Notes: This slightly overlaps the Weekly Shonen Jump one-shot.

Chapter 1

On windy days, Near sometimes goes to the rooftop garden. None of the neighboring buildings are taller than L's headquarters, and with all the trees he had put here, no one can see him anyway. He can see Battery Park from here, but this little urban oasis is private. The air currents are capricious this high up, and Near likes to let them wash over him. It makes him feel closer to Mello, but within controlled parameters.

He needs that today. He knows what he's going to do about C-Kira—or not do, rather—and he knows it's going to make people angry. He doesn't care what they think.

That guy's a punk, Mello says. He's not worth our time.

He's right, of course.

Even when Mello was still alive, but after he left the House, Near sometimes talked to him. Not like now, when Mello actually answers, but he's always been there. Near knows it's weird to imagine that his dead rival talks to him, but he doesn't want to examine it too closely, because then Mello might stop.

He spreads his arms and tilts his head back, and the wind takes his hair and the baggy shirt like twin banners. It blows away the last of his uncertainty.

He hears the door back in to the building open, and stands up normally and crosses his arms.

Lidner steps out and watches him for a moment, wearing a faint smile. "It's freezing up here. Aren't you worried you'll get sick?"

"No," Near says. People who don't know him often assume he's sickly—he's still slight for his age, and he'll never be anything but pale—but Lidner knows better. She must be merely casting about for something to say. "You can go back in," he says. "I'll be down in a little while."

But she shoves her hands into her jacket pockets and comes closer, past the flowerbeds that are just bare plots this time of year, and shakes her hair out of her face. "This case is making you angry."

"Yes," Near says, frowning. Its tackiness annoys him, but he doesn't think she would understand.

"You think it's beneath L. Not you. L."

"If you want to put it that bluntly, yes. It's not meaningful at all."

"But... he is killing people."

"He's a cheap little pretender with a toy, like a child who knocks over his building blocks just because he can. L has better things to do." He keeps his voice steady, but he still feels insulted on L's behalf, and maybe even, a little, on Light Yagami's. He was ignoble in defeat, yes, and wrong, but while the question of whether his ends justified his means is laughable, Near's not likely to forget that Kira almost won.

Lidner's silent for a moment. "Your story about L," she says. "You liked him more after you found out he didn't really care?"

Near reaches for his hair. "I don't think he was being entirely candid. I think he did care, but he wanted to see our reactions. It was a neat little way to show us his methods first-hand. L knew you have to be pragmatic to do his job. You have to use methods an idealist would balk at. Seeing yourself as some virtuous good guy has to be less important than solving the cases."

"But you are a good guy," Lidner says.

"I act like one. Most of the time. Let's see if you still think that after this case."

He tries to make the team see why he can't take the case, but they don't really get it. Near wishes he could explain more clearly that it's impossible for him to do any more, that it's more than distaste: it's a wall he can't get through. There's only one path he can imagine following, and he doesn't even like to do that much, but it's L's responsibility.

L is L, you are you, Lidner said, but the world needs L to be L, and no one but Near can do it.

Three years, and title still wears him instead of the other way around, and try as he might, he doesn't fit it very well. He's more than smart enough to know this.

Trying to fit it has, possibly, made him a little cracked. Or maybe more than a little.

He's smart enough to see that, too.

The headquarters was built to his specifications, and it's so well-equipped that Near doesn't have to leave, and he seldom does. Everything's just the way he likes it—the way he needs it to do his best work. The large, mostly empty room has plenty of space for toy cities, or kiddie pools for ducks, or towers. He likes the cards best lately; he's gotten very good at building the towers high despite their fragility. The paintings on them are interesting, and some are quite pretty, but Near turns them all white-side up. He doesn't believe in fate.

The computer and media room opens off the largest room, and there are toys on the threshold and partway in, like an invading army of robots and spaceships, since Near hates to be empty-handed when all he's doing otherwise is looking at television screens. Today he picks up a rocket from the ranks, and goes to watch for any new developments in the C-Kira case. Nothing seems to be happening since he made his statement as L. The killings have stopped, but there's no other news.

