While his dreams quite normally contained robots, aircrafts, automobiles and the like, as he grew older finding a half naked woman lying on the hard tiled floor with a smirk on her face occurred on occasion. Despite his quirks and far-reaching intelligence, Near still steadily grew into a young man.

And so, on one not-so particular night, Near once again found himself peering over at a young woman from his dream world. Very naked, lying on her back just before him, knees held together but ankles spread far, she smirked at him, lazily sucking on two of the dice from his collection. If he could have chose what entered his mind that night, it would have been elements of the case he'd assumed a role in.

Kira. Some clue at this moment could be right before him and yet here in the recesses of his mind lay a nude nympho giving him looks he'd never imagine receiving while awake. Perhaps this woman held the reasoning behind his inability to yet catch his predecessor's murderer. Maybe he allowed some of his focus to slip along the way.

She giggled while parting her knees and Near stared, wide eyed. After another light chiming laugh, he realized his mind had blanked.

"Why are you here?" He asked, shaking his head.

Sitting up, her hair cascaded down and over her face like half a curtain needing to be drawn. She flicked the moistened dice toward him, watching them clack, bounce and roll until stopping just at Near's bent knee. The little cubes shown their smooth faces, both sporting a single dot toward him, and Near questioned the relevance -- though getting a pair of snake-eyes on a dice roll seemed hardly original on his mind's part.

"Two?" He questioned to the woman. She smiled, then giggled and rolled back as if his question had been the silliest thing she'd ever heard. Near touched one of the moisten dice without really caring from where it'd come and stacked it on the other.

He subtly glanced to her again through the curtain of his own hair. "Two Kiras?" Smiling, she lay down again, looking much more comfortable than she should've been on the hard cold floor.

"I know there are two Kiras."

Slowly she extended her arm to him, reaching with lax effort for his own hand. He watched her move, watched her reach, and he denied her silent request. Instead, he knocked the dice over and stacked them anew. Pinching the bottom one between his fingers, he lifted the stacked dice, with their singularly dotted faces toward him and tried to find any relevance in the number.

When he looked to her again, he noticed her face remained smooth and unperturbed. Patience in others was often an attribute he found lacking, yet she seemed as though perhaps she knew him well enough not to rush him.

She turned her reaching hand to motion for him with a single graceful digit.

Perhaps not.

Near dropped the dice and slowly crawled toward her. "Is there no reasoning behind two?" He asked, leaning over her face which lightly smiled at his. Gently reaching up, she laced the fingers of both hands into his hair and slowly pulled them free of the locks. Again and again, before she left her fingers against his scalp, entwined in the fair strands, and tenderly coaxed him down.

His response time lacked, since he knew he should pull away from the situation that was far from reality, and yet he didn't. Allowing himself to brush his lips against hers, he lay down on the tiles above her, feeling none of the awkwardness about intimacy he expected he should when with a woman he'd never known before. Her mouth smirked beneath his lips, and parted slightly. He opened his own mouth a bit when one of her hands slinked behind his neck.

Warm. Warm and wet and when she suckled on his lower lip a groan escaped him before he realized. Her light tinkling giggle sounded again, but deeper, nearly in a different timbre. He moved to support his upper body on his elbows so as to free his hands and touch her. His fingers connected with something rough along her cheek and his eyebrows knit together.

The laugh sounded again, a chuckle with a deeper resonance, and Near recognized it immediately.

Jolting upward, he stared down at the scared face of his rival, who lightly smiled back up at him. The significance of the number finally registered and he blamed the late conclusion on being asleep.

"You're going to do something soon, aren't you?"

Mello smiled and said nothing. He appeared relaxed, almost to the point of drifting off to sleep. "What are you going to do Mello?"

He reached up, hands free of black leather gloves. He stroked his fingers through the almost translucent strands much like the young woman had done, and calmly peered at the mass of loose curls.

Near sighed, and pulled his head free. Grabbing Mello's wrists, he held them down on either side of the blonde's head. "Tell me what you are going to do."

Laughing, Mello closed his eyes, shifting his nude body around on the tiled floor. He sighed, and opened his clear eyes to Near's.

"I'm so tired," he murmured.

Near glanced away. "If you tell me what you're going to do, I can help you. You can rest when we've won." Still facing away, he rolled his dark eyes to those of the young man on the floor.

Mello chuckled softly, and closed his eyes. "Even if I slept for a hundred years, I think I'd still be tired."

Near released Mello's wrists and sat with his legs drawn in. So that's how it would end then. If he were honest to himself, he knew it all along.

"You're upset?" More of a statement than a question. Near found it hard to look down at him again. "I am," he replied, looking far away.

"That's good."

Near frowned and chanced looking down. Mello no longer lay before him, but the young woman did in his place. She smiled same as she ever did, and rolled over. When the sounds of her breathing began a sustained pattern, he knew she'd fallen asleep.

When Lidner called and immediately started apologizing for Mello's death, Near silenced her before she could finish. Mello's ending would be before the case's, and he knew that. And with the blond problem solved, he'd been freed with having to concern himself with it. With him. With when it was going to be, and how and where with whom. He no longer need to waste a single brain wave on it. Now his entirety could be focused into Kira.

And he'd be damned to let Mello have died in vain.