Author's Note: To those of you about to read this I warn that this is a side fic to "God of the Machine" and if you haven't read that you'll be confused as to some of the characters. You'd probably be okay without reading it, but you know.
When L spoke with Naomi Misora for the final time, explained the backstory that she perhaps deserved to hear when she had first met B in the guise of Ryuzaki, he had not told her everything.
He had made mention of A, his first successor, who had hung himself from the rafters at the tender age of sixteen. He told her about B, the man she had thought was L himself, and what had brought him to lighting himself on fire.
He didn't tell her about C, the third of that first generation of successors.
He hadn't thought she needed to know.
It was only years later, staring out at the snow falling lightly over Tokyo, giving the city a dazed and silent feel that he realized he had had no difficulty telling her about A but somehow he couldn't bring himself to tell her about C.
Somehow, even back then, C had always been personal.
There was a time when L had belonged to him and him alone.
A long time, actually, because the saga of L the detective didn't begin when he was five years old in an orphanage being adopted by the eccentric and jaded inventor Quillish Wammy who'd always had a penchant for DC comics and tales of private eyes.
His career as L, the anonymous detective, didn't come until quite later although it was now difficult to recall if he had ever been anything else. Of course, he had been Erald Coil, he had been Ryuzaki, he had been the names and identities he'd stolen from others, but that almost didn't count.
Regardless, by the time he was fourteen L belonged to no one.
"Successors?"
It was one of the rare times he was actually in England, in the orphanage that Quillish Wammy had built shortly after having adopted L himself. Of course, Quillish didn't manage the place anymore, he was off playing Alfred to L's batman instead (which the fourteen-year-old L found frankly hilarious and intended to prolong as long as humanly possible).
No, the place was run by Roger Ruvie, Quillish's old Cambridge friend who secretly detested children.
But then, he would learn later, the point had never been the children. The point had always been L.
"Surely, L, you are not under the delusion that you will live forever." Quillish had responded, sighing at the sight of L perching on the old fashioned and very expensive chair in Quillish's office and eating cheesecake, a habit the man had long since grown tired of trying to break.
At fourteen years old L did not quite consider himself immortal but he liked to believe that death was further away than Quillish seemed to be implying.
"No, but I hardly see the need for successors either." L said, between bites of cheesecake, schooling his face into that blank expression that Quillish always hated so very much. L imagined that his face could match the robotic voice he used, perfectly blank, unreadable, and damn unnerving.
"It's a very dangerous line of work you are pursuing. You've made a lot of enemies. Not just among criminals either, L." Quillish started, peering at L over his glasses before sighing and adding, "It's best to be prepared for all eventualities."
L, the title, will be immortalized is what Quillish had meant to say while L the human being would fade into oblivion. Such was the price of glory but at the time L had difficulty telling the difference.
"Such as my untimely death." L finished for him, licking his fingers clean, trying his best to get the sticky residue of cake off them but not quite succeeding.
Quillish didn't respond, he simply asked, "Would you like to meet them?"
"No, I don't." L said, calmly, casually but as expected Quillish ignored him and instead pushed a button on an intercom and said, "You may come in now."
And then in marched three brats, like they were in a musical show or else a bastardized form of the army, in a straight line and in height order as well until they were facing Quillish's desk more or less at attention.
The first, a tall blonde boy, more or less L's age (perhaps even a little older) was a bit too lanky and hadn't quite managed to fill his frame. He wore glasses and readjusted them whenever he was too nervous, which was far too often in L's opinion.
The second was a smaller black haired boy probably younger than L by a few years with pale skin and oddly enough red eyes. Not a pink eye sort of red or a brown that bordered red but red eyes that almost seemed to glow like traffic lights, the pupils themselves barely visible for the glow. This one grinned at him and with his eyes it made him look like some sort of demon.
And then there was the third, a red headed little girl who looked like she should be playing with dolls and sporting bright pink ribbons in her hair but instead was plainly dressed and staring resolutely ahead at Quillish without even bothering to glance over at L.
"A, B, and C." Quillish said, motioning to them in order, "Your potential successors. Children, the current L, the man whose title one of you will wear someday."
