Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note.

A/N: I like Roger. He and Gelus are my favorite obscure characters. :D People say he's a pedophile but that doesn't make sense- How to Read very explicitly states that Roger hates kids. Pedophiles do not hate kids.

When L died and I saw the grief-torn faces of the kids, I was sorry for them. Truly, I was. These were kids who had, in most cases, survived horrible things. Rape. Abuse. Torture, in some cases. Neglect. And in all cases, they had survived the death of every family member they had. Now they were losing their mentor and, in some cases, friend.

So, I was sorry for them. Really. But as much as my heart went out to them as tears ran down their faces after my announcement, I didn't have a single piece of my soul to empathize with. I wasn't even certain that I had a single piece of my soul left.

I couldn't feel a thing, and unfortunately my lack of reaction has to this day made some of the children hate me (more). Why wasn't I in tears over L's death? Was I some kind of monster? Did I secretly hate L all these years? Was I a sociopath? They took to calling me Heartless behind my back, although naturally I heard about it.

What they couldn't be expected to understand was that L being dead meant nothing to me in light of the fact that L's death meant Quillsh Wammy's. And that meant that I had just lost the person more important to me than anyone in the world.

We grew up together as roommates in the same orphanage. Spent our entire lives together. I had helped him dream up Wammy's House and supported him as the only person who never thought he was crazy, never gave up on him. I knew he was a genius before he did. He created beautiful, impossible things, amazing things that improved or saved the lives of so many people. He didn't benefit from half of them. Anything he did for the medical field, he didn't put his name on, didn't take credit or money for, and didn't patent. And he did a lot for the medical field, especially in his younger years. After all, his parents had both died of heart failure.

It is not surprising to me that I ended up loving him.

And I never got a chance to tell him.

There were a few moments that I could have done it, and a few where I actually tried. I would open my mouth, stunned and awed as usual by this gorgeous (and he was gorgeous when we were young), brilliant, passionate person, and the words would not come out. And once, when A killed himself, when Quillsh was at his absolute worst, and was so far from gorgeous and brilliant and passionate... I almost told him then, as well.

I didn't. Perhaps it was better that way.

I try to convince myself that he might have known. Maybe he had seen me watching him when we were young men, as he sat at his desk and I sat at mine, reading about insects even as he created some new, unbelievable invention. Maybe he figured out that my devotion went above and beyond the call of duty for a best friend. He probably knew. Maybe on his wedding day, with me as his best man, it occurred to him that he would never be as close to his wife as he had always been to me.

Whether he knew or not changed nothing, because I had been planning on telling him for years, since we were kids, tried dozens of times, and I had failed.

That is what Wammy's students can't understand, and can't be expected to, because they do not hold all the pieces of the puzzle.

They couldn't possibly know that I don't remember a time before Quillsh, that I don't want a time after him, and that I haven't felt a single thing- not even grief, not even exhaustion, not even pain- since the moment I read that "L is dead."

They couldn't know that I loved Quillsh like air.

Or that I'm definitely not heartless.