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One of the first systems that L – the original L, that is – developed and implemented when investigating Kira was the Abnormal Cardiac Trigger. It worked in two ways. The integrated network would trigger a flag warning on L's systems, notifying him when an unusual number of heart attack death victims suddenly appeared and where they clustered. It would also trigger if there was a logical pattern to the heart attack victims, like ten every hour, even if they were across different countries. It wasn't a very legal system, as it could read private hospital records and detect keywords through emergency calls, but when it came to a murderer that could kill with just a name and a face, L wasn't going to bother with silly trifles such as privacy and confidentiality laws.
Passively, the system waited for an unusual surge of heart attack victims before causing any alerts. However, once a Kira event is identified, the idea is to keep the system running for the remainder of the case. When active, it continues to note strange heart attacks but pinpoints further specificity; if a man dies of a heart attack, he won't necessarily cause the system to flag. Let's say, he's in his sixties, and has smoked his entire life. The system wouldn't flag because of the factors involved; this man could very easily have a natural heart attack. On the other hand, we'll say this same man has a criminal record and that changes things; Kira punished criminals, it stands that a criminal record would factor into the algorithm. But, even so, there is still a likelihood of just dying naturally of a heart attack in that circumstance. Criminals weren't known for their easygoing lifestyle.
To avoid false-positives, the active system would always flag criminal heart attack deaths but on a scale system. Green to yellow to red. A green heart attack is easily explained through health history, economic class, and a general overview of government documents. A yellow heart attack is still a possibility for the individual but a doubtful one. An alcoholic in his forties who lives a comfortable life, a drug-abuser in his twenties with a novel of a criminal record – for the most part, yellow flags dominate the map of the active ACT system. Most criminals aren't in their peak condition of health but there is an unlikeliness of cardiac arrest.
Finally, red heart attacks. These were ones that would have had less than a tenth of a percentage chance of happening without Kira's involvement. Healthy individuals younger than fifty, no history of heart conditions or family health issues, low-stress indicators within the general range. The type of individuals that, if they did somehow have a heart attack, would certainly survive after prompt treatment.
Kira's victims never survived, no matter how young or healthy.
Near's dark gaze was fixated on this singular red flag that had popped up over Tokyo on the designated ACT monitor.
As soon as the Sakura-TV broadcast had aired, Near had manually activated the system. Predictably, a few green and a couple yellows blipped onto the screen over the course of this A-Kira situation. Nothing was deliberate though, or particularly meaningful. In a world of 7 billion people, these markers were easily shrugged-off. No red flags, no patterns, nothing even remotely suspicious as far as Near was concerned. Everything remained consistent throughout the auction and nothing changed for a while afterwards.
In fact, Near had barely recalled having to activate the ACT system manually and the necessity to manually turn it off well after the case had settled into the dust of failure. The screen had just become another peripheral object while he did casework.
Then, as he finished up a particularly inhumane case of high-end human trafficking, red flashed in his periphery. It seized him up momentarily.
Now, it has been about five hours since the red flag appeared. Near was supposed to go to sleep six hours ago. But he has become quickly obsessed.
Maybe if it hadn't been Tokyo, Near would have brushed it off. Maybe if the timing hadn't lined up with the excited announcement that Japan was experiencing an economic boom in the form of the Kira Bubble, the funds from the Death Note auction finally becoming available, Near may not have cared about one tragically unfortunate and unlikely death.
As it was, the factors involved had made him desperately curious.
Thankfully, the ACT system is thorough and invasive. Near opened the red flag for investigation and, almost immediately, felt that he was looking at A-Kira's statistics.
17 year old male dies of cardiac arrest at bank.
Further investigation, of course, reveals that it is Yotsuba Bank. That didn't necessarily mean anything though.
Near was compelled to fill in the blank information and soon enough, he had a surprising but persuasive profile for A-Kira. The one that got away.
Tanaka Minoru. A statistical genius deemed a failure in the eyes of the public education system for not conforming to the expectations. An odd thought crosses Near's mind; Minoru would have thrived in Whammy House.