"Is the next one going to be D?" L couldn't help but ask, because the naming scheme was fairly obvious at that point, and also just the sort of thing that Quillish would do.
"Well, Watari, they look… Excellent." L finally settled with, letting his eyes fall on each of them, watching as the two boys (even the one with red eyes) flinched but attempted to hide it. The girl though, she just stared straight back, and he noted that she had strange eyes too.
Blue, but a pale blue, the kind you rarely saw in eyes and whenever you did see were striking; even in the face of a child.
"The girl, what is she, five?"
"Seven." The girl answered, flatly, before Watari got the chance.
"Ah, seven, my mistake. So much older and more sophisticated than five." L said, in a tone that implied none of the underlying sarcasm, but the girl seemed to understand all the same (although she still gave him no reaction).
"A and B are currently more likely to take your position…" Quillish began before adding, "Of course, the choice is ultimately yours, L."
L decided then that he would choose none of them, and he never did, they had each would take that choice from him in one way or another.
Like sand falling through his fingertips; and he had never even thought to notice until it was far too late.
"There is a thirty-six point two nine percent likelihood that Mr. Brown is the murderer."
A few months after first meeting them he was sent videos of his successors performances during mock cases, often cases that L himself had solved. They were given the same information he himself had been given, the ability to ask for more, and then were asked to solve the case.
L hated watching them.
He usually made a point of avoiding it until he was too bored from a lack of interesting cases and Quillish's nagging had finally reached an intolerable level. Pick and choose, watch and see, evaluate and pick your own successor as if you had one foot already stuck in your grave.
Watching A was painful; gangly, nervous, and so very afraid of failure. According to his IQ test he was quite brilliant but probably would have fared better as an engineer. He crumpled under pressure and while it was painful to watch L always came back to these tapes in his darker moments, because there was something absurdly funny about watching this older boy shake and sweat and splutter out wrong (dreadfully wrong) conclusions.
He'd cried more than once, at the time that always brought a smile to L's lips, later… Later it only made him feel a curious emptiness, as if his organs had been removed and he was hollow, and he only thought of how this strange, intelligent, gangly boy no longer existed.
B was unnerving at best. He'd taken to mimicking L, or at least, the way L spoke from the transcripts (L didn't visit enough for the boy to get a real feel, that wouldn't come until years later) and watching it was like looking in a demented mirror. And wasn't that ironic? Because half of the L persona was crafted to unnerve his audience, to wear on Watari, for B to do it to him and Roger really did say something.
L decided then that he probably hated B the most.
And then there was little C, whose legs weren't even long enough to touch the floor, who stared straight ahead at the camera with those remarkably blue eyes and would say some of the strangest things he'd ever heard. Percentages, she always gave percentages, and they were never high either. Rarely was a percentage above fifty, she usually danced between five and thrity, and always said with that straight face every single time.
And even when he'd put the videos aside and focus on real work whenever he brought them out again he'd remember and it would haunt him. It wasn't a puzzle, not a real one, not like a case but it was still there and he still didn't know why.
Eventually, after watching another series of videos of each of his potential successors addressing a case, he asked Quillish not caring if it gave the man the wrong idea. That L actually cared about these three little bastards gunning for his name, "The girl, C, why does she do that thing with the percentages?"
"The thing with the percentages?" Quillish asked, as if he had no idea what L was talking about. Which was just unfair, since it was L's job to play dense.
"In her mock cases, she gives percentages. It must annoy the hell out of Roger."
"Oh, that, it does." Quillish responded distractedly, having only just returned from the latest éclair run.
"Perhaps simply because it annoys the hell out of Roger." Quillish said finally after setting a plate in front of L, "You were always contrary as a child."
L was contrary as a half-grown adult, but neither of them were pointing that out.
At the time it was enough of an answer, the most thought he was willing to spare for any of those three nuisances, and so he turned his attention from case to case and would casually watch the videos as they rolled in. Watch as the shadows under their eyes grew darker, their skin paler, watched as verbal ticks developed, quirks in their attitudes and performance…
In retrospect it was very easy to deduce that A would be the first to break.
Video quality in those days had been grainier, so you couldn't see the wetness in his eyes, but it was implied in the cracking of his voice.
