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darkluna(Working) Title: Wind
Rating: PG-13ish for now
Word count: About 2300 for this chapter
Spoilers: For everything; is post-one-shot.
Summary: The title still wears Near instead of the other way around, but a new case forces him to re-examine what it means to be L.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
Chapter 3: The Hermit, the Chariot, and the Moon
Gevanni follows him to the main room. Near looks up from fixing the Lego, his mind whirling with calculations, conjectures about the killer's next move, possibilities for stopping him. "He is after L. He's after me."
Gevanni kneels down and looks at the new label. "Do I even want to know how sure you are?"
"A hundred percent," Near murmurs.
"Our information's out there."
"I'll talk to Mr. Aizawa right away. But if S-Kira knew the NPA had it, he would have manipulated them into sending it by now." Gevanni's stricken expression doesn't change, and Near feels there's something more he ought to do. Carefully, he puts a hand on his arm. "Don't worry."
Gevanni nods, obviously more comforted by contact than by the facts.
Still hopeless, Mello says.
Luckily, it's not yet the end of the day in Japan, and Near reaches Aizawa easily.
"Is there any publicly available information about your team?" he asks, without preamble.
"No. Not since..."
"I see. Please make sure it stays that way. And please have everyone use aliases when interacting with anyone unknown. I know that will be difficult, but I believe it's necessary."
"You're not saying—"
"It's a precaution."
"There's another of those murder notebooks out there, isn't there?"
Near sighs. "Yes. If you follow my instructions, your people will be all right. But please look out for any suspicious behavior."
"L, don't you think we deserve a little more information than that?"
"I think this new Kira may try to get information about me from you. He could use the notebook to do that. Right now he's concentrating on people who have recently worked with me, but it's not impossible that he could guess the NPA might know something."
Aizawa clearly suppresses a groan. "I almost wish I hadn't asked. I'd say we'll help all we can, but..."
"I'll let you know," Near says, and disconnects.
Gevanni was eavesdropping without bothering to hide it.
"I do think they'll be safe. I wouldn't lie about that," Near says.
"I know you wouldn't."
"It's a good thing L has a reputation for working alone." He gets two more Lego people, and labels one Parrish and the other Fernandez. It's good enough for now.
"S... S-Kira had to manufacture cases, because he couldn't find any existing ones?" Gevanni says.
"That's what I think. He's definitely researching L, though. Do what you can to obfuscate the public information of people who might seem like they've worked with L recently. There shouldn't be too much out there to begin with. S-Kira won't get anything from them, but I do not want them to die."
Gevanni nods. "I'll get the word out."
Near goes back to the card castle and opens a new deck to make an inner wall.
He'll know by now that he fucked up, Mello says.
What will S-Kira do next? What would someone like this have learned from his idol's defeat? S-Kira would not have shot Carruthers and de la Cruz if he weren't trying to hide his possession of the notebook. The secret's out now.
Mello says, We're winning. We know more than he wants us to. If we're lucky, he'll get pissed.
I wouldn't count on that.
Kira supporters were a varied, and mostly stupid, group. They were easily manipulated, but someone hoping to take over as Kira himself is a different story. He is patient; he has planned ahead. L needs to take advantage of his mistake.
Not the Fool this time, Near thinks, flipping that card face-up. Not Death either. Certainly not Justice.
He turns over the Moon, and sees the description in his mind's eye as clearly as if reading it from the book. It illuminates our animal nature, types of which are represented below—the dog, the wolf and that which comes up out of the deeps, the nameless and hideous tendency which is lower than the savage beast. It strives to attain manifestation, symbolized by crawling from the abyss of water to the land, but as a rule it sinks back whence it came.
That fits.
The finger puppets are too heavy for the castle to support, so Near takes the Hermit and Chariot cards and stands them up in the tallest tower. The Moon gets pinned to the floor with a dart.
I'm flattered you made me major arcana, Mello says.
I would never have heard the end of it if I hadn't.
He writes down all the rules he knows about the notebook, then picks up the L and Mello puppets and makes them look at the list.
I wish you could help me, he tells them.
He said he only talked to L once, but this was only technically true. He talked to L-the-construct once. It had little to do with Ryuzaki, his friend.
Near was only four when they first met, and hadn't been at Wammy's House very long. They had given him a battery of tests, some of which he'd done before.
The people at the House were better than most. Some of the teachers treated Near like a little kid, and were baffled when he didn't act like one, but overall they were a lot better than the nurses, who had meant well, but been stupid.
