostly tuning Mello's ranting out but still listening carefully for those breaks in the storm clouds, those points where Mello would let slip an actual, genuinely helpful observation or throw out an idea that might give Matt a hint of his next grand stand.

Or ask him a question.

"So what have you learned about the Yagami girl?"

"That you messed her up good. She used to be this cute, perky thing, but now she spends her time sighing forlornly and staring out the window. She's gotten doubly bad since you killed her father."

"His son is Kira! I shouldn't have to justify myself to you, but he deserved it. He was playing with fire, raising a kid like that."

Heroically, Matt declined to comment. Or maybe Matt was just more interested in his video game.

"If it messes up Kira to have a dead dad and a sick little sister, if he makes a mistake because he's preoccupied, and we use it to nail his ass, it's all worth it."

"Not everyone reacts to everything like you do," Matt said pointedly. "He's gotta be a pretty cold fish to even let his dad in the same county as a nutcracker like you. Let alone kill that many johns over all these years."

A magazine ripped, and Mello flung half of it like a Frisbee, letting it crash noisily into the cheap, unpainted wall. He jumped up and started to pace like a hungry lion, leather creaking, boots thudding on the ground heavily. Muttering.

Matt just saved his game, and replaced it with another one from his collection.

…

Matt did not speak Japanese.

This was beginning to suck.

The girl was an English major, hoping to become a translator for an embassy or diplomat or movie-dubbing studio. Barring all that, maybe she could be a teacher. She was not bright enough to realize that Matt was interrogating her in order to see if another try at her old classmate, Sayu Yagami, would have any affect on Kira, so he doubted it.

"Sayu was a, um, sweet girl," the student-girl enunciated slowly. "I did not know her very well, but I knew her for three years and she was always polite to me."

"Did she ever talk about her brother?"

"Yes. Her brother was very intelligent and helped her with her homework. He was a genius, I think, and when she got him to help her, she let us all copy her answers."

Nice girl. He had a newspaper clipping of Sayu and her family in his pocket, from an article about how the chief of the NPA's genius son helped solved such-and-such a crime. It accompanied Soichiro Yagami's obituary. He showed it to her to double-check that they were indeed talking about the same Sayu Yagami ("I doubt there are many other Sayu Yagamis with a brother named 'Light,'" the student pointed out dryly, so Matt reluctantly allowed that she might not be a complete moron), and since they were, he went to track down the next kid on his list, a guy this student assured him had been Sayu Yagami's boyfriend…

…who did not speak a drop of English. Damn him. Matt added his interview to the list of things Mello would have to do himself.

…

Spying on Sayu Yagami was easier than spying on Misa Amane.

Amane was a bubbly little airhead that bounced rather than walked, and spying on her was a bit like hunting a fox. Too much effort involved; there was a damn good reason there were dogs bred solely for the job. Which didn't mean it wasn't fun, sometimes, but everyone appreciates a change of pace.

Their lives were equally boring, though. Amane bounded from shoot to shop to promotional appearance, repeating the same spiels about her happiness about fan support and striking the same poses that had, more than once, encouraged Matt to buy the magazine featuring her. He was only human, after all, and if Kira was more interested in that frosty reporter, Takada, well. It was his loss—so she wasn't entirely boring, yes, but even the nicest things lose their charm (and sex appeal) when one is bashed over the head with them constantly enough.

Meanwhile, the Yagami girl floated along in a haze, day after day after day after day, her mother trailing worriedly behind her. Knowing why did not make the situation any more thrilling; Near was the type to sit back and psychoanalyze motives and reasoning, all the whys and wherefores. Mello was the type to jump in head-first and kick and thrash and blow things up (especially blow things up) until it stopped. He couldn't care less about the reasoning.

Matt was somewhere in the middle: neither method appealed to him, but at least Mello's sounded more like fun.

She was sitting on a quilt, spread out over the grass in a clearing, clutching a sweater around her shoulders, with another quilt tucked snugly around her hips and legs. There was a stack of something next to her, and… She shifted to one side, and he saw that, yes, she was looking intently at something in her hands. From his vantage point back in the forest, Matt could only see Sayu in profile.

So this was new: he had never seen her out of her wheelchair before. Her mother must be desperate (more desperate even than Mello…), because it was much too cold to really be out and about. The winds were blowing rather violently; a damn shame Near had ended up with L's money, because Matt highly doubted that he would be very willing to pay his hospital bills when Mello finally doomed him to pneumonia.

Another damn shame: Mello had not yet finalized his plans. This would be a perfect opportunity to kidnap her or kill her or interrogate her or whatever. Any other time, her mother would be watching her like a hawk.

She was cute. A dark, tragic kind of cute, but cute nonetheless. The winds blew her hair about her face; normally, she looked to him as a princess might, put together and elegant, but there was no idealistic tableau waiting for him today.

She did retain a kind of elegance, though—he could give her that. Either she was unflappable enough to ignore the locks of hair whipping her face, or she was too sick and sad to care. When Matt considered the first, she took on a kind of imperial radiance that made her very appealing; focusing on the second just made her kind of pathetic, but Snow White and Sleeping Beauty were the same kind of pathetic—sleeping in death, vulnerable, dependant, waiting. Trapped. Frozen. The plaything of fate, blown by the wind—the wind was picking up, stabbing at Matt through his clothes, and when he blinked, he missed Sayu hugging herself, the something in her hands slipping from her white, listless fingers—but he opened his eyes again when he heard her shriek, a despairing wail, and the wind was still targeting him (probably because the universe hated Mello, and thus hated Matt by association), so the something—a single sheet of paper—glided effortlessly toward him.

