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Near can be very quiet, if he wants to be. He’s not fast and he’s not strong, but he moves like smoke. Mello tells him it’s creepy, and he’s probably right, but Near doesn’t care. It’s one of his best advantages.
And so when he sees Roger glance down at his pager then slip out of the dining room, he climbs off of his chair and follows after. He’s certain he won’t be caught.
He doesn’t walk particularly well, but that’s an advantage too, because no one looks down at him crawling across the floor. He doesn’t have any friends here. He doesn’t want any, either. It’s best this way, where he can leave without anyone noticing. Their laughter disappears behind him, not unpleasant but completely irrelevant.
In Japan, it’s midnight on the dot.
Roger heads straight for his office. Near sticks to the walls as he follows him. The floor is linoleum, lightly textured so the orphanage’s charges won’t slip when they run through the halls. He crawls on his knees to prevent his pyjamas from whispering across it. Roger’s shoulders are hunched. He’s wearing a thick maroon Christmas sweater, not quite yet in season. He looks so much older than he already is.
The hardest part comes when Roger passes into the office. From experience, he knows the door is too thick to listen through — heavy oak, chipped with age but somehow more regal for that. He catches it as Roger steps inside, then slips through quick and gives it a tiny nudge so it’ll drop shut and sound like it’s supposed to. He slides on his stomach and drags himself behind the chesterfield.
Roger’s office looks older than the rest of the Wammy House. The spaces where they play have been retrofitted to be suitable for children, and they are a strange and comfortable mix of the holy and the mundane — vaulted wooding ceilings with stained glass light pouring down on nonslip flooring and folding tables. Roger’s office looks fancy, though. Like something from a storybook. The centrepiece is a mahogany desk with gilded moulding and mother-of-pearl inlays, and the wallpaper is a deep green damask. Everything smells of old lacquer. Near runs his fingers along the back of the chesterfield, which is a heavy leather and faintly sticky from age.
From here, he can’t see much, but he can hear Roger dragging back his chair, then settling down behind his desk. There’s the sound of fingers tapping a computer awake, and then the soft ding of the voice client waking up. “L,” Roger says.
Except he doesn’t say L. He says L’s real name, which Near pushes out of his mind as quick as he can. It feels profane and unsettling, as if he’d stumbled upon L half-undressed. L is L and no one else; someday someone else will be L and there will be a grave with no name.
Near is expecting L to chide Roger — it’s a stupid thing, to say that out loud when they all know what Kira is capable of, but he doesn’t. Instead he says, voice crackling through the cheap speakers, “You came quickly.”
No matter how often Near hears it, he’s always taken off guard by L’s voice. It’s always higher than he remembers. Lighter, almost melodic. There’s a bit of a whine buried inside of it, too, which Near finds ever-so-slightly offputting. It’s petulant and altogether too human. Mostly, when Near thinks of L, he imagines his voice without that.
“It seemed important,” Roger says. “If you contacted me instead of going through Watari.”
“Mm,” L says. “He’s asleep. I’ve kept him awake for long enough.”
“Well. That’s considerate of you.” The unusually is implied by his tone. “What did you want from me?”
There’s a long pause, long enough that Near thinks the call might have dropped. He runs his index finger along his knuckles, waiting. At last L says, “What’s going to happen to him?”
His voice sounds very small. He sounds like a child. Roger must think so, too, because he’s silent for a moment. “What do you mean?”
“To Kira,” L says. “What’s going to happen to him?”
Him, Near notes, with a shiver. So L knows who it is.
“Well.” Roger shuffles something on the table — the pens in his penholder, probably, although it’s hard to be certain. They rattle against one another. “I suppose he’ll be executed. Japan has the death penalty, after all.”
“Yes. I know that. But we could try him somewhere else, couldn’t we?”
“I suppose we could. But I don’t see why we would. Japan isn’t interested in chasing Kira aggressively, but they’re not so far gone that they wouldn’t prosecute him if we gave them substantial evidence.”
But that’s not what he’s saying, Near thinks, frustrated. Roger is always so slow. Everyone is, even the other children; they’re always getting distracted by useless things like this, facts which are true but which haven’t got anything to with the core of the situation at hand. He curls his hands into fists, nails scraping at his palms. He’s saying he doesn’t want to do it at all.
