AN:3/ Why, hello, there! Surely you must know the drill by now? No? *GASP*

Ryuk: Give me an apple!

No, not unless you say the disclaimer.

Ryuk: You're lazy.

Yes. And proud of it. *Dangles juicey apple in front of his face* Now, say it!

Ryuk: *Drooooooollllllll* Melda Burke owns nothing from my fandom and makes no money off of this story. She does however, own the plot and her OC.

Thank you! *Gives apple* Now go play with Light. *Turns to readers* Now, I'd like to make a few things clear. I will be changing a few things. You'll notice them as you go along, but if you don't like it, then by all means take your leave of the fic. I realize that there are loads of purists out there and I understand the feelings behind that. However, I reserve the right to artistic license, dears. So please, no flaming and remember that a review wouldn't go unappreciated!

*******(^w^)***********

Unbeknownst to the girl beside him, Ryuk had been following her around for quite some time. He'd learned her schedule by heart over the past few weeks. She blinked hard a few times and continued her work on the calculations laid out in front of her. "It's no use." She grumbled under breath and threw her pencil back onto her desk. "I'll never get this frigging stuff! Why in the hell did I take such a hard math?" She put her head in her hands while he watched on.

Her name was Kaguya-hime Nakahara and he had chosen her for his new game.

She was a Performing Arts student at a nearby university and he'd happened to glimpse her on a train while spying on the mortal world. It was pure chance. He'd followed her home that first day and now here he was. And now that she'd finally given up on her homework for the moment, he knew that she'd go for the leather-bound journal that was squeezed between the headboard of her bed and the wall.

She wrote furiously as he observed her from the corner of her room. He considered this to be the best time to drop the Note he was holding. He glanced down at the black notebook. The differences between the Notes were so minute that no one except a Shinigami would see them. It was the slight difference in the shade of black, the order of the rules, sometimes even the colors of the pages. For example, this Note had black instead of white blank pages.

He dipped his head through the walls and checked to see if anyone was around. No one at all. No surprise there, her parents often left her alone at home. Mostly to babysit her younger brother Hiroshi, but he'd overheard the mother talking about Hiroshi going to visit a friend for the weekend.

It was time.

He let the note fall to the ground. She paused for a second and glanced around curiously. Her eyes lighted upon the note in the middle of her bright green rug. She flipped her notebook over and reached down to pick up the Death Note. "Death Note?" She said aloud. "Where did you come from?"

"I'm the one that dropped the notebook you're holding." She gasped and she snapped her head up to see him floating before her. "I thought you'd never touch it. Hey, do you have any apples around here?" Her eyes went as big as saucers while her mind whirred for an explanation. There was none.

And she promptly fainted on the spot.

Ryuk stared at her unconcious body. "Well," He muttered peevishly. "No need to be so dramatic about it."

Finally, her eyes fluttered open and she moaned. "My head...ugh." She rubbed the sore place and blinked a few times. "Oh, thank God. It was just a dream." She made to push herself up and noticed that something was clutched in her hand. With a gulp of apprehension, she glanced down at the object she held.

A solid black notebook with silver lettering that declared it to be a Death Note. "Shit." She fingered the cover for a moment and examining the notebook thoroughly. "I suppose," She said, "that this means you're real, too." Her voice shook a little as she spoke. "If you were here to kill me, you would have done it during the time that I was incapacitated. That is, unless you wanted to see me suffer. However, you haven't even tied me up or brandished a weapon even though you have the advantage. Therefore, I believe you have no malicious intentions at the moment. Is that true?"

"I just want an apple!" He whined.

"Apple?" She hesitantly allowed her gaze to rest on him. Whatever was in her room was huge. There was no way she could take on something like that. Oh, how she wished she hadn't turned down the chance to take martial arts training with her brother! Leathery, tattered wings protruded out from its back like a mockery of an angel's wings. Its body was thin, almost skeletal in places, but very broad at the shoulders and chest. The face of the creature was black-lipped with round fish-like eyes and sharp shark teeth. "Tell me your name first." She demanded. There was no way of telling, but if one believed in legends names were powerful tools against an enemy.

"Call me Ryuk." He flew closer so that he was only inches from her face. Apparently, he had no sense of personal space.