Whammy found those high IQ's and centred a child's education in ways that fostered their particular way of understanding and comprehension. A standardized system could find a high IQ and smother it before it had a chance, placing expectations upon tests that didn't measure intelligence as much as memorization and conformity.
That being said, Whammy House was a home for gifted orphans. Tanaka Minoru had a mother. A mother that was now grieving. Near couldn't relate. Couldn't bring himself to care about her.
However, Minoru himself fascinated Near.
After organizing a quick facial recognition software, Near had brought up nearly every image that existed of Minoru on social media. The boy's natural expression was demure and thoughtful, even when his photo was on other people's accounts. Friends? Near couldn't relate to that either.
Near identified a social circle of media accounts that Minoru's face appeared in, and discovered what must have been a personal account, where his face seldom appeared but when it did, it was in selfie format. Minoru went for brooding and pouting expressions. In one selfie, he smirked. But these were rare moments, lost in a sea of other images.
A cat curled up in someone's lap. The sky on a clear summer's day. Silent videos of Minoru's thin fingers solving a rubix cube within seconds.
Something inside Near's chest aches.
He delves deeper. Minoru didn't write much in his captions and didn't respond to comments with much more than grateful platitudes. Near wants to know what lay hidden in the boy's browser history, the types of articles he read, the things that don't filter out into the public view. With his resources, Near could make it happen but it would take time to arrange and, all things considered, investigating a dead teenager would be a waste of resources.
Yet, Near was already devising the best way to phrase his orders to make it happen.
Laying down, Near grabbed a nearby tablet and continued to explore his new interest, sleepily clicking through photos and links and descriptions. After digging through a few years of his archive and his connections on one website, a caption sent him to a forum where he easily identified Minoru's username based on the keywords.
Suddenly, a whole new side of Minoru was open to Near; the talkative, opinionated Minoru. When he explored his post history, he found discussion on phone games and puzzles, quiet but firm political understandings and a hopeless kind of anger towards the state of things. Ultimately though, Minoru didn't have world changing aspirations, he just wanted him and his loved ones to be comfortable.
If things had gone differently, would he and Near have met each other? How would that have gone? His predecessor and Light Yagami had spent a long time together during the Kira investigation. Near had gone through the surveillance. He watched the suspicion and antagonism transform into something... collaborative. L had never given up his doubts that Light was Kira but when new killings using Kira's powers had emerged, their partnership was efficient and thorough.
Of course, L never knew that the Light that he came to know, the one he had remained chained to for the better part of the investigation, was never aware of being Kira. As soon as those memories were regained, L's death was secured, but every interaction up until that point was genuine.
What really got to Near was that Minoru refused to use the power of the notebook even once when it entered his possession. Any time others had acquired it and went to the media, they immediately used one life as a pawn. Proof of the power. Yet, the outrageous claim and floating paper had been enough to garner the world's attention. Of course, this was a world that had already been ravaged by Kira; there was a weight to the claims, and a shinigami visible to the well-initiated.
Near couldn't let the idea of the boy go. What if Minoru had killed? Near probably wouldn't be as interested. If you hand a man a loaded gun and he shoots someone, it's not remarkable. If you hand a man a loaded gun and he dismantles it, puts it back together, then disposes of it without firing any bullets... there's something Near admires about that kind of resolve.
What would Near have done in his presence? Surely, he wouldn't have handcuffed the boy to him. There was no logical explanation to do so. Perhaps Near could come up with one. Would their minds have been compatible? Like the L before him and Light Yagami?
Near wasn't known for his imagination and yet, the scenarios ran through his head.
“L,” Minoru prods. Near's eyes remained fixated on the footage. The boy stands behind him in the darkness, dark eyes questioning the long-haired man on the ground in front of him.“No matter how often you look at them, the camera angles aren't going to change. They chose that blind spot for a reason.”
“I know it was a deliberate choice,” Near retorts. Somehow, even monotonous, his tone manages to condescend. “Yet, there are frames where the clothing becomes visible. They erased the tapes leading up to the crime, took advantage of the blind spot, but left in flash frames of movement. To be so careful, then still be sloppy. It's contradictory.”
