He tries to climb out of bed and instead rolls heavily to the ground. His limbs flop, leaden; his concussed head explodes into a nebula of painful stars. He cannot lift himself off the ground and instead has to call weakly for help.

"Whoa, babe," the nurse says. "You're not ready to strike out on your own like that. You gotta wait a few days for your body to get it together. Do you know where you are, honey?"

"No."

"You're in the hospital."

"Oh," he says weakly.

../../..

The hospital is still drowsy with the dregs of the night shift when he slips out of the doors two days later, without checking himself out. His head is still throbbing. The sidewalk chill cuts into his ribs and raises goosebumps on his thin limbs. Early morning commuters pass, carrying a plastic shopping back or a piping hot beverage pluming steam into the wind. Traffic hums. There is life around you every day, buzzing and retching and shouting, the city whispers into his ear, and you don't pay any attention. But Near has larger matters to attend to.

The House has not contacted him for several days, nor followed any of the emergency protocols meant to be used in circumstances like this. Roger having died a few months ago, he has no caretaker to watch out for him in person, and is now forced to abandon hope of ever actually getting in touch with his hired guards. Without the authority he uses under the name of L, he cannot command law enforcement agencies. Without any access to money, he can't feed himself or find a place to stay. He's never abandoned a case before, but perhaps this will be the first.

In a particularly strange turn of events, he does manage to make a restricted call from a pay phone to one of the companies victimized by the billion-dollar scandal.

"Curiously enough," says one particularly indulgent CEO (who seems somehow willing to believe that any unidentified call could genuinely be from L), "we actually redid our inventory, and it seems like everything has been put back. I don't get it either, but I have to wonder if we ever got hit, or if we just had a computer malfunction and panicked. I suppose we won't need your services anymore."

He manages to make three more calls before running out of the quarters he found glued to the sidewalk (and tore his fingernails to pry up). They all say the same thing – everything has been put right, and the evidence is gone without a trace. No smugglers, no missing inventory, no paycheck to fly him out of hell. Heist rings do not simply put everything back where it came from and erase their trails. There is a scheme under his nose, and he is fully aware of it, but he has nowhere to start to find out what.

He wanders around the city in a daze, ducking into all-night diners and wishing sorely for a new pair of socks when his get wet. He falls asleep in the public library, and then a Waffle House, and then in a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop.

There is something peculiar nagging at the back of his memory, a sense that something crucial is being forgotten. Specifically, something about the accident that got him stranded in the first place. There's a sensation that accompanies the almost-memory, a feeling like grasping at the tiny, frayed end of a thread. But it's much too small to get a hold, and he keeps pulling to no avail.

Mello would be perfectly at home in a situation like this. Hell, Mello was probably in situations like this all the time before he died, except Mello always had a skill set Near's never had. There was a drive somewhere in him to keep going in times like these, and he would have muscled his way into a solution. If Mello lost all contact with his caretakers and was forced to wander a city on foot, he'd never have settled for wandering aimlessly and scrounging quarters off the sidewalk.

../../..

"Wake up." A hand lightly swats at his face.

"Eh?" He rises out of a groggy dream, the subject of which is yet another elusive thread, and finds himself in a water-damaged, powder-blue room filled with '80s-era washing machines, one of which is still whirring. His back is against the cold glass of the window. The fluorescent light is sharp and ugly. From somewhere behind him, out of the wall of glass windows, there comes the distant sound of a siren.

The hand belongs to a tall, hollow-eyed man in a dirty drab-green parka and threadbare blue jeans. "What's a kid like you sleeping in a Laundromat for?"

"I don't have anywhere else to go," Near says, sizing up the man in front of him, with his long black hair falling around his collar and curiously smooth features. He looks ill, certainly, but not like a drunk man or a drug abuser. His eyes are clear and expressionless. They almost look dead.

He calls himself Virgil, and he has a wad of change in his pocket, along with several sticky gummy bears that may have come out of the coat pocket when he bought it at Goodwill, and he uses it to buy hot and sour soup at a hole-in-the-wall pseudo-Chinese restaurant. Yellow bubbles of grease float on the surface. He shoves it towards Near, pulling an unwrapped caramel from his pocket. When he opens his mouth, Near sees teeth that are stunningly white. As if to be even more confusing, Virgil then examines his caramel, picks away a single black hair, and luxuriates in the taste of it by visibly swishing it from cheek to cheek. He sits with his knees bunched up in the booth.

Near takes one apprehensive sip off of his spoon before feeling his face warm from the overuse of spice. He coughs violently.

"What were you doing in the laundromat?" Virgil asks disinterestedly, now picking idly at one of his fingernails. "There are much better places to sleep, you know. Denny's doesn't mind if you sleep in one of their booths. And they keep the thermostat up high in there, too."

