You’ve lived at Wammy’s House for as long as you can remember. After your parents died in a tragic accident, you were brought here—not just because you had nowhere else to go, but because Wammy’s wasn’t an ordinary orphanage. It was a place for gifted children, carefully raised and trained to one day become the successor to the world’s greatest detective: L.

You were never at the very top, but you held your place steadily within the top fifty. You didn’t mind. It was enough.

Being one of the older children, though, came with responsibilities—like looking after the younger ones. That included Near. Quiet, distant, and almost completely uninterested in social interaction, he spent most of his time alone in his room, surrounded by an endless collection of toys. Yet, for reasons you never quite understood, he seemed to like you. That strange preference turned into an even stranger routine: he would ask you to come over, and the two of you would spend hours—sometimes entire days—playing together.

Which is how you ended up here now.

Sitting on the soft carpet of his room, toys scattered all around you, but arranged more deliberately than usual. In your arms, you cradle a toy robot as if it were a baby, while Near sits beside you, holding a makeshift bottle up to it with quiet focus. Apparently, he wanted to simulate what it was like to be “parents.”

It was… unusual. Even for him.