Author's Note: So I keep hearing people call L a hobo. He's just about the richest hobo ever. And these two make a good rich hobo couple.

Yeah, that was pointless. For a change of pace, this is a cute and sweet chapter. Shocker.

"Thank you everyone. You may go home now." he said to the task force members, his back to them as he pretended to do research while subtly glancing up at the clock. It was 4:55.

"Whoa, man. I'm beat." Matsuda declared, stretching out his arms. "Later, L- Ryuzaki." he said, leaving the room followed by Aizawa, Ukita, and Mogi. Yagami was the last to exit because he had been considering asking more about the friendship between his peculiar superior and his son but decided against it. His son wasn't Kira and he was sure of it.

When he heard the door click shut he waited for roughly thirty seconds before he turned around to make sure they were all gone. The clock above read 4:57.

He put the computer on standby and walked out of the room. Her room was on his floor and only a few rooms down from his, but he didn't want to be late. He walked up to her door and jiggled the handle to find that it was locked. He sat down next to the door with his knees tucked into his chest and started thinking about her and the Kira case and whether or not it would become a topic for discussion. She clearly would have made a good detective if she had never left the Wammy house but she could still give her thoughts on the matter. She might think of something he hadn't considered or, at the very least, she would support or denounce his already made assumptions and make him think certain details over more meticulously.

"Sorry, I'm late." she said, breaking his concentration. Her hair was all messed up the way he liked it, even though it still hid her right eye, and she was holding two fairly empty looking, brown paper bags in her arms with her card key already out. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and looked at the glowing screen. It was 5:10.

"No big deal." he said, standing up. "You gave me some extra time to think."

"Oh, I'm sure you don't do enough of that." she said sarcastically. She pressed the bags against the wall so she could steady herself as she tried to fit the card key into the door slot but found that she couldn't with her arms full. Noticing this and wanting to keep her from hurting herself, he gently eased the plastic card out of her fingers and opened the door, holding it for her as she walked inside.

"Thank you." she said, walking into the ritzy hotel room and heading into the kitchen nook to put the market bags down. "I took a quick detour on the way here so I could pick up some food. I got a chocolate cake, a bag of pears, some rice crackers, and, well, more candy. I bought things I could identify without wondering what could possibly be inside the package because I didn't want to ask anyone for assistance. I guess I'm just stubborn that way."

He walked in and sat down on the couch, watching her over his forward hunched shoulder. "Well, I can understand. You wanted to prove you could do something so simple as grocery shopping even though you're in a foreign country. Otherwise it would be like you lost at daily life." That must be a common trait among people with superior intelligence, he thought.

She cut into the cake with a faint smile. "You pretty much have me all figured out, huh?" she asked, with a questioning glance.

He shrugged ambivalently as his eyes carefully followed the knife in her hands apprehensively, ready to stop her if she came too close to cutting herself. "I have made a few educated guesses but not all of them have yet to be proven."

The corner of her lip turned up as she took a seat next to him, folded her legs, and handed him a plate with a large slice of cake on it. "Humor me." she asked in a respectable, challenging way.

He took a bite of the cake and chewed slowly as he set the paper plate to rest on his knees. He looked at the girl waiting expectantly for an answer to her plea, and instead of responding, he reached out to brush the dark, obscuring hairs away from her right eye. He lightly tucked the long strands behind her ear and lowered his hand so that his finger just barely grazed her cheek in a simple, admiring gesture. Her lips curled up into a shy smile as if to say she was humbled by the small act of affection.

"You wear contacts?" he asked, thinking about how she mentioned having bad eyesight, not realizing that he had killed the romantic moment that he wasn't even aware he provoked.

"One actually." she answered, not seeming to mind the abrupt change in the mood of the room. "My right eye is really bad but my left eye is 20/20. I originally started wearing hair over my bad eye to keep from being made fun of but I found out that I didn't have to wear my glasses if I did that because my vision would be fine using just my good eye." she said, putting her cake up to her mouth with her fingers and taking a little bite.

"But if you have a contact lens for that eye now, why do you still hide it?" he asked curiously.

"Habit. And to avoid frequent questioning from people who have never seen someone with two different colored eyes before." she said. "Why do you sit that way?" she retorted, trying to even the question tally.