"I…I… I can't… can't… I can't do it. I'm just not, I just can't do it." Shaking his head back and forth, he ran a hand through his pale hair continually, twisting it back and forth as he curled into his metal chair.
"B and C both solved this case successfully, A." Came Roger's voice, somewhere behind the camera, which caused a tearful snort from A his eyes flickering somewhere to the left of the camera.
"You think I don't know that?"
"If your low performance continues then it will be highly unlikely that you will be chosen as L's successor."
A shook his head back and forth hunching further into his chair, his voice distorted by rage and grief, "I know that, I know that, you don't think I know that? You don't think I know that everyone younger than me is smarter than me?! You think I don't know that this is all there is and that I'll never be good enough?! I try and I try and I try but it never…"
He shook his head, shuddered, and then said, "No, I'm done. I'm done, I can't do it, I can't do it anymore!"
He stood, shaking, and walked past the camera, Roger calling after him, "A, your examination isn't finished. If you leave now you will be marked as having failed!"
Then the video cut off abruptly.
Two days after that video was produced A would commit suicide.
L wouldn't watch the video until two weeks after A's funeral.
L didn't wear black, instead he wore his worn grey sneakers, blue jeans, and long sleeved white shirt that he'd grown accustomed to.
Although there were other children in the orphanage, those who were not destined to succeed L, only a select few attended A's funeral. L, Quillish, Roger, B, and the girl C. Only those connected with L stood above the plain black coffin and pit.
And of those only he and the girl lingered.
It was drizzling, not too heavy, but unpleasant all the same. The chill was already leaking through the cotton fabric and clinging to his bones but all the same he remained and stared at the grave.
"His name was Jonathon." The girl said and L turned to look at her. She was such a serious little girl, he'd never seen her smile, and he wondered at once how it would look.
How would she look if her eyes weren't always burning?
"I didn't know that." He finally said, he had wondered if it didn't start with an A, like his own name was secretly L.
"You wouldn't, it would defeat the purpose of the anonymous detective. Of course, I've never really understood the point of an anonymous detective." She tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and simply stood there as the rain drizzled down her face.
For a moment he simply watched, stared at her, forgetting what she had said and just transfixed by the sight of this girl standing still as a statue in the light rain. Then he said quietly, "Neither have I."
"A thought he knew, he would try to explain it to us, to me and B… That was the last thing he said to me, the reason why I had to become the next L, why L must keep going even if he died and if you died. Trouble is, I still don't think I get it. His last request, and I don't get it." She smiled, a slow bitter thing, and dropped her head, her eyes blinking away the water.
"Why not B?" He asked and she simply gave him a look, one that cut through him, seeing all that he was and finding it ultimately lacking.
Finally she said, "You really don't know anything about us, do you?"
"I don't make it my business to know." L said, hunching in the cold and adding, "I am a detective, not a baby sitter."
Her gaze lost its cutting edge and all at once she seemed as empty as he felt, her eyes staring forward with nothing in them, and she said, "Well, then, great detective L. I can tell you about a case, not one that's happening now, perhaps not even in ten years, but it will happen."
"What will happen?"
"B's gonna snap." She said shaking her head back and forth, her smile growing more desperate, a spark of laughter appearing in her eyes, "He's going to lose it. He's already losing it, A was just a little more distracting, but B… B isn't exactly all there either, he never has been. Did you know, that he can tell you exactly when you're going to die? He got A's down by the second."
She stopped, breathed in, her smile fading and something darker and angrier taking its place. The girl stepped up to him, grabbed him by his arms, and said, "If you don't start paying attention, L, then one day Beyond Birthday's case is going to wind up on your goddamn doorstep! Then you'll have no choice but to pay attention!"
Over the grave of one of his dead successors those words and her desperate too adult expression took on an edge that would haunt his more introspective moments. Sometimes, in those few moments where he dreamed, he'd see a flash of her face and her eyes in that moment as if the image had been carved into his soul.
C, it never struck him as he stood there in the rain with her, that he should have asked for her name then. A's name was Jonathon Price, B's was Beyond Birthday, and C's…
C would forever be nameless in the way that he would always remain more or less nameless.
Sometime between A's death and B's disappearance he discovered that he had favorites.