And why? L must know Kira, and not just abstractly. They must be in contact. He turns this over in his head, trying to work out the implications.
“We could handle it ourselves,” L says. “It doesn’t have to be a legal proceeding. If we know he’s guilty, we could keep him somewhere safe. That could serve as adequate punishment. I think — no, I know that I could remove Kira’s power from him.”
“But why would we want to do that? We aren’t a storehouse. No, we’ll give him to Japan. Or you can pick another country if you’d like, but I can’t see how that would make a difference. He’ll get extradited to a country with a higher punishment, anyway, so we might as well let Japan do it. It’s lucky he’s there, really. It saves everyone a lot of trouble.”
“But he won’t get a fair trial.”
There’s a long pause. “What?” says Roger.
“There could be mitigating factors.”
There’s an even longer pause. Finally, sounding exasperated, Roger says, “What are you going on about?”
For once, Near is inclined to agree.
“He could be — we’d have to consider the entire situation. The political situation. With the whole world focused on this case, it seems unlikely that any judge would consider all the factors. For example, he he could be a minor, or he could have been … ” L trails off.
“Yes, but is he a minor,” Roger says with so much irritation that Near realizes he must also know who Kira is. “Right now, I mean. Currently. Not in the past.”
There’s a long pause. “No.”
“Well, that’s sort of a stupid thing to think about, then, isn’t it.”
The line is silent. Finally Roger shuffles some papers around and sighs. “Look,” he says, more kindly. “I know you’ve grown quite fond of him. Quillsh told me about your … what you two have been up to. I sympathize. I really do. I was young once, too. But he did kill several hundred people so, yes, your boyfriend is going to have to stand trial. That’s just the way things are. You can’t keep him like a pet.”
Boyfriend.
Once, when Near had been quite young, some of the other kids had picked him up and tossed him into the pond behind the orphanage. They’d tied his hands behind his back and then they’d done it. It had been November then, too, but much colder than it is now. Ice had formed like a skin across the water, it snapped easily as he fell through. What Roger is saying now feels just the same. A shock of pain, and then revulsion and fury running cold. L can’t be dating Kira —
L’s end of the line crackles. When he speaks again, his voice sounds normal. Just like it’s supposed to. Crisp and clean and impenetrable. Near tries to tell himself that this is what’s real, but it doesn’t work — he’s just heard it, L pathetic and human, bargaining for the life of a murderer without even the dignity of having something to trade.
“I’ve decided to test the murder weapon,” he says. “I’m going to tell Watari when he wakes up, and then we’ll do it tomorrow. I expect we’ll see the end of the Kira investigation very soon.”
Roger breathes in sharp. “Ah. I see. So you’re sure, then.”
“No, I’m not sure yet. I wouldn’t sacrifice another life if I was. But I think it’s extremely likely, yes.”
“Well. That’s good.” He’s quiet for a bit, then taps something — it must be his pen — against the table. “Why did you call me? You don’t need my approval for any of this, and I’d imagine Watari’s going to be arranging most of it for you. Did you want me to make the decision for you? To tell you that you don’t have any choice? I can say that, if you want.”
“No,” L says. “I don’t want that. I … I don’t know why I called. I think I just wanted — it doesn’t matter what I wanted. I understand what needs to be done. I think I’d better go.” Then, almost absent, “Oh.”
“What is it?” Roger says.
“Nothing. Nothing. It’s just started to pour. That’s all. Look. I’ll have Watari send you my choice tomorrow, for the next in line. Just in case.”
“Hold on,” Roger says. There’s something new in his voice, now. Near can’t quite make out what it is. Desperate would be overstating it, but it’s something in that family. He’s not good at telling what other people are thinking. “Maybe you could come home, after this. I’m sure everyone has missed you.”
“Yes. Maybe I could.” It must be raining very badly, because Near can hear it coming through the line, now — heavy and distorted by the technology, sounding more like thick static than anything else. “Goodbye, Roger. We’ll talk again soon.”
The chat client chimes again, to let them know L has logged off.