Everyone felt sorry for him at the hospital, and their sympathy was worse than nothing at all would have been. Only by repeating his requests incessantly and being uncooperative until they were met did he make anyone take him seriously.
He just wanted... He wanted his mum, but he knew she was gone. He wanted to be clean and cool, and never to smell a fire again. Stubbornness was the only weapon he had, and he used it shamelessly to make the nurses bring him new white clothes. Knowing the compulsion was irrational didn't make it possible for him to wear anything else, and he decided he would claim eccentricity once he was old enough that people wouldn't think he was trying to be cute in doing so.
It was almost certainly Meghan who contacted Wammy's House. She was the one nurse who didn't talk to Near as though he were a baby, who brought him toys and puzzles even though she wasn't supposed to.
The puzzles were too easy, but they were something to do with his hands. For the first and last time, Near used activity as a substitute for thinking, solving one over and over, so he wouldn't remember that he didn't have anyone who could take care of him, and would certainly be sent to an institution.
The man he later knew as Mr. Wammy came to the hospital and talked to him for a while, and watched him working that same too-easy puzzle, and took him to the House that same day.
There were a lot of other kids there, loud and strange and old enough that Near wouldn't have known how to talk to them even if he'd wanted to. He mostly sat alone in his room, playing with the action figures Meghan had given him, and sometimes reworking the puzzle. He hadn't found any better ones yet.
He'd been there about a week when an older boy peeked into his room. "Hello?" This boy seemed a little scary, like a crow, with messy black hair, and bony arms like awkward wings, and his eyes were deep and black-rimmed.
"Hello," Near said softly.
"I'm Ryuzaki. Mr. Wammy told me about you." He held out a box. "I brought you something that might be a better challenge."
It was a large puzzle with a picture of lots of candy on it; the pieces would all be very similar. "Thank you." Near wasn't used to making conversation, but he was curious about this boy. "Do you live here too?"
"I used to. Now I have a job."
Near dumped out all the pieces right away and started sorting them. "What kind of job?"
Ryuzaki paused, the kind of pause older people often gave when trying to figure out how much to tell kids. "I'm a detective."
Near looked up at him consideringly, and decided he had no reason to lie, even if he didn't look old enough. "They let you leave? No one comes to adopt the kids here."
"It wasn't a matter of letting me. Hm. You already noticed that? Well, no. No one comes to adopt anyone. It's a special orphanage for really smart kids."
Near frowned, and decided to address the more relevant question first. "Why have an orphanage like that?"
Ryuzaki studied him for a moment. "You'll probably hate hearing this, but you'll find out when you're older. We think it's best if not too many people know." He seemed sincere, and he was friendlier than most people.
"What if I don't like it when I find out?" Near said.
Ryuzaki knelt down and started helping him flip pieces over. "Think of it as more like a school. You'll learn how to be a detective too. You don't have to, of course."
Near didn't answer. It sounded interesting, and interesting was hard to come by.
"We all have aliases here," Ryuzaki went on. "You can pick yours if you like."
Near loved pretend games already: building houses for his figures and inventing their life stories. Getting a new name seemed almost like a special kind of pretend that would work in the real world. He could pretend he'd never been the little boy called Nate, the one who was scared and alone. He didn't even have to be the same little boy who had spent a seeming eternity in the hospital, feeling trapped by the oxygen and IV lines, wanting nothing more than for everyone to leave him alone, because only time would make him better. But what name? "I don't know what to choose."
Ryuzaki glanced over, wearing a small smile. "Near, I think."
He didn't really appreciate the joke until later, and Mello.
Just what are you implying? Mello says.
Near smiles a little, and finishes the last of the inner wall. The castle still needs something else. Gevanni would hate it if he made a moat; he rolled his eyes—very discreetly, of course—at the kiddie pool for the ducks.
Once the first Kira case began, L never visited the House again. Near talked to him a few times, but L was never very specific. Near thinks, now, if he had known...
But you don't know. You don't get to say goodbye in war-time. Afterwards, you have time to honor the fallen, even if you can't cry for them.
Matsuda pulled Near aside after the end, and awkwardly, as if ashamed, told him about the secret funeral service they'd had for L. "It feels wrong," he said. "You were his family."
Near remembers finding it odd at the time that his first thought was, Mello would know what to say. He thanked Matsuda, and meant it, and thought of having Roger arrange to move the grave. But that seemed wrong, too. So he visited before leaving Japan, and left a huge bouquet of poppies there. He knew L would understand.
He knew, too, that it looked strange to people when he stood for a while at the edge of an apparently-unremarkable stretch of road in Tokyo, smelling cigarette smoke long since dissipated, seeing shells long since cleaned up, Gevanni standing nervously beside him.