He supposed he always had, even in that first moment, he had just loathed the idea of them too much to acknowledge it.
He had never really liked A, he reminded him too much of the underling police men he bullied and although his death still would occasionally weigh on L's thoughts he would not delude himself in retrospect.
B, for his own part, grew more demented and creepier by the day. Now technically L's official understudy B no longer seemed content with being a mere replacement. Or rather, he aimed to perfect it, to become L in all his entirety. Whenever L appeared on Wammy's doorstep he'd watch B's latest attempt and mimicry, and would note how each time it became just that much cleaner.
It no longer was merely the speech but also the slouch, the biting of the thumb, the hair, the skin tone, perching on a chair.
A doppelganger, L would think every time he saw him, and then would remember that to see one's doppelganger was a forewarning of death and misfortune.
The girl though, he liked the girl.
He wasn't quite sure why. She was seven years younger than him, as adults this might not be too odd, as a child and an adolescent the gap seemed almost infinite. But somehow, in spite of that, he found her presence more than tolerable. She'd never really seemed like a child anyway, more like a too casual adult stuck in a little girl's body.
They didn't often talk about his work or hers, usually only discussing mundane things or else nothing at all, and would sit in the garden away from the other children and stare out into the horizon.
She was terribly philosophical for a little girl.
"It's like we're all in this demented play about a play. Where B and I take the roles of the first and second understudy, and we have to memorize all the lines, perfect the character, but we all can't be on stage at the same time." She said at one point with a sigh, "It really gets to B, me too I suppose, but being the replacement of a replacement… Well, it sometimes makes things a bit easier."
But they didn't often talk about that, about her position as second place to B, or his own role as the original L. Sometimes they circled it, like ravenous vultures, but they rarely openly discussed it.
He supposed neither of them wanted to, that was their life after all, they lived and breathed anything to do with L. It was nice to occasionally be able to set it aside.
"Why do you use percentages all the time in your cases?"
Her eyes flickered to him, away from the words in her book, and for a moment the eleven-year-old C simply stared at him and then said, "Well, they're all just math problems, aren't they?"
"Mathematics?"
She smiled, one of the few she ever gave without something else hiding behind it, "Deduction is just a larger logic problem. You have various events, various known truths, and from there you connect until you reach what is most likely to be your result. But we can never know for certain if one thing is correct, we can only be mostly certain, or somewhat certain, so I give percentages."
"I've never thought of it that way." He responded, which was true, he just solved the damn things. To him they were puzzles, which, perhaps that was what she was getting at with her logic problem idea.
"Neither has Roger, it's probably why I'm second best. He thinks I'll piss them off too much." She said dully with a shrug, as if this was more or less irrelevant, as if it truly didn't concern her that she was the understudy of the understudy.
L made it a habit of pissing off middle aged policemen so he hardly saw the problem. No, Roger wasn't picking her because she had once been too young and was now too apathetic. B showed more passion, more drive and desire, the girl would flatly give her percentages and refuse to show absolute certainty in any one result.
"You don't believe you can be truly certain of any result, then?"
"Nope, there's always something missing. Something I'm not quite seeing. So I can only tell you what's most likely at best. I'm not going to sugar coat that even if it makes a few people sleep easier at night."
Fair enough, he didn't bother to respond with that, simply bit his thumb and stared ahead.
"You do know that you'll ruin your back sitting like that." The girl pointed out dully.
"But if I don't sit like this then I will never be able to think at my full capacity." L responded, not shifting from his position.
"That's complete bullshit." She responded before adding, "You just do it to tap dance all over Watari's nerves."
True, undeniably true, but he had never admitted that before and wasn't about to start now, "As second best to my replacement you can never hope to understand the sacrifices we must make for one more percentage of brain power."
"Oh, right, you and B both. Jesus Christ, I'm starting to think I'm the only half-way normal one left."
"There is a twenty-three point seven percent chance that…"
She cut him off flatly before he could name whatever he was that certain of, "That doesn't count."
They sat for a moment in silence the good mood dripping from them both and leaving that same feeling of A's grave in its place. Hesitantly, she said, "But then, you might be right, maybe I just can't see it... It would be nice though, if one of us came out of this halfway normal."
