Tonight a boy is scared. He is terrified. His breath comes in ragged gasps, his heart beats as if determined to fulfil its job to the last, his mind races through all the possibilities.
Because he knows this is it. He knows this is his last night.
He sits by the window, looking out at the streets that criss-cross out below him. There is no-one out. They are all asleep and dreaming of love, and money, and the Caribbean. Matt never dreams about love, or money, or the Caribbean. Matt dreams about guns.
He stares down. Snow is lining the streets, thick, white, and oppressive. It muffles all sound; so there is nothing possible to hear. Sometimes, if Matt listens, and stops breathing for a few seconds, he can kid himself he hears whispering coming from the very ground itself. A sudden blast of icy wind has him gasping; but he is so glad. Because, hell, if this isn't what it's like to live.
He goes to shut the window, but whenever he does it's like there's a grip around his neck, a cold hand ready to clench.
He looks out. Is this his last snowflake, tumbling gently from the sky on its suicide mission? His last taste of urban January air? His last star, far away from the grimy fog that hangs over the city?
Damn, it's beautiful. Every single polluted brick on every god-damn gloomy building is so, so beautiful. And why did he have to wait until he had a single night left to realise that?
Matt sits there for some hours. He thinks of Alfred Hitchcock. He thinks of the race to the Moon. He thinks of a letter he once wrote to the president that never got a reply.
He thinks of Mello.
Matt looks over at his clock. It's 4:36am. Soon the people will be getting up and going to work. All the people that have hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of days left.
It's bloody unfair.
Matt gets up from the chair. He shuts the window. He walks out of the room.
Matt starts the last day of his life.