He couldn't face the burned-out church in Nagano, but he still dreams about it sometimes.
It's not like I was there anymore, Mello says.
I still wish I could have gone there. I thought I was stronger than that.
Come on. You fuckin' won, and you needed me to do it.
Near looks at the Mello and L figures again. I need you both now. We have to find him before he finds us.
You prepared to kill him if that's what it takes?
That's always a last resort, Mello.
He shrugs. Even when we've seen the world go to shit before?
Always. L is not a killer.
He's still thinking about it in the morning, when Lidner and Rester come in early. Lidner takes one look at Near and Gevanni and says, "What happened?"
"The detective killer has a death note."
"How did you find out?" Rester says.
Near explains the investigators' deaths. "He didn't want us to know about the notebook yet," he adds. "When we get it, I'm sure we'll find those names and an instruction like 'Sends L's location to this address before dying in an accident.' He was too specific.
"There's also the matter of that email message. It seemed out of character, but it wasn't. Anyone committed to being a criminal would want L out of the way, but only someone with an advantage in reserve would be arrogant enough to tell L about it."
He doesn't say Mello thinks so too, though it's true.
"He has another weak point. His shinigami doesn't seem to be very helpful. S-Kira had to discover the limitations himself."
Rester and Lidner exchange a look at his use of the Kira name, as if that makes it real to them too. Near has already decided what he needs to say, and he doesn't let himself hesitate. "If any of you want to leave, now would be a good time. Even you, Ge— Stephen."
He looks a little surprised at the deliberate use of his first name. Lidner smiles and shakes her head. Rester raises an eyebrow.
"Are you kidding?" Gevanni says.
"Let's get him," Lidner says.
***
Chapter 3 notes: There's no huge significance to the Wales thing I mentioned last chapter. It's just my little cross-fandom joke, because Bran Davies, the Welsh boy in the Dark is Rising series, has white hair. Tarot equivalencies for Mello & Near were done first by the Balgus REC/Sabi (I assume, since the art I have uses the same code alphabet as "Angelic Reeds"), but I swear they're the same cards I would've picked for them. :-) The word-for-word quote Near thinks of is from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by Waite. The poppies are a reference to "In Flanders Fields" (I know, most of you probably know that!).
Rating: PG-13ish for now
Word count: About 2300 for this chapter
Spoilers: For everything; is post-one-shot.
Summary: The title still wears Near instead of the other way around, but a new case forces him to re-examine what it means to be L.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
Chapter 3: The Hermit, the Chariot, and the Moon
Gevanni follows him to the main room. Near looks up from fixing the Lego, his mind whirling with calculations, conjectures about the killer's next move, possibilities for stopping him. "He is after L. He's after me."
Gevanni kneels down and looks at the new label. "Do I even want to know how sure you are?"
"A hundred percent," Near murmurs.
"Our information's out there."
"I'll talk to Mr. Aizawa right away. But if S-Kira knew the NPA had it, he would have manipulated them into sending it by now." Gevanni's stricken expression doesn't change, and Near feels there's something more he ought to do. Carefully, he puts a hand on his arm. "Don't worry."
Gevanni nods, obviously more comforted by contact than by the facts.
Still hopeless, Mello says.
Luckily, it's not yet the end of the day in Japan, and Near reaches Aizawa easily.
"Is there any publicly available information about your team?" he asks, without preamble.
"No. Not since..."
"I see. Please make sure it stays that way. And please have everyone use aliases when interacting with anyone unknown. I know that will be difficult, but I believe it's necessary."
"You're not saying—"
"It's a precaution."
"There's another of those murder notebooks out there, isn't there?"
Near sighs. "Yes. If you follow my instructions, your people will be all right. But please look out for any suspicious behavior."
"L, don't you think we deserve a little more information than that?"
"I think this new Kira may try to get information about me from you. He could use the notebook to do that. Right now he's concentrating on people who have recently worked with me, but it's not impossible that he could guess the NPA might know something."
Aizawa clearly suppresses a groan. "I almost wish I hadn't asked. I'd say we'll help all we can, but..."
"I'll let you know," Near says, and disconnects.
Gevanni was eavesdropping without bothering to hide it.
"I do think they'll be safe. I wouldn't lie about that," Near says.
"I know you wouldn't."
"It's a good thing L has a reputation for working alone." He gets two more Lego people, and labels one Parrish and the other Fernandez. It's good enough for now.
"S... S-Kira had to manufacture cases, because he couldn't find any existing ones?" Gevanni says.