Gevanni took over the Watari name when Roger retired. He's here today, and he greets Near as he comes in, then goes back to his email. He comes in to the headquarters a few times a week, and is never more than the click of a button away. The rest of the team is never completely out of touch either. Near knows Lidner and Rester don't wait around for him to contact them, but when he does, they always seem to be free to help.

He kept them in mind when he designed the floor plan. He doesn't use his own bedroom very much, but there's a room for each former SPK member in case they need to crash for a bit. There's a gym one floor down, because Gevanni wanted it, and a sort of lounge area off the kitchen. No one uses that. They come in, work as long as they have to, and leave. Near knows that Rester is married, that Gevanni has a sailboat, and that Lidner loves dim sum, but these are random facts picked up in the course of working with them. They don't exactly socialize.

You're still afraid to care, Mello says.

It's not fear. It's only prudent. If he'd cared more about Gevanni's safety than about catching Kira, he would never have sent him to touch the murder notebook and possibly confront a shinigami. If he'd cared about Mello... If...

Nice try, squirt.

Near still doesn't like to go out into the world unless he has to. There are too many people, and too much noise. He notices everything, and can't turn it off. To walk along a normal street is to be bombarded from all directions, and not even he can process that much data at once. So Gevanni goes out for him, and brings back groceries and toys. He runs errands, too, and does the cleaning-up Near doesn't get around to, though he likes things tidier than Gevanni does, and he does try. He tries to cook, too, but while the chemistry part of the process is easy, he hasn't quite mastered the art part, and his experiments tend to come out a bit strange.

He keeps an eye on the news for the next couple of weeks, but it seems obvious that C-Kira has stopped for good. Whether it's out of fear or out of repentance isn't that important.

The Japanese police either don't know any more than anyone else, or they're still pissed off about how L handled it, and they don't make contact. Near doesn't especially care about their reasons either.

Very quickly, most of the Kira worshippers online move on to the next fad. They'll come running back if another death note finds its way into the human world. If they learned nothing from the first Kira, they certainly won't learn anything from this one. For now, though, things go back to normal.

If normal is trying to live without letting in a breath of wind that might disturb paper fortresses; if normal is always asking how someone else would do things because you never know instinctively. It's a balancing act that's almost impossible, this navigation between compulsion and ambition.

If you hate walking the tightrope, Mello says, almost singsong, you can always jump.

"No, I don't think I will," Near says.

"What was that?" Gevanni calls from the next room.

He didn't mean to answer out loud. "Nothing. Sorry if I disturbed you."

Gevanni comes to the doorway. "It's fine. I'm just looking through the paper. Everything OK here?"

"Yes." He has just wrapped up one case and profiled a suspect for the Chicago police in another, and now he's scrolling through wire reports, looking for interesting new cases.

"Well, if you—" Gevanni begins, then stops. "Huh."

"What is it?"

"It says here that Lawrence Carruthers was killed."

"May I see that?"

Gevanni comes over to the desk and hands over the paper, and Near scans the story quickly. "That's extremely unfortunate," he says. "It's also quite similar to how Rodrigo de la Cruz died, last week." He twirls his hair and compares the two incidents point by point. "I don't think it's a coincidence."

"Should I contact Halle and Anthony?"

Near really doesn't think it's a coincidence, but the fact that Gevanni immediately takes it so seriously makes him worry just a little. "Yes," he says. "Maybe you should."

They come in that afternoon, looking a bit surprised to be back so soon.

The giant card Ls are gone; they were done. Near sits in the middle of the empty floor, and starts building a tarot wall.

The team members follow him in, and sit on the sofa Gevanni moved in here.

"Rodrigo de la Cruz and Lawrence Carruthers are dead," Near says. "They were both found in their homes, in their beds. Both houses were broken into, but the London Times and El Mundo say the killer didn't take anything. He got in, shot them, and got out. One shot per victim. Other than the similar circumstances, there's only one link we know of."

"They're both detectives," Gevanni says. "And, except for L, of course, considered the top in their respective areas, correct?"