"I haven't been out on the street long," Nate replies.

"Didn't you have anybody you could call, if you haven't been out long?"

"No," he says, tugging his new (borrowed) windbreaker tighter around his skin-and-bones frame. "I don't have anybody to call."

"Everybody has somebody," L says. "In The Catcher In the Rye, Holden calls his old teacher when he runs away from his parents."

"It's not that I don't know people," Nate replies. "It's just that I only ever bothered to cultivate working relationships with them, and I am not comfortable behaving as if we were ever anything more than colleagues."

"You are so uncomfortable asking for personal favors that you would rather sleep in a cold, dirty Laundromat," Virgil replies, punctuating with a loud slurp of soup. "I see."

"And if everyone has someone to call, why are you alone?"

After a long pause, Virgil says, "I lied. Not everybody has someone to call."

../../..

"You can stay with me, if you have nowhere else to go."

Desperation will drive a young man to do whatever he's got to do to get a shower and a clean pair of socks, luxuries Near has never before appreciated like this.

Virgil's apartment is shabby but mostly sanitary, with exposed brick and piping with the rust scrubbed away. The only furnishings are a sofa and a thin laptop lying on what looks like a heavily used IKEA end table, in stark contrast with the cheap air of the rest of the place.

"Tea? I have Earl Grey, green, oolong, chai, English breakfast…"

"Do you have apple juice?"

"Yes, actually."

After a glass, he requests to use the shower. Since the apartment is tiny, he is hyperconscious of the noise the running water makes and the feeling of being hideously, disgustingly vulnerable. He peels off his clothes behind the curtain that sections off the bathroom part of the open-floor plan. Not knowing what else to do, he tosses them straight into the path of the showerhead and watches gray filth stream off of them. It takes him a moment to remember he is still wearing his socks, and he almost laughs, and then he almost cries. The water is cold after ten minutes.

He sleeps under an afghan on the floor, wearing a borrowed white shirt and a pair of blue jeans to long for him, listening to the hum of the air conditioning. He drifts dreamlessly out of consciousness, unsure of whether this is reality or some delusion experienced as a result of his head injury.

When he wakes, the light is just turning pink on the horizon, but the view from the tiny window is still mostly made of dark skyline. Pulling on yet another borrowed pair of clean socks, he turns to face the door and stops when a face appears mere centimeters from his.

"Not so fast, Nate River," Virgil says.

Nate River.

Near's breath hitches, and suddenly a strange wave of heat passes over him. His ears ring. For once, it is mostly piercing intuition which moves him to speak. "How do you know my name?" But he already knows the answer.

"Hello, Near." Virgil extends a hand. "I am L, this century's greatest detective. And I am quite alive."

Taking his hand, Near finds it cold and clammy, the skin a dull gray. The attached man fares little better – his clothes hang off him like sacks, his cheeks are hollow, and his weak, dead smile does not reach his eyes. All of these things seem very natural for Virgil the impoverished squatter, but for L, the long-dead world's greatest detective? Not so much. "How nice to finally meet you," L says.

"You tried to kill me." You lied to me, he means to say, but it's not strictly true in a pedantic sense. You deceived me sounds better, but this is deeper and much more terrible. This is a fundamental shift in the foundation, a subtle moving of the plates. The breaking of Pangaea.

"It may be true that I rigged that billboard to fall, or it may not be true. Whether I did or not, if I had wanted you dead, you would be dead. Either way, that's not what's important right now. How about some ice cream for breakfast?"

Near, not knowing what else to do, sits Indian-style upon the lineoleum, compliantly taking the bowl and spoon provided to him. The ice cream is green tea-flavored – sweet, with a hint of clean bitterness to cut the sugar. Virgil – L - sits across the kitchen, also on the floor, balancing on his ankles. "I needed to get your attention," he says. "I wanted to see you in the flesh at least once."

"Then would it not have been more logical to contact me somehow other than luring me into a strange city, throwing a billboard on top of my head, and lying about who you were?" Bitterness leaks into his voice, and he reigns it back in measuredly. He looks at the ceiling because it is white, and it doesn't spin when he focuses on it, like the printed wallpaper. "And what about sabotaging my case? What was logical about that?"

"You would never have believed someone who contacted you claiming to be L," comes the reply. "You wouldn't have even bothered to investigate. And besides, I have extraordinary abilities in the realm of logic. That doesn't mean I'm a slave to reason."

"Of course I would have investigated," Near says, stabbing the thick green lump with unnecessary ferocity. "Given the preposterous suggestion that you might still have been alive, why wouldn't I have investigated?"

L's expression does not change. "Well, perhaps I have a bit of a flair for the dramatic and wanted to exercise it." He swishes a bite from cheek to cheek, appearing to savor it in a moment of distraction. "You resent me," he says absentmindedly.