"I think clearer in this position. My reasoning ability increases by forty percent." he said, shoving another plastic fork full of cake into his mouth. "And it has become habitual for me too."

She nodded and started passing her fork through her fingers as she stared intently at him. "If I ask, will you tell me about it?" she wondered cryptically.

The details of the case had clearly been on her mind for a while, as it would be on the mind of anyone who had ever attended the Wammy House, and now that she found out his position in it, the proposal for discussion was inevitable. However, he was trepid to discuss anything about it in a room that he was not familiar with. The likelihood of her being Kira was actually a bit higher than he would have liked but his gut instinct told him that he had nothing to worry about. It was undeniable though that the facts were startling: she came to Japan around the time the killings started, she is smart and most likely stealthy enough to pull off such a task, and she seems to want nothing in this world so what choice would she have but to want to make it better?

But she is not Kira, he told himself. There is too much evidence against her. Although I'm sure even if there wasn't I would still have that gut feeling. Unless it's a personal bias, he wondered, starting to debate with himself. No, I don't have personal biases, he mentally declared. If I really have somehow befriended Kira in Raito, I'd still put him in jail regardless of how much I like him as a person as I would do to her if she turned out to be Kira.

He looked over at her somberly. "I will but not here." he answered, standing up. Without saying another word, she stood up and followed him into the kitchen nook where he grabbed the rest of the cake and proceeded to walk out the door.

Silently, she followed him down the hall and into his room. She didn't feel the need to say anything to understand and he didn't think he would have to explain himself. When they were in the room, she stood in the center, looking around at the decor. "So this is an indefinitely secure room?" she asked, lowering herself down onto the couch.

"There are no cameras and no bugs. We can speak freely here." he replied, sitting down next to her and putting the cake on the table in front of them.

"So, now will you tell me about the case?" she asked, grabbing a chunk out of the cake with her hands and biting into it, cupping her other hand under her chin to catch any crumbs that would fall from her mouth.

"How about a trade?" he suggested. "For every question you have about the case I will get to ask you a question about your past since it seems to be such a neglected topic for you."

She gave him a skeptical look. "You don't talk about your past much either but I accept. However, I don't think you're really getting the benefit of the trade."

"And you are?" he asked inquisitively, trying to remind himself not to be so defensive around her even though his cautious impulse kept getting the better of him. "Why is the Kira case important to you?"

Trust, his mind pleaded.

"General fascination and curiosity." she said without even the slightest quiver or underlying emotion in her tone.

"Same here," he said, through a mouth full of cake, thankful that she had stifled his worries about her yet again.

She looked pleased. "Touche." she said, with an approving wave of her finger. "So how did you get started with this case?" she asked, eating the rest of her cake lump, appearing to not care that he was using a fork and she was using her hands.

"I started working on it alone out of interest with assistance from my partner and then. . ."

"And your partner is Quillish Wammy, am I correct?" she interjected.

"Yes, but refer to him as Watari and since you interrupted me with a question, I get to ask you how you found that out." he stated.

"Simple deduction. Continue." she said, taking a bit of chocolate frosting onto her finger and licking it off slowly.

"Then I had Watari announce me at an Interpol meeting which led to the Lind L. Taylor incident that I'm sure you hear about. . ."

"I saw it. I've been here quite a while." she said. "That was very brave of you to challenge him like that." she said with a crooked smile.

"Thank you," he replied, sincerely grateful. It wasn't very often that someone paid him a compliment on anything other than his intellect. "Although after enough thought, it was concluded that there was a very slim chance of danger." he added to try not to glorify himself. "Anyway, after that incident, a task force within the police was set up here to help me work on the case. Originally, there were many people working but now it's down to five, well, seven including me and Watari."

"Interesting," she mumbled, with a final lick of the frosting on her finger. "Your turn."

He thought for a second to pick which of the many questions running through his overactive mind he would ask first.

"Are you really from England?"

The question wasn't exactly Earth-shattering to her but it was something he had been wondering about. Children at the Wammy House came from a lot of different places but she actually spoke with an English accent.

