Warnings/Disclaimers: Obviously DN is not mine. Rating for mentions of drugs and potentially disturbing imagery.
Group projects. Near dislikes them.
In what is too obvious a move to be either a stroke of genius or a disaster waiting to happen (though it's probably both), he and Mello are paired together. Near understands the logic of it and actually, Mello would be his preference if they had been given a choice. Still. He knows what he wants to do and how he wants to do it, and explaining himself to others (particularly Mello, who couldn't possibly be more other than Near) is tiresome. He wants to command, not compromise. They haven't even picked a case yet and they're already quarreling.
"A drug cartel?" Mello says incredulously. "You think drug runners are more serious than a serial rapist and murderer?"
"It's an organized crime cell comprised of hundreds of members, and causes much more damage both locally and throughout its sphere of influence than a single killer, working alone," Near returns calmly. "The police are far more likely to require assistance with such a case."
Near can't remember the first few years of his life, spent mostly lying forgotten in his crib while his mother sailed out her crank highs. He does remember later things—half-frozen fish sticks, the reek of ethanol, the constant feeling of griminess after his stepfather decided to expand his lab from the utility sink in the basement to the bathtub. He doesn't think he will forget the sound of the house when it blew up due to clumsiness or contaminated equipment, or the way his mother looked, running back into the house too high to realize she was on fire, while Near crawled under the pickup to avoid the rain of burning debris.
Everything he tells Mello is true, but that doesn't mean that at the root of all his arguments is not the seed of desire for revenge—for his childhood, for his life, for everything, really.
But obviously he's not going to tell Mello that.
Mello is gritting his teeth in that way that means he knows Near is right but feels he is wrong.
In the end they can't agree, and the teacher is forced to assign them a case that neither would have chosen.
After Mello is gone, Near remembers the project with something resembling regret. Weeks and weeks of sifting through the same (so very little!) data, grasping at tiny threads in hopes of finding trails gone stone cold, give him perspective. Mello was difficult to work with, Mello was nothing like him, Mello was impulsive and reckless and far too imaginative. With so few facts to hang onto, though, Near thinks he could use that spark of inspiration, the intuition that would somehow connect all these disparate points into a coherent picture.
So he thinks about Kira and about L, tries to reconstruct what happened in Japan, turns the scant information he has over and over in his mind to see it from different angles; and whenever he finds himself overthinking it (sometimes the world seems like a conspiracy, and coincidence and wild conjecture and fantasy blur together into a whirling migraine) he turns his mind to Mello. Where he might have gone, how "his way" is working out for him. How Near can track him down. Why some lone perverted killer was more of a threat to society than a well-established drug cartel, a concept that to Near is ludicrous.
It's not until Mello is back, and that last question is the only one left, that a plausible answer occurs to Near: perhaps it was personal.
Because Near knows about the explosion, has seen the satellite footage, he has heard Halle's description of the scar, and that knowing is enough. Because sometimes he still has nightmares about the meth lab and wakes silently but suddenly, the image of his mother running barefoot in the gravel driveway and the dead white ooze of her arms melting branded on his eyes, and sometimes it's him trapped inside the house, skin peeling away, and sometimes, now, Mello is there too, and they're too busy arguing to escape.
Near doesn't want to see the burn scar. It's too personal, hits too close to the mark. He can't afford to be personal, not when Mello is going to go around blowing himself up, carelessly squandering away his face and name.
He wonders, because now even though he has his answers, he's in the habit of wondering about Mello, wonders if something about that case hit close to Mello's mark too, and thinks maybe they're not so other after all.
And then Mello is taken by flames too, and there's nothing left to wonder about, just cases, and hollow revenge.