Near gets more cards and starts another wall, perpendicular to the first. "Correct," he says. "The worldwide rankings aren't official, or even widely agreed upon, but those two were both not too far below L on the list."

Rester and Gevanni exchange a glance, but Lidner's watching Near. "How sure are you that it's the same killer?"

Near smiles. The percentages have become almost a joke among the four of them. "Seventy percent sure. Of course, we'll need to look at the evidence to fill it in. We should also find out if there were any cases both of them worked on. I don't think it's very likely, but any connection between them could lead us to the killer. Lidner, would you research that?"

"Sure."

"Rester, since you're fluent in Spanish, could you talk to the police in Madrid and see what information they can give us? And please do the same for the investigators in London."

Rester nods.

They both go to do their respective tasks, and Near scoots down to the end of one of the walls and works on extending it, thinking about motives. One cannot target prominent detectives without having L in the back of one's mind, and Near suspects this killer has him rather closer to the front.

The fucker's taunting us, Mello says.

He's trying to, Near tells him. You know it's difficult to provoke me.

The question is whether his ultimate target is actually L, or if this is some sort of twisted challenge the killer has given himself: getting to the very people who would try to stop him.

It's too early to answer that, but there has to be something he can do that isn't waiting for another killing.

He sends requests to Heathrow and Barajas, and refreshes all the email programs a couple of times, though he knows it's pointless. Until they get back to him, there's not much else he can do.

Not enough information, Near thinks. He's starting to feel hemmed in. "Gevanni?"

He pokes his head in. "Yes?"

"I'm going up to the roof. Come get me if there's any news."

"All right. Hey, Near. Wait." He pulls off his suit jacket and hands it over. "Take this."

These occasional displays of protectiveness aren't exactly professional, but all three of the former SPK members have them, and though Near is slightly puzzled by them, he doesn't really mind, as such. "Thank you."

It's chillier up here today, with a strong breeze coming off the water, and Near's rather glad to have the jacket after all. He sits on the lawn in the middle of the garden, plucks some grass, and lets the wind blow it blade by blade from his hand.

Mello? he thinks. What's making me so unsettled? I'm doing all I can, and I still don't feel quite right.

Mello laughs, and Near can see him, lounging on the couch in the House common room. You're impatient. That's interesting.

I guess I am. He pulls some flowers from a patch of clover and starts linking them. It's irrational.

The possibility that they were killed to get our attention makes you feel bad.

It shouldn't... but yes. It does.

Welcome to the world of people with emotions.

Mello, I've always had emotions.

He laughs again. Try listening to them more.

How would that help in this situation?

In general, Mello says, then grins slyly. Though it would be fun to see you explode from bottling 'em up.

Near sighs, and ties the ends of the flower chain together. Sometimes, you're no help at all.

This is better, though; he feels less stifled. He makes the chain into a cat's cradle. The killer's trying to set a trap, he thinks, and turns it back into a circle with a few motions. It won't work.

He watches the ships come in to the harbor, idly twisting the chain into a more complicated crown without looking at it. Would L be able to do anything more?

Probably not, but Near can't help but think that L would have already had a flash of insight that would grow into the answer. L wouldn't feel stuck.

He heads back inside, and meets Lidner in the hall.

"Hey. I was just coming to get you," she says. "Rester's just finishing talking to the English and Spanish investigators, and everyone's sending over their information."

"Good. Thanks."

"They were definitely killed with the same gun," Rester says once the team gathers in the main room. "No witnesses in either case. De la Cruz's closest neighbors were away when he was killed, and Carruthers lived out in the country, with his closest neighbors a mile away. No fingerprints, either. They're still sorting through various shoeprints, and they'll send their findings when they're done."

"This guy's pretty sure of himself," Near says. He eyes the card walls, and picks a spot for a watch tower. "He's counting on not being caught."

"He knows other detectives will pick up on what he's doing," Lidner says.

"Yes, and that's one thing that worries me."

"How so?"

"It suggests that he doesn't see the killings as murders. He sees them as opening moves in a chess game." Near scowls, but he's aware of the irony. "I think I might be better at that than he is."