Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note or any of the characters , and I make no profit with this.
Set post-series.
Unopposed
It's always he who says it, every time. They've come to expect it, count on it, and if he's hoped that maybe it will spread, maybe they will catch on, he has hoped in vain: on the contrary, this responsibility has fallen onto him exclusively, and the truth is that he's not self-reflective enough to let it pass even once.
"No. We shouldn't call L. We don't need L."
Every time. Sometimes he wins, sometimes he doesn't. He has reasons most of the time – not always, and often bad ones – but only after a while: the protest comes first and the reasoning later. He gets strange looks from his colleagues every time: he's not himself. He tries to say it like it's a good thing, they shouldn't be giving up like that, they can deal with this alone, but it feels forced, the more since he's noticed they think his enthusiasm fake.
They all know he's one of the few who've been on the Kira case, who's met L face to face, and they all suspect, of course, that his reason lays there – maybe he didn't get along with L, something personal must be hidden under this, certainly? He's been very close to telling them many times and has balked every time, yet maybe, though he hasn't thought about it himself, it's only because he knows it would have no consequences, and then his last hope to change things will be lost.
Almost every time, whether he loses or not, it leads to an evening in a bar with Aizawa, who's had to hear his theories time after time, after the other members of their team have grown tired of them: Near killed Mikami, Near – L – can't be trusted, chief Yagami would never have approved, the other L's methods were already shady enough, they can't let him get away with it, let him guide them.
Aizawa listens and nods and drinks and disagrees quietly, knowing full well that his colleague just needs to vent, and privately thinks what he has never dared tell Matsuda: they are without evidence, without a chance, now. That Near, on that fateful day when he choose to investigate on his own and found that Light had been cheating them, had told he knew all this and then calmly warned him that his life – all their lives – were worth nothing, that all he could do was stand back and watch...
He daren't tell Matsuda, who's paranoid enough already, but easy to pull out of this mood again, that he feels, ever since, that they're caught and defenceless: they no longer have Ryuuzaki, the first L; they no longer have Light, who's never been on their side but was a genius; they don't even have a distant equally brilliant, equally unscrupulous enemy – Mello – to balance out the power Near is left with.
He listens to Matsuda's rambling – he'll be awake and happy and back to work with his headache tomorrow, smiling at his own delusions – and tells himself that it doesn't matter, that Ryuuzaki was like that, that this is what L is and nothing has changed, and, for all his anger and his dislike of the new world he imagined, he obscurely misses Light just like (he knows this is the real basis of his accusations) Matsuda does, though for entirely different reasons.