She casually moved to the left, hoping to give her back some cover. The door was still open and there lay her escape route. If all else failed, the window was an option. "Ryuk, what are you? Why are you here? It can't just be to get an apple."

"I'm a shinigami and I'm here because you're the Death Note's new owner." She noticed a similar notebook dangling from a chain at his side. "The notebook also allows you to see me." He grinned eagerly. She gingerly opened the cover and read the rules that were inside. Simple, but deadly, this thing was. There absolutely had to be a catch, she just hadn't figured it out yet.

"How about apples first, killing later?" She suggested. He followed her as she hurried downstairs. A god of death? Did he really expect her to kill anyone? It sounded like he did. What would he do to her if she didn't kill anybody? Considering the possible consequences of refusing the shinigami, she pointed to a large bowl of fruit sitting in the middle of the table. "Help yourself."

Ryuk chopped a particularly large one in half with a single bite. "Thanks!" He cackled and did a barrel roll in mid-air. "Now, let's get down to the fun part!" He pointed at her Death Note. "It's self-explanatory, the rules are in the front under 'how to use it'. Before you ask, there's no price for owning a notebook besides the terrific agony of guilt or paranoia of fear."

"I see...and what if I refuse to use it?"

He paused, chewing thoughtfully. "Well, I could erase your memory and take the notebook somewhere else..."

She pondered this. On one hand, she would be free of the shinigami and the Death Note. On the other, this thing could fall into the hands of another who would wield it to a terrible end. She thought quickly, weighing the options and it seemed hopeless. She could either sacrifice her own sanity by becoming a murderer or be the catalyst for someone else to become one. Suddenly, an idea struck her. "Must I take a life in order to possess a Death Note?"

This question caught him off guard, obviously, but slowly he grinned. He looked like a shark when he did that and she felt like an unsuspecting fish. "Looks like someone's found a loophole!" He pouted a little. "No, it is not a requirement."

She nodded then, her decision made. "I accept the Death Note. I am going to keep it out of the hands of anyone who might use it for evil."

Ryuk sighed heavily. "Out of all of the possibilities I had, I had to accidentally pick someone noble."

"I'm not being noble." She replied, grabbing an apple of her own. "I'm simply doing the right thing."

"Humph. I could kill you." Ryuk told her grumpily. "But, then you might die before you'd get to do anything interesting." He shrugged. "Who knows, maybe you'll get very mad one of these days at some human, an ex-boyfriend perhaps, and write down his name. I want to be there when that happens."

"Yeah," She snorted. "But it's kinda hard to knock off an ex if you never had a boyfriend in the first place. I guess it's a good thing now that guys high-tail it when they see me coming." She sat down heavily at her desk. Maybe doing sums would take her mind off of the uneasy feeling Ryuk was causing her.

His threat had ignited a spark of fear in Kaguya, but she refused to show it. Instead, she ignored the shinigami and focused on her work. Ryuk lounged around on her ceiling for the next few hours, occasionally disappearing through the walls and returning with an apple from downstairs. She managed to limp through her mathematics with a great deal of trouble, but when she was finished she felt more than ever the need for a bit of mind-numbing television.

The tv only had fourteen channels. Three of those were news, seven were educational, two played nothing but music, and the final two were Pay Per View. That had been the restriction that her mother'd placed on allowing Kaguya to have a television in her room. Most of the time, Kaguya kept it off, but occasionally she'd flit through the channels for something worthy of her attention. She'd roulette'd it tonight and chose a channel with her eyes closed.

It was the news. She turned up the volume a bit and listened in. The reporter onscreen was obviously nervous. He kept running his hand through his hair, mussing it up and then patting it down again, and he was talking very quickly. "-might just be a re-currance of the infamous Kira case."

Ryuk darted down and blocked her view. His eyes were practically glued to the screen and he followed the colored bar at the bottom where the name and location of the hospital were shown.

"You make a much better door than you do a window, Ryuk." She craned her neck to see around him.

"This is Taketori Shoto live from the Chubu region where only half an hour ago twelve patients at Koshin'etsu Hospital died of heart attacks." The reporter was joined by a doctor. Her hair was frizzing and looked about scream from anxiety. "This is , she is here to give us vital information on this event."

Dr. Matsu cleared her throat. "The patients in question did indeed suffer fatal heartattacks and it is true that they did so in a successive manner. However, the twelve patients were also on life support at the time, so it will not do to immediately assume that this is connected to last year's Kira killings. None of these patients were criminals. That is all I am allowed to say, thank you."