Matt caught it. Sayu was reaching in his direction, but he stayed out of her sight, stayed in the tree line.

She cried out again. The decision: take the something back to Mello, or get it back to her, somehow. He glanced at it. That shouldn't be hard to determine; chances were, Mello wouldn't be interested in it, anyway. Unless it was a handwritten confession from her brother, of course, but if Light Yagami hadn't given himself away in L's own presence… Fish would swim in the air first.

Sayu was not as bright as her brother: she sat wrapped in her quilts, reaching desperately, crying that the wind had taken her (it was a therapeutic exercise, Matt found out that evening), but still sitting there, not moving, not chasing it, not fighting for it. From that, Matt concluded it was both vastly and not very important, and was about to set about—but his cell phone was vibrating. From Mello, charming as ever: "Get back here immediately."

…

He was writing something when Matt returned. That was his latest thing. Writing. While sitting still, even, and it wasn't bad writing, either. Or bad reading, for that matter.

There was a large manila envelope sitting at Mello's elbow, with Hal's handwriting on the front. It was open, and pages of notes and a photograph of Kiyomi Takada spilled out. Hal had the interesting job, damn her.

Mello capped his pen. He stretched his arms up over his head, and spun his chair around to face Matt. There was a half-eaten bar of chocolate in his lap—that Mello had paused in his constant devouring of chocolate could not be a good sign, and, indeed, it wasn't.

"I've made my decision," Mello said slowly. He picked up his chocolate, but didn't take a bite "I take it you haven't learned anything Earth-shattering about Sayu today."

"Nope. Her ex-boyfriend doesn't speak English, so I thought you might like to deal with that little problem."

"No time. Just got off the phone with Hal." He twirled the candy bar in his fingers and smiled, half-manic, half-depressive. "The little bastard already has a meeting lined up with Light Yagami. I am not going to let him one-up me."

"Uh-huh. So what are you gonna do, set up a bomb in his headquarters?"

"Don't tempt me. But we gotta act before then, you know. And Sayu, out there living detached from the world like a hermit, isn't gonna cut it. We need something big, we need to scare him. We already went after Sayu, and it went great, everything according to plan—but he might be expecting that. We gotta shake things up, do something so insane and desperate that he and Near won't know what hit 'em. When it's over, they'll think they're safe, and the storm has passed. They'll let their guard down, and then…"

…

This is weird. It feels like I'm talking to myself, but my therapist wants me to keep a diary. I haven't done that since I was a kid.

I guess Light keeps a diary, because I found one in his desk drawer when I was looking for some of those cap erasers. I lost all mine. I thought about reading it, but Light is probably the only brother in the world who wouldn't read my diary, so I decided I'd return the favor for once.

I wish he would come and stay here with us since Dad died, but he has to catch that monster Kira. Light's always been "dutiful" like that, but I want someone here to protect me. Someone big and strong, someone who is here just for me, and me alone. Someone who couldn't care less about the rest of the world. But I'll settle for Light.

I want him to forget about all those criminals dying—I know it's wrong, but they're just criminals. I don't know why Light cares so much about saving them, but I guess that's just how wonderful he is. All these strangers, strangers who have robbed and raped and murdered and who knows what else, and my brother is leading the effort to save them. My father died to save them.

My family is so good. I feel so horrible and so selfish, but I just want my dad and my brother to come home. I want to lock them up here with me, trap them, and never let them out of my sight. They're mine. Barring that, I want to just scream, "Kira can't have him! Kira can't have my brother, you understand? He already took my father from me, he can't have my brother, too!"

Misa visited us; she brought me some magazines and candy. She's so happy all the time, but she really hates Kiyomi Takada. I guess because she's Kira's spokesman. I hate her, too. I hate anyone associated with Kira, and that includes criminals. If they were never criminals to begin with, Kira would never have gotten it into his head that they needed to be killed, right? And then my dad would still be alive.

I hope they catch Kira in a country with the death penalty. Let him feel what he did to my father.

I want someone to protect me. Someone strong. Someone who will watch over me. A man, I guess. Someone who will come and wake me up in the mornings, and when they try to force me outside for some sunlight, they'll be with me so I won't be afraid. I love my mom, but what is she going to do if someone comes after me? She's… not really young anymore.

I guess I'm kinda delusional, because sometimes, I even feel like I have my wish. Like someone is watching me. Like there's a shadow—sometimes I think I see it, which is why I think I want it to be a man. The basic silhouette is male. But he's always watching me. Just me. It makes me feel special, even if it is just a dream. I wish he

…

The writing ended there. Matt supposed she had been in the middle of it when it was blown from her hands. Part of him wondered what she wished, and part of him didn't care.

Kiyomi Takada would be his next date, and Mello was going to get to have all the fun on that one, anyway.

Still, he should return the page to her, since her therapist needed it and all. Once Mello was done finalizing his plans and the Takada thing was over with. Maybe the Kira case itself would be over with, then.

Sayu would get her wish.

Later.