"Having dealt with normal people over many years I can safely say they are overrated." L stated and she'd smiled back, distracted enough to agree, but he wasn't the only one who lied.
Only a few years later B would leave the orphanage and strike out on his own and then, just as C had predicted, L found himself working on B's case in Los Angeles and pawning it off onto the unsuspecting Naomi Misora.
"He's alive, severely burned, but alive."
"So he didn't manage to do it then."
"Do what?"
"…It doesn't matter now."
The last time he'd see her in Wammy's orphanage she was sixteen and one of the oldest children there.
"Look at you, the prodigal son finally come home." She said, greeting him at the gate before adding, "Roger wants to see you, he comes bearing new recruits."
He almost turned around right then but she continued on, holding onto his arm and not letting him leave, "Oh yes, new successors, since the last batch turned out so poorly. These ones get to keep their first letter, at least, and pick a name. It's nice, better than C. I've always felt a bit like 'C is for Cookie' not that Mello, Near, and Matt are much better but hey, it's better than what we got."
He stood perfectly still, his eyes fixed on the property without blinking, "Your impressions?"
"Well, they're not as young as I was, but… Near can't seem to get out of his pajamas and likes to practice the art of deduction with his legos standing in as models of the murder scene. I mean, compared to B's jam thing it's not…" She trailed off and waved her arms about as if to brush these eccentricities under the carpet where they could remain out of sight.
He remained standing at the gate, unwilling to condemn himself to this meeting, and she seemed to understand because with an eye back towards the main house she grabbed his arm and walked with him on the dirt path off the property.
Only when they were a fair distance away did they resume their conversation.
"And where do you fall into all of this?"
"I, of course, am old news now and have officially been written off and am no longer in the running." She said with a sigh and waving her hand as if brushing herself away just as easily, "But you knew that."
He almost let this slide but something stopped him then and he realized, looking at her, that they were the only ones left now. He had never truly connected with his successors but of the four of them only he and C now remained and something had to be said for that.
"Considering I had yet to make any decisions regarding my successors, no, I didn't."
She always had a way of looking older than she was, of letting the emotion drip from her and only the cold gears of logic remained. As if that brutal ruthless thought was the true heart of her.
"L, I don't want your title."
And then there were none of his original successors.
"This place, your title, it destroys people, L. It destroyed A, B, I guarantee you it will destroy the new ones, and we aren't nearly as unscathed as we'd like to think either. It's evil, L, maybe not like murder and rape but all the same this idea of crafting us into this perfect faceless detective isn't good either."
For a moment he said nothing, let her words sink in, her flat out refusal and wondered if these words would have made him happy years ago. To know that not one of those chosen to be his successor would live up to his name.
"Being the faceless detective himself I can tell you that it's not all that bad." L said, "I can hardly imagine being anything else."
"I know you can't. A couldn't either, or B for that matter…" She sighed, stared off into the distance and then said, "Do you know what B was looking for, when he left?"
L hadn't realized he was looking for anything, then again B's departure had been a subdued affair compared to A's death. The next L would hear from him, after he left the orphanage, was through the guise of Ryuzaki.
"He wanted to create the one case you couldn't solve. To him that was the only way to really win against something like L." She paused, licked her lips, and looked out beyond him into the distance, "He was impatient, insane, and tried to do it himself but he wasn't wrong, L. Because that case does exist somewhere. In mathematics there are some problems that simply cannot be solved and I am willing to believe that it's true for deduction, for us, as well. I'm leaving and I will find that case, I won't make it, but I'll find it. And with it L will become nothing but a farce and this ridiculous situation will finally come to an end."
"And if I don't want L to end?" He asked but she didn't answer only turned back to the orphanage and slowly walked back, leaving him to stare after her, and by the time he reached the place and met with his newest successors she had already packed her things and left through the front gate.
He would see her again almost a year later, under the name of Anna Jones, in the Kira investigation.
Author's Note: Does this spoil some things for the main fic, maybe, did I get impatient and post it anyway, yes. So anyway, here we are, for the prompt by the 500th reviewer of God of The Machine, OnlyAFan who asked for a fic with Anna in Wammy's.
Thank you to readers you are excellent feel free to review. Seriously, I do like reviews.
Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note