Near could hear Minoru's breath draw closer. Glancing for a moment, he saw that Minoru was leaning over his shoulder, looking at the set up he had created out of toys. A visual depiction of all views the camera angles provided; toy cars lined up beside white blocks, small birds to represent the cameras, and a black block depicting the impenetrable blind spot.
Minoru hummed.
“Did any of those cars have dashcams?” he asked.
“Yes, none of them were active at the time of the crime,” Near answered.
“When was the last time one of them was recording?”
“One had been recording about fifteen minutes before the crime but after three minutes, it shut off.” With a couple of clicks on a wireless mouse, one of the screens above them showed the footage in question of the empty space beside the stairwell leading into the building.
“And the camera at the top of the stairs were wiped as well,” Minoru stated.
“Fourth monitor.”
“What if this is a diversion?” Minoru mused, kneeling beside Near.
“This is all we have at the moment.”
“Mmm.” Minoru had been looking at the footage for as long as Near had, but now his eyes were fixated on Near's model. Near refused to move as Minoru invaded his personal space, instead catching a long strand of hair and wrapping it around his fingers.
“Did that dashcam activate from collision detection?”
“Yes, a sensitive model apparently. Some of the security footage shows raccoons getting into the garage.”
“Ah. What if the perpetrator went under the car? And that's why the cam activated?”
“Why wouldn't the cam activate when the perpetrator came back out?”
“Why wouldn't we see some sort of animal movement in the surroundings of the recording?”
Near watched with mild horror as Minoru invaded his set up, introducing new toys to the model. With swift movements, he lifts one of the toy caers and places one of Near's many fingerlings underneath it, balancing it on top. Then, he draws an invisible line to an opposing vehicle.
“It's a long shot but if the perpetrator was under that vehicle, his face might be in the reflection over here. Maybe he knew about the dashcam and didn't intend to activate it, but was careful not to set it off when exiting. If it was just a raccoon, there were be more movement in these reflections during those three minutes. There could be a face somewhere in the darkness, if we look for the patterns.”
Sometimes, Minoru made Near think of Mello. He was persistent and intrusive but without the emotional volatility. No matter how many times Near criticized his investigations, Minoru always responded with a new theory, a new angle. He wasn't afraid of Near, who was so used to his other colleagues keeping a respectful distance. And he wasn't dissuaded by impossibility; both of them were experienced in the unpredictable nature of reality.
As the dash cam footage zoomed into the reflection, the darkness underneath the car became distinguishable as a physical mass rather than darkness. With a few filters and contrast enhancements, the mass became a form and that form had a face.
Minoru smiled like a cat that had successfully stolen cod from a fish market. Near was impressed but he would die before he let Minoru know that.
“It's blurry and vague. But we can work with it.”
Near wasn't sure why he was so... entranced by this fantasy. He had partners, people that he worked with. L only really had Watari but Near had an intimate network of connections to rely on and trust. He wasn't alone in the same way L had been.
Was companionship worth dying for, L? Was Light Yagami such a compelling suspect that you would take so many risks, expose yourself to more danger over the course of a year than you had ever willingly gone through in your entire existence as L, in order to expose him? To examine him? What was your goal, L?
Near wasn't an emotional man, just as he wasn't an emotional child. But he couldn't deny the disgust that Light Yagami evoked within him. Processing L's death as an adolescent, watching those interactions. Seeing L put his trust in the man that would ultimately be the cause of his death. When he was younger, he theorized about human social instincts and just figured L had denied something primal that escalated into recklessness.
Being L now, nearing age twenty-seven, Near was more sympathetic.
Especially having been denied his Kira. His Light Yagami.
“Is that really how L decided to treat his number one Kira suspect? Invasive monitoring of his entire family, solitary confinement, and then literally putting him on a leash?” Minoru had actually looked up from his phone when Near divulged this information. He wasn't sure why he was sharing. These were details that didn't need to be exposed but Near didn't find himself concerned with secret keeping this time.
“Ultimately, he was Kira, so it doesn't matter,” Near surmised dismissively.