"That's what I think. He's definitely researching L, though. Do what you can to obfuscate the public information of people who might seem like they've worked with L recently. There shouldn't be too much out there to begin with. S-Kira won't get anything from them, but I do not want them to die."
Gevanni nods. "I'll get the word out."
Near goes back to the card castle and opens a new deck to make an inner wall.
He'll know by now that he fucked up, Mello says.
What will S-Kira do next? What would someone like this have learned from his idol's defeat? S-Kira would not have shot Carruthers and de la Cruz if he weren't trying to hide his possession of the notebook. The secret's out now.
Mello says, We're winning. We know more than he wants us to. If we're lucky, he'll get pissed.
I wouldn't count on that.
Kira supporters were a varied, and mostly stupid, group. They were easily manipulated, but someone hoping to take over as Kira himself is a different story. He is patient; he has planned ahead. L needs to take advantage of his mistake.
Not the Fool this time, Near thinks, flipping that card face-up. Not Death either. Certainly not Justice.
He turns over the Moon, and sees the description in his mind's eye as clearly as if reading it from the book. It illuminates our animal nature, types of which are represented below—the dog, the wolf and that which comes up out of the deeps, the nameless and hideous tendency which is lower than the savage beast. It strives to attain manifestation, symbolized by crawling from the abyss of water to the land, but as a rule it sinks back whence it came.
That fits.
The finger puppets are too heavy for the castle to support, so Near takes the Hermit and Chariot cards and stands them up in the tallest tower. The Moon gets pinned to the floor with a dart.
I'm flattered you made me major arcana, Mello says.
I would never have heard the end of it if I hadn't.
He writes down all the rules he knows about the notebook, then picks up the L and Mello puppets and makes them look at the list.
I wish you could help me, he tells them.
He said he only talked to L once, but this was only technically true. He talked to L-the-construct once. It had little to do with Ryuzaki, his friend.
Near was only four when they first met, and hadn't been at Wammy's House very long. They had given him a battery of tests, some of which he'd done before.
The people at the House were better than most. Some of the teachers treated Near like a little kid, and were baffled when he didn't act like one, but overall they were a lot better than the nurses, who had meant well, but been stupid.
Everyone felt sorry for him at the hospital, and their sympathy was worse than nothing at all would have been. Only by repeating his requests incessantly and being uncooperative until they were met did he make anyone take him seriously.
He just wanted... He wanted his mum, but he knew she was gone. He wanted to be clean and cool, and never to smell a fire again. Stubbornness was the only weapon he had, and he used it shamelessly to make the nurses bring him new white clothes. Knowing the compulsion was irrational didn't make it possible for him to wear anything else, and he decided he would claim eccentricity once he was old enough that people wouldn't think he was trying to be cute in doing so.
It was almost certainly Meghan who contacted Wammy's House. She was the one nurse who didn't talk to Near as though he were a baby, who brought him toys and puzzles even though she wasn't supposed to.
The puzzles were too easy, but they were something to do with his hands. For the first and last time, Near used activity as a substitute for thinking, solving one over and over, so he wouldn't remember that he didn't have anyone who could take care of him, and would certainly be sent to an institution.
The man he later knew as Mr. Wammy came to the hospital and talked to him for a while, and watched him working that same too-easy puzzle, and took him to the House that same day.
There were a lot of other kids there, loud and strange and old enough that Near wouldn't have known how to talk to them even if he'd wanted to. He mostly sat alone in his room, playing with the action figures Meghan had given him, and sometimes reworking the puzzle. He hadn't found any better ones yet.
He'd been there about a week when an older boy peeked into his room. "Hello?" This boy seemed a little scary, like a crow, with messy black hair, and bony arms like awkward wings, and his eyes were deep and black-rimmed.
"Hello," Near said softly.
"I'm Ryuzaki. Mr. Wammy told me about you." He held out a box. "I brought you something that might be a better challenge."
It was a large puzzle with a picture of lots of candy on it; the pieces would all be very similar. "Thank you." Near wasn't used to making conversation, but he was curious about this boy. "Do you live here too?"
"I used to. Now I have a job."
Near dumped out all the pieces right away and started sorting them. "What kind of job?"
Ryuzaki paused, the kind of pause older people often gave when trying to figure out how much to tell kids. "I'm a detective."
Near looked up at him consideringly, and decided he had no reason to lie, even if he didn't look old enough. "They let you leave? No one comes to adopt the kids here."
"It wasn't a matter of letting me. Hm. You already noticed that? Well, no. No one comes to adopt anyone. It's a special orphanage for really smart kids."