"I resent your failure," Near says, biting back the bile taste rising in his throat. "I resent that you somehow managed to contradict every principle I was ever taught to live by, when you were supposed to be the bar that set it." All this is said in the same tone one might use to say, I bought goldfish food today, or No, I don't know how to do your calculus homework.

"You don't really care a thing for justice, though, do you, Near?" His eyes are dark and luminous. "At the heart of it, you follow the ideology ascribed to L simply because you have been taught to measure yourself against it."

"How can you expect me to do anything else?" Near's pulse beats feverishly, and his pale cheeks take on a faint pinkness. "What else was I ever given to live by?"

"I had hoped for better from you, though. I want better for you than I had."

Near stands, turns, faces the wallpaper, and traces the pale blue flowers with a fingernail. "I think you're lying again," he says. "I think you want to be convinced that I'll collapse in the same spots you did, and skip out and hole up somewhere until it all passes over. You're like a child who hasn't done his homework – you keep thinking maybe it's excusable if someone else did the same thing. It's not excusable. It's disgusting." His tone remains dispassionate, and yet his fingers clench and unclench at his sides. They held me to your standards, and now I find even you did not uphold them. So what am I? What was the point?

"You are quite good at hiding your true feelings, but you're not a master of it yet. It's very clear to me that you are not nearly as disengaged as you would like to appear. Perhaps it's because you think I had a choice about whether or not to leave the Kira case. I did not, I assure you."

"There is always a choice," Near says, controlling his breathing, leaving little crescents imprinted into his palms. "You're still telling lies."

"Would you have had me give my life?"

"Those who are unprepared to give their lives will never win."

"You're a bit of an idealist, however you try to hide it," L says. "I had my reasons, and maybe one day you'll understand them."

Near, unsure of what to say, chooses to say nothing. They sit a long while in silence, L staring intently at Near's face and Near staring intently at every feature of the room except L's face. There is a clock ticking somewhere in the apartment, and the sound is maddening. Near, feeling his head spin in circles, cannot know that L is recalling a story about a dead man's heart hidden under a floorboard, ticking away like a time bomb.

"I am dying," L says.

Near turns away from the printed wall, one finger thoroughly tangled in a lock of white hair. "What?"

"Dying. Truly, this time. And this time, when they put the coffin in the ground, I'll actually be in it, and there is no string I can pull to steal away in the night."

Please let this be another lie,he thinks, but L's cadaverous appearance takes on new significance – the gray pallor is that of illness, that of a body beginning to give out. "What string did you pull the first time?"

"That," L says, leaning back against the stove and moving his legs out in front of him, "is the part I will never reveal as long as I live." He chuckles wryly at the last bit, but the chuckle turns into a discomfited groan as his bones creak and stretch. "It's the one trick I played that I can never take the credit for. Suffice it to say it will never work again. The cost was great."

Near says nothing, but his coal-gray eyes are wide, not half-lidded and passive like they are all the rest of the time. "What will you do?"

"Nothing," he says. "There's nothing I can do."

That's not what I meant, Near wants to say, but he settles for silence instead. He supposes maybe he should wonder what, exactly, is going to kill the man before him who should already be dead, but he finds that he doesn't care. He finds that, peculiar as it is, it is more difficult to contemplate mourning L a second time. And this time, he will have to mourn the real mean, not some idealized fiction.

"Nate River," L sighs. "Twenty-one years old, meandering around New York in your pajamas, not knowing up from down when you're not in front of a computer screen. What are you going to do?"

He remembers hiding behind corporate walls and bodyguards and watching a young man die hideously on the floor of a warehouse. He remembers the sudden sense of displacement at hearing the words L is dead. He remembers falling asleep in the Laundromat. He doesn't know yet. His head throbs.

"I want to play one last game before I die," L says. "And I want you to be my opponent."

"What's the objective?"

"Answers," L replies simply. "If you agree to this one last battle of wits, you'll find all the information you're looking for. All the information I withheld to keep you in New York. The reason I left the Kira case. And maybe a few more pieces of knowledge, if you're vigilant."

"And what's in it for you?"

"The thrill of the chase," L says, rubbing at one bagged eye. "One last adventure." He puts down his spoon. "A distraction."

"In other words, you're manipulating me like a toy so you can have a little fun before it's too late."

"Of course I am," L says. "Now, are you willing to challenge me?"

"Yes," Near replies.

"I'll give you one day's head start," L says. "And I will do my worst."

"I would expect nothing less," Near says.

"We start tomorrow," L says. "For now, have another bowl."

They stare into the early morning brightness out of the window. "I don't want to be L anymore," Near says.

"Neither do I," L says. "But unlike me, you have a choice in the matter. Use it."