“Maybe, but it's still batshit crazy to hear about,” Minoru sighed, throwing his feet over the armrest of the chair and assuming a curled position, eyes drawn back to the slide puzzle on his phone screen. “Though, I guess it's even crazier that the guy basically consented to all of it to clear his name. Just the lengths he was going to in order to prove his innocence must've been suspicious in itself. Sure, getting tortured is one thing but allowing an absolute lack of any personal privacy to prove you have nothing to hide?”
“At that point he didn't,” Near explained, mostly disinterested in discussing Light Yagami. “He had given up his memories of the notebook temporarily.”
“That makes it even worse!” Minoru exclaimed in exasperation, making Near blink at the volume the normally quiet boy had assumed. “The guy literally knows he didn't do it, yet doesn't put up a fight about the gross human rights violations he's going through? He's either so confident about his plan that he knows he won't get caught or he's a shameless psychopath that gets off on being watched twenty-four-seven.”
“Hm. With Kira, I'd say it is safe to assume both are correct,” Near murmurs, adding another card to his growing tower.
“Oh my god,” Minoru snorts, attempting to hide an amused smile behind his phone. “I can't tell if you were trying to joke or being serious and actually, never mind, of course you were being completely serious. That's absolutely disturbing.”
“Well, he was one of the most prolific serial killers in human history.” Minoru's smile fades at the grim statement, turning his gaze to Near. The man's long hair cascaded around him and hid his expression from the teen but he knew the other had been through a lot. As expressionless as he was, Minoru knew there must be some kind of trauma in there concerning these events. When Near was his age, he successfully confronted and eliminated Kira, a killer that had become more than a murderer; he changed the way that history textbooks were written, made skeptics believe in divine punishment. When Kira was Minoru's age and was given the same notebook, he executed thousands of criminals for years, lowering the crime rate significantly and inadvertently creating a persistent anxiety for any would-be criminal in the years following. And Minoru...
“I guess I'm a pretty disappointing successor to the Kira name, huh?” Minoru teased. At that, Near actually turned his face to look directly at Minoru, expression blank and unamused. “Ah, I was joking... Mostly.”
“What are you talking about?”
Minoru was nervous now, sweating under Near's intense stare. “I-I mean,I was just a kid when it was all going down but even I remember the infamous media messages L and Kira were sending each other. L challenging Kira, Kira responding and murdering someone to prove the validity of his message, L sending direct messages. It was terrifying and all happening right in front of everyone. Kira would say someone would die, you'd flip the station and that person would actually be dead. A lot of kids would make games out of it at school...” Minoru winced. “Sorry.”
“What's your point?”
“Ah, yeah, well,” Minoru mumbled. “What we ended up having was pretty anticlimactic, huh? The new L and Kira battle was so bland. A disappointing reboot. No back and forth media messages, no dramatic arrest, no lost memories or moral ambiguity, it barely qualifies as a thriller, just... just...”
A failed case and a dead kid.
Near sighs heavily, lying under the dimmed lights of the monitors. He's curled into the fetal position, eyes heavy but somehow, for some reason, still focusing on this dead teenager's internet ghost. A lifetime of information to feed into the imaginary scenarios of what if situations but what good was it now?
Why did he die? Surely, it had something to do with the shinigami. Perhaps he angered it. Or maybe something went wrong in the exchange and Minoru was the victim of a mysterious rule the death note didn't indicate.
There was a hollow despair to these thoughts. No matter how much he ruminated, there weren't going to be any concrete answers and even if he found them, it wouldn't change the situation.
No matter how much Near fixated on him, Minoru was still dead. Minoru still succeeded in defeating Near.
Once more, Kira defeated L.
Minoru was angry at him. Near didn't care.
“You know that I haven't killed anyone with that notebook,” Minoru growled. He stood away from Near, who stayed crouched near the floor but kept all his attention on the upset teenager.“It has been under your lock and key the entire time I've been here. Why would I even choose to kill at this point? What would it get me?”
“Funny how you don't suggest you couldn't have gotten the notebook,” Near states darkly. Minoru rolls his eyes.