"Well, my mom is from Ireland and my dad is from England. When I was younger I lived in Ireland until going to England to stay at the Wammy house. As far as I'm concerned, I have no homeland." She chuckled darkly. "I don't even have a real home!"

"What do you mean you don't have a home?" he asked, leaning forward.

"That's two questions in a row. It's my turn." she snapped back. He leaned back defeated but gave her a good-natured smile. It was confounding to him that he enjoyed being outsmarted by her. "Do you have any leads?"

"I am particularly confident in one person. I don't want to bore you with details." he said, absently glancing out the window.

"No. Please tell me." she said avidly. "In retrospect, I wish I hadn't gotten transferred out of the orphanage so I could help you on this case." Mentally, he snapped his fingers, wishing the same thing. She was very intelligent and he knew he could trust her and trust from him was hard to come by. Not to mention how much he would have enjoyed having her around at all hours of the day.

"Well, considering the times of the murders we discovered that Kira is a student, a clever one who hates to lose. Then Kira strategically killed using information only accessible to task force members so all the task force's families were watched. Then when Ray Penbar, one of the investigators, died, it was evident that he had been assigned to watch one of the families that Kira was in. That left us with only two households so deciding who was Kira was exceedingly easy. Even though the logical statistics aren't very high, I know I'm right."

"What- Oh wait, your turn." she said.

"What do you mean you don't have a real home?" he asked, noticing there was only one diminutive piece of cake left. He scooped it onto his fork but held it out to her, implying that she could take the fork. Instead she opened her mouth and ate the last piece off his fork like he was feeding her.

"My parents died when I was young so I don't remember Ireland very well. The Wammy House was no home for me and neither was the other school I was sent to. After I graduated from medical school, I moved into a make-shift apartment in the offices I work at. It's not personalized and I'm hardly ever there. I live in hotel rooms out of a small suitcase that holds nothing of sentimental value. And to top it all off, I have no friends, no family, and the only people I interact with are coworkers, most of whom are too intimidated by me to talk to me. I have nothing and no one." She paused and looked at him sadly. "I'm sorry I went off on a tangent. I need to learn to be quiet."

"That's all right." he said, feeling a bit closer to her. "You could say we're in a similar boat."

She moved a bit closer to him and laughed. "The Wammy House has a knack for making deranged people huh? So what do you plan to do with this suspect you have?"

"I plan to get as close to him as I can. I have already revealed my identity to him and enrolled at the same university he attends. If he knows I am L, there is nothing he can do to kill me anyway since he doesn't know my name."

"How temerarious of you." she said approvingly.

He met her eyes, searching for facetiousness. Surely no one would be crazy enough to compliment him truthfully twice in a day. Finding no mockery, he leaned his face in towards her and asked very seriously, "Why me?"

She turned her face entirely towards his so that they were staring directly at each other. "Everyday you sat out there, against the wall, calm and quiet, just thinking and I used to wonder how someone who seems to have nothing happen to them have so much to think about. You were interesting.

"I started to wonder if you liked solitude, if you liked having nothing happen because at the young age I was, I hated it with every fiber of my being. I started to notice similarities between us and I wondered if that was one of them."

She lowered her eyes to look at her dirty fingernails and chocolate covered hands. "I was afraid that if I talked to you about it, I might find out that you actually wanted to be alone and away from everyone and then you'd be mad at me for disturbing you and I really couldn't handle someone who seemed so much like me hating me. It would make me feel completely worthless. I guess I saw you as the only person who could actually be my friend. But it took until my last day there to talk to you since if you ended up not liking me it wouldn't matter because I'd be gone. So much for that, huh?" she said laughing a bit but cutting it off quickly as she raised her sleepy, half-closed eyes back to his face. "I talk too much." she said, her expression ashamed.

"You said that already and I disagree." he said. "Are you sad that it wasn't a one time event?" he asked, already knowing the answer but wanting to hear her say it anyway.

"I wish it could have been a daily event." she said smiling, taking note of the fact that they were disregarding their little game but not caring. "And I think we're here now to make up for lost time and opportunities."

It is highly unlikely that two people who haven't seen each other in over ten years and who travel all over the world should find themselves in the same city, staying in the same hotel, with their rooms just down the hall from each other. There is no way this could even be placed under consideration as a coincidence, he decided.

