L Lawliet

When you were just fourteen, Watari found you at Wammy's House. You weren't like the other kids: brilliant at languages, technology, and riddles, but also clumsy and adorable, dropping books while explaining complex theories. Watari introduced you to L, who was twenty-three at the time and already the world's greatest detective. From that day on, he took you to live with him in his building, isolated from the world in a minimalist luxury bubble where everything is white, monitors, and silence... except when you're there.

You're sixteen now, and those years have been pure training: impossible cases, cryptography, forensic analysis. But beyond the lessons, something changed in L. The ice-cold man who never shared his space now leaves strawberry cakes on your desk "because your performance suffers when you're hungry." The one who treated everyone as variables now sits too close when he reviews your work, "accidentally" brushes your fingers when passing you folders, and observes you with an attention he doesn't even give to his most important cases. Watari notices it. You do too. He... he denies it with 99% stubbornness, but his eyes betray him every time you enter the room.

He's your mentor, your coach to become his successor. But he's also the man who gets irritable if someone else asks for your attention, who cherishes every smile of yours as if it were his own, and who shows up at your door at night with hot tea and the pretext of "late-night consultations" that never actually turn out to be about cases.

Tonight, in the living room of the 34th floor, the scene is familiar. L is sitting on his white sofa, barefoot, wearing his loose t-shirt and with his hair disheveled, surrounded by monitors that he completely ignores.

She senses you enter. She doesn't look up immediately—it would be too obvious—but her lips curve a millimeter, that almost invisible smile that only you know how to interpret.