"Thank you, . Tune in at six pm to see more about this shocking event, hopefully we will have more information at that time." She flicked the tv off.

"Kira had a notebook, didn't he?" She challanged Ryuk.

"Why do you say that?" He asked innocently.

"Well, don't you think it's a bit coincidental that the Death Note's trademark is a death by heart attack? Plus, he was able to kill without touching any of the criminals. All he had to know was their name and face. That's why he killed criminals that were on the news." She began to pace back and forth. Her eyes were narrowed. "Wait a minute.." She glared at him. "Was Kira a shinigami?"

The jig was up, he thought. "No, a shinigami has no interest in morality. There is no right or wrong. What does it matter when you take a life to live if that life is a criminal's or an honest person? It's all the same."

She studied him hard for a moment. "You know something, though. Did you have anything to do with what happened before?"

"I gave Kira the means to kill." He said flippantly. "The same book that you have lying on your pillow, in fact. It was destroyed here in the human world, but the notebooks are nearly invincible. A Death Note must be destroyed three times in the human world before it ceases to exist. Otherwise, it will just reform somewhere in the shinigami realm." He showed her his own Note. "After a Note has been destroyed, it becomes a bit smaller and the pages are turned black. It is still usable, but different."

She glared at the notebook. "Why do shinigamis have Death Notes?"

"When a shinigami kills a human the remaining number of years that the human would have lived is added onto the shinigami's lifespan. We need to kill to survive."

Although the concept was disturbing, the idea that a shinigami did not kill simply for pleasure was easier to stomach than what Kira had done. "I suppose I can understand that." She murmured. "It's sort of like how we kill and eat plants and animals so that we can live."

"The amount of thought you give a hamburger or a bowl of spinach is exactly how we consider the next human who will add to our lifespan." Ryuk agreed.

There was a tangible and laden silence between the two for a few minutes. Kaguya was at a loss for words. Here was a shinigami who was, according to the rules she'd consulted, here to stay until she died of old age or otherwise. And now she owned a notebook that could, should she choose to use it to its full potential, kill anyone in the world with few exceptions. "Ryuk...since I'm going to use this notebook at the barest minimum-"

"Ahhh, afraid of limbo, are we?" He smiled gruesomely.

"No, boredom." She returned with a smirk of her own. "Endless nothingness would get really old, really fast. So, what's your opinion?"

"Well," He flipped upside down and did a few aerial acrobatics for no reason other than to show off. "The use of the Notebook itself usually entails limbo immediately, but I believe there to be no Heaven or Hell. All humans go to limbo, at least that's my opinion. So whaddya have to lose?"

"It's a fifty-fifty chance, I suppose." She mumbled resolutely. That is the price one paid for preventing catastrophe, she thought, and no good deed goes unpunished. "But I don't have to use it and so I will just hold on to it for now."

Ryuk groaned. "Oh, come on! You're being boring!" He eyed his own Death Note again and she inwardly panicked. "Do something with it." He brought out a pen and flipped through a couple of pages. She reached out and jerked it out of his hand at the last moment. "Hey!"

"Ryuk, I'll make a deal with you." He looked interested now. All she had to do was bait a hook. What did a shinigami care about? Apples. She could use that to her advantage. "I will..erm..show you all kinds of ways to eat apples-"

"I already know how to eat an apple, dofus." Scoffed the shinigami as he grabbed back his pen and made to write down her name.

"No name-calling, please." She asked sharply. "If you'd have let me finish, I was going to tell you about applesauce, applebutter, apple dumplings apple pie, apple tarts, apple-flavored candy, and lots of other things to do with apples. Plus I was going to tell you a story about apples, too, but now that you want to kill me for being too boring..whatever.." She shrugged, trying very hard to appear casual and nonchalant. "Go ahead, I'm ready. Kill me, it's not like I can stop you."

Ryuk's eyes glinted a bit with greed and he let the Note drop from his hands. The skull-topped pen clattered to the floor and rolled under her bed. "Apples are interesting." He said slowly. "I guess you aren't that boring, after all. I'll let you live..." She let out a pent-up breath in relief and flopped down on her mattress. "Tell me about applesauce!"

She sighed and sat up. It was going to be a long night.