He waits. Roger doesn’t do anything at all for a little bit. And then, alarmingly, there are two heavy thunks as he kicks his feet twice against that heavy desk. Near flinches. He wasn’t aware that adults were capable of acting so babyish.
“God,” Roger mutters. “Just in case …”
Near hears the chair pulling back, so he shrinks close to the chesterfield and waits until Roger shuffles out the door and back out into the hallway. Then he kicks away from it, rolls onto his back, and spreads his arms out. He stares up at the scalloping on the ceiling.
He is so angry he can barely move. To think of L dating Kira — it’s disgusting, that he’d cede even an inch of himself to a killer. It’s a betrayal of everything L stands for. L is supposed to be objective. He’s supposed to be impenetrable.
They don’t have lives outside of this home because what they’re made for is more important. They all know this L hasn’t been quite like that. He’s been taking little detours when he travels for cases, returning with stories of strangers in subways and gifts of strange, iridescent shells he’d picked off distant beaches. Once there had even been a boy, in Nantes, with whom he’d run away with for the night and which they all know about because Roger and Watari had a screaming fight about it loud enough that it could be heard through the oak door. This L is insolent and unwise; he is married to the world in a way they aren’t meant to be.
But Near hadn’t thought it would go this far. He hadn’t thought it would affect a case. L is still L. L has to be a spear that strikes fast and true. He has to be justice, cold and untouched. Near had always assumed that, when the time came, L would cast aside all these stupid frivolities and become the wraith that he needs to be.
He lies there for a long time, breathing in and out until at last his lungs settle and the waves of hate retreat and he can climb back to his knees and crawl out into the stained kaleidoscope light of the Wammy House.
He was thirteen, then. He was young and everything he knew about the world had come from the few years with his mother, which he has cut out with a scalpel and forgotten as best he can, and from the impenetrable walls of the Wammy House.
When he finally draws Light into the cold and the dark of the warehouse, he is eighteen.
He’s older. He’s different. He’s seen more things. His life is still quite constrained but he’s been through three different airports and watched the clouds from above. He’s drunk a glass of pink champagne with Anthony and Stephan and Halle and laughed at the texture of bubbles on his tongue. Once he’d sat at the edge of a beach in the dark with the black water lapping at his legs and his hands buried deep in the sand and he’d thought of nothing except the night dragging him deep into itself and he had known quite viscerally that he was owned by the earth and that he owned it in turn. The seasons have passed and he has been carried through them, sloughing off the old parts of himself and gathering new pieces.
This is not a choice he made. This is something that happened to him, as inevitable as the fall of rain in the spring and the blistering heat in summer. He didn’t want to be human but it had happened to him anyway.
So he understands, now. He gets why L would want to carve off a little piece of the world and have it just for himself. He gets that the world sometimes finds you, even when you didn’t ask it to; that it can crawl right inside and make itself a part of your blood and bone. He can forgive L for being just another person. Stupid and fallible and in love without his own permission.
Light is standing tall with the surviving members of his task force behind him and the shadow of a monster above. He is wearing an ugly black suit and his hair is just a little too long, poorly cut, falling against his lips when he tips his head too far. His mouth is set tight. He is blandly handsome but joyless and lifeless, a creature that must have gutted itself out to fit all that ink and bile.
And he is Kira. This is absolutely, incontrovertibly true.
Light Yagami is Kira and L was in love with him. Oh, Near thinks Light is pathetic and disgusting and sad; a murderer who’d sent his own father off to die, who’d been responsible for the chain of deaths that left Mello cold and dead. If it were up to him, he’d give him to whichever country would cut him up the quickest.
But years ago, L had called Roger to beg for the life of this maggot. Maybe L was simply broken but probably there had been something better buried in this boy, once. A scrap of gold under all this filth. Either way, the truth is inescapable: L hadn’t wanted him to die.
And so he won’t. This is what Near has decided. He chose on his eighteenth birthday, under the cold white moon, his first decision as an adult. Light won’t be sent to the noose. Near doesn’t care whether or not he deserves it. He will lock him up and keep him safe. Light will be his responsibility, from the moment they walk out of this warehouse to the day he dies; his final gift to L.
He slips off his mask and meets Light Yagami’s eyes. From behind Light’s shoulder, the Shinigami watches all of them, grinning with white sharp teeth.