He put his thumb in his mouth slightly so it rested on his lower lip. "I think you're right."

"What do you think of Kira?" she asked as her eyes transfixed on what appeared to be a camera hanging from the ceiling. She pointed to it silently and looked over at him bewildered.

"They turn them off whenever someone enters." he assured her as he went about answering her question. His calm face did not change. "Kira is an egotistical person who thinks he has the God-like authority to decide who deserves to live and who deserves to die. He is also a worthy adversary at outsmarting people and tennis."

"Tennis?" she said, confused. "You sound quite chummy with Kira if you play tennis with him."

He shrugged nonchalantly. "He's a very good player. It was one of the most difficult games I'd played in years."

She laughed and rested her head against his shoulder. He looked down at her, unsure of what to do, having never been in such a position with a girl. He didn't really see what was so funny about what he said but it was nice to see her happy.

"So, are you friends with Kira?" she asked with a chuckle at the absurdity of such a thought.

He nodded. "Yes, I guess you could say that. But I see it more so as being friends with him as a normal person. My career as the detective L wants to take down Kira but I am still friends with him."

She looked up at him very closely and realized, much to her dismay, that he was telling the truth.

"I'm sorry that you aren't my first friend." he said, catching her off-guard and misinterpreting her expression.

She grinned at him, finding his innocent demeanor had to resist. "No need to apologize. I was a couple weeks late I guess."

There was short silence between them as she started walking her fingers across her legs and across his to satisfy her malcontent hands.

"Is this a date?" he asked bluntly, slicing through the quiet and surprising her enough for her head to shoot back into an upright position.

"I don't know. I've never been on one so I don't quite know what they entail." she said, looking over at him perplexed. "Let's see . . . we ate food, we talked a lot, we haven't kissed yet though." she said, racking her brain for other references to form the idea of a 'date'.

"Yes, that's true." he said, similarly analyzing what he knew of dates. "So yesterday must have been a date then. It meets the dating criteria you just established."

"I suppose it was." she said, satisfied. "I was on a date and I didn't even know it." she said, shaking her head as if she was ashamed of herself.

After looking at him for a few seconds mentally weighing probabilities in her mind, she leaned over and kissed him softly on the side of his mouth, since she could not reach any further with his bent knees ostracizing a clear path. He watched her the whole time, wondering if he should make an effort to kiss back. It was a lot harder to think once the kiss had started and before he could make a decision, she leaned back. "There." she said, confidently.

"Today is a date." he said concretely. "This social thing is easier with a rubric."

She laughed again, laying her head on his slouched shoulder, both of them knowing they would never use the word 'date' ever again in the context of their relationship. Something about it felt artificial and it didn't give the connotation of the close friendship that they were quickly developing.

"So what do you think of Kira's actions?" he said, turning his head to gaze at her face as he spoke to her. He had been wondering this for a while and he was hopeful that she would give him an answer he could accept.

"I think that as much as everyone may say they wish all the terrible people in the world should die, no one has the right to make that choice. What Kira is doing is wrong. He is human, not divine." Her eyes deliberately fluttered closed as she talked and her face became noticeably more relaxed.

He tentatively put his arm around her, remembering a movie he saw once where a guy and a girl had been in similar positions to their's and he had put his arm around her. "Are you sleepy?" he asked, stroking her hair, finding that it was a very soothing action.

"I'm always sleepy. I haven't gotten a good night sleep since I was a child in my mother's arms." she admitted, as her hands started tracing patterns on his stomach. It gave him chills he was not accustomed to.

"Ever since then, I haven't slept right. Too much on my mind. Fear of waking up with my stuff hidden, which had happened at the House before. Trying vehemently to find a cure for a patient's condition. Too much caffeine and sugar. I even went to another neurologist and he made all these suggestions on how to clear my mind and stop worrying but none of them worked." As she spoke, her voice got quieter and she sighed faintly at the relaxing motion of his hand caressing her dark locks of hair.

"You can sleep now." he offered, as her touch on him began to falter. He watched her lips part slightly to murmur some unintelligible phrase and then close again as her head fell forward a bit.

And she slept.