“You and I both know that Ryuk doesn't have any particular inhibitions regarding, I dunno, WALLS or TANGIBLE MATERIAL. But you saw from the camera, the notebook was not moved or tampered with or anything. Yet, instead of assuming the smart thing, that there is another notebook in the world and someone is abusing it's powers, something that you personally experienced before, you immediately turn your gaze on me? After how ever many months of living here, of talking about Kira and L and how sick the idea of using that power made me feel that I went to such lengths to not deal with it, you still think of me as suspect number one? What, am I going to find out you've been taking after your predecessor and watching me as well? Monitoring the dumb shit I do on my phone, playing voyeur through hidden cameras because who knows! Maybe the urge to kill will hit me right as I'm taking a shit and I'll scribble a name on some scrap of paper I've kept hidden in my asshole the entire time!”
Everything Minoru was saying was logical and, while he became vulgar when he was upset, Near couldn't explain his accusations. Near had come to regard the young man as someone special. He was given the power of death and used it to spread a type of hope. Sure, Near caught him but he didn't catch a murderer. He caught an innocent kid who understood the weight of the weapon he held in his hands.
But.
“I have to consider every possibility,” Near responded. Curtly. Clinically.
“This is not a possibility though, L.” Near could hear how badly his betrayal of trust was hitting the kid. “I have not killed. With the notebook or anything. I have been here with you the whole time! I didn't kill before and whatever is happening is not me and I have absolutely nothing to do with it.”
“Speaking of taking after one's predecessor,” Near stated, barely registering the venomous words as they escaped him. Minoru's mouth gaped and Near felt a cold guilt wash through his body.
“Are you seriously-?!” Minoru cut his raising voice off himself, eyes wide and expression fuming. His chest was heaving and he looked like he wanted to cry and yell all at once.
Near felt... distressed. Numb.
Tears rolled down his cheeks. His eyes were burning. Probably because he was tired and refusing sleep. Certainly not because of this imaginary game of house he had created with a boy he never met.
If they did, somehow, had ended up in another situation of L being Kira's keeper, Near would never have been able to trust Minoru. History repeats itself for fools that don't learn. L came to trust Kira and it got him killed. Even when he was innocent, Kira was dangerous.
“This isn't the same though! That Kira had accomplices, that Kira had motivation and police connections and acted suspiciously when L confronted him, the murders stopped when he was detained, then he became thoroughly invested in catching the new Kira and working with L and the police. Something was wrong with him, even when he wasn't a murderer! There is so much about this that isn't at all comparable!”
Are you saying you wouldn't investigate these Kira killings, Minoru? How suspicious.
“Don't contradict yourself, L. I'm not running away, but nothing will change about how I act. I'll look over your shoulder at security footage or evidence and try to solve the puzzle. Then I'll go back to doing quizzes on my phone and talking to you about life. I don't care about police work, I don't care about the notebook, but I do care about what you think of me.”
Was this what L had to go through with Light? This pit in his stomach, this deep desire to be known by someone you find so tolerable and different at the same time, yet never being able to trust, never being able to be vulnerable because you're L.
L cannot trust.
L cannot doubt himself because he's L.
L's only reason for living is justice.
“It sounds like you're really lonely, Nate.”
A strangled sob scrapes its way out of Near's throat and he curls tighter into himself.
L isn't weak.
L has never taken a case he didn't solve.
L was killed by Kira but then Kira was killed by L.
Near's eyes can't keep themselves opened anymore. A video plays on the tablet screen in front of him. Minoru is playing with another rubix cube but he's not simply solving it. He's making intricate patterns out of the colours, skillfully and quickly changing the images, returning back to a resolved cube. The video loops, smooth motions lulling.
L doesn't dream about being friends with the dead boy that defeated him.
Minoru leans against Near as he plays on his phone and, surprisingly, the man doesn't mind the contact. It's casual and not disruptive. It's comforting, in a way, to feel another human being's warmth, their presence, without being smothered by it. Near focuses on his puzzle.
The dead boy smiles sadly.
“We never had a chance in this world, huh?”