Near frowned, and decided to address the more relevant question first. "Why have an orphanage like that?"
Ryuzaki studied him for a moment. "You'll probably hate hearing this, but you'll find out when you're older. We think it's best if not too many people know." He seemed sincere, and he was friendlier than most people.
"What if I don't like it when I find out?" Near said.
Ryuzaki knelt down and started helping him flip pieces over. "Think of it as more like a school. You'll learn how to be a detective too. You don't have to, of course."
Near didn't answer. It sounded interesting, and interesting was hard to come by.
"We all have aliases here," Ryuzaki went on. "You can pick yours if you like."
Near loved pretend games already: building houses for his figures and inventing their life stories. Getting a new name seemed almost like a special kind of pretend that would work in the real world. He could pretend he'd never been the little boy called Nate, the one who was scared and alone. He didn't even have to be the same little boy who had spent a seeming eternity in the hospital, feeling trapped by the oxygen and IV lines, wanting nothing more than for everyone to leave him alone, because only time would make him better. But what name? "I don't know what to choose."
Ryuzaki glanced over, wearing a small smile. "Near, I think."
He didn't really appreciate the joke until later, and Mello.
Just what are you implying? Mello says.
Near smiles a little, and finishes the last of the inner wall. The castle still needs something else. Gevanni would hate it if he made a moat; he rolled his eyes—very discreetly, of course—at the kiddie pool for the ducks.
Once the first Kira case began, L never visited the House again. Near talked to him a few times, but L was never very specific. Near thinks, now, if he had known...
But you don't know. You don't get to say goodbye in war-time. Afterwards, you have time to honor the fallen, even if you can't cry for them.
Matsuda pulled Near aside after the end, and awkwardly, as if ashamed, told him about the secret funeral service they'd had for L. "It feels wrong," he said. "You were his family."
Near remembers finding it odd at the time that his first thought was, Mello would know what to say. He thanked Matsuda, and meant it, and thought of having Roger arrange to move the grave. But that seemed wrong, too. So he visited before leaving Japan, and left a huge bouquet of poppies there. He knew L would understand.
He knew, too, that it looked strange to people when he stood for a while at the edge of an apparently-unremarkable stretch of road in Tokyo, smelling cigarette smoke long since dissipated, seeing shells long since cleaned up, Gevanni standing nervously beside him.
He couldn't face the burned-out church in Nagano, but he still dreams about it sometimes.
It's not like I was there anymore, Mello says.
I still wish I could have gone there. I thought I was stronger than that.
Come on. You fuckin' won, and you needed me to do it.
Near looks at the Mello and L figures again. I need you both now. We have to find him before he finds us.
You prepared to kill him if that's what it takes?
That's always a last resort, Mello.
He shrugs. Even when we've seen the world go to shit before?
Always. L is not a killer.
He's still thinking about it in the morning, when Lidner and Rester come in early. Lidner takes one look at Near and Gevanni and says, "What happened?"
"The detective killer has a death note."
"How did you find out?" Rester says.
Near explains the investigators' deaths. "He didn't want us to know about the notebook yet," he adds. "When we get it, I'm sure we'll find those names and an instruction like 'Sends L's location to this address before dying in an accident.' He was too specific.
"There's also the matter of that email message. It seemed out of character, but it wasn't. Anyone committed to being a criminal would want L out of the way, but only someone with an advantage in reserve would be arrogant enough to tell L about it."
He doesn't say Mello thinks so too, though it's true.
"He has another weak point. His shinigami doesn't seem to be very helpful. S-Kira had to discover the limitations himself."
Rester and Lidner exchange a look at his use of the Kira name, as if that makes it real to them too. Near has already decided what he needs to say, and he doesn't let himself hesitate. "If any of you want to leave, now would be a good time. Even you, Ge— Stephen."
He looks a little surprised at the deliberate use of his first name. Lidner smiles and shakes her head. Rester raises an eyebrow.
"Are you kidding?" Gevanni says.
"Let's get him," Lidner says.
***
Chapter 3 notes: There's no huge significance to the Wales thing I mentioned last chapter. It's just my little cross-fandom joke, because Bran Davies, the Welsh boy in the Dark is Rising series, has white hair. Tarot equivalencies for Mello & Near were done first by the Balgus REC/Sabi (I assume, since the art I have uses the same code alphabet as "Angelic Reeds"), but I swear they're the same cards I would've picked for them. :-) The word-for-word quote Near thinks of is from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by Waite. The poppies are a reference to "In Flanders Fields" (I know, most of you probably know that!).
