Shadow: I have such a headache…I've been typing this update for the better part of today, and metaphorically kicking my writer's block down somewhere about three am this morning. (Seriously – best time of the day to write, especially when you have a mug of hot chocolate beside you. Don't forget to go to bed though, because the birds singing about five-six make a terrible racket.)

Note: I got Another Note! (Some time ago actually, but shh.) And I have a Death Note of my very own – sadly, it doesn't kill anyone when you write their names inside but…hey, we can all dream, right?

…Yes, the title of this chapter is an inside joke.

Ashes to Ashes

3. The Kelpie's Tricks

The kelpie is a water-horse who haunts the rivers and streams of the north, a tricky spirit that loves to play mischief and ensnare others in dark riddles and dangerous games.

Kelpies are not meek or friendly, much contrary to their docile appearance. They fool others into trusting them, into riding their backs, and then plunge into the waters and foam and hold their riders down until they drown.

Never trust a kelpie, and never ride the water-horse.

'Lumière', Quillsh Wammy had quickly come to realise, was a strange little boy. Quite aside from their odd little introduction in the rain, Lumière had somehow or other managed to ingrain himself so upon Wammy's interest in the space of less than ten minutes that the elderly gentleman found himself taking the child to his mansion of a home on the outskirts of Winchester, instead of to the local police station. With all his pretty arguments from his silver tongue Lumière had somehow disabled every case Wammy had presented for having L placed within the care of the police until his guardian could be summoned, and the inventor was at a loss as to how he had been so effectively talked down by an eight year-old.

"This is your home?" The child had looked slightly taken-aback by the sheer size of Quillsh's house, standing dripping water on the floor of the immense entrance foyer.

"It is one of my many homes, yes." Wammy had four mansions, three houses and a range of apartments about the globe in his name and the names of his aliases; the selection allowing him to come and go as he pleased about the world to do his business.

"It's big," Lumière had been blunt; something Wammy was beginning to realise was customary for the child, "too big for one person. Even if that person fills his house with his inventions."

Wammy didn't question how the child had known he was an inventor. "I have a live-in housekeeper and cook."

Lumière had insisted upon being taken to meet her.

The housekeeper/cook loved him. Adored him even, cooing over the little boy with big eyes, dark hair and porcelain-pale skin. She scolded Quillsh for letting the child remain wet and drip all over the floor, and sent the man out of the kitchen where she was working into the main of the house to fetch a towel. While Wammy was gone L suddenly found himself presented with a giant mug of hot chocolate and a pile of strawberry jam tarts, and by the time Wammy had come back the mug was half-drained, the pile had vanished, and L's mouth and hands were sticky with red. So commenced the long and arduous operation to clean the boy up, the boy stripped of his soggy shirt and dungarees and placed in a too-large spare t-shirt, wrapped in an enormous blue towel that trailed the ground as he shuffled along the floor. Black eyes, bright from sugar, peeped out from over the top of this elaborate wrapping, fluffy hair perched above them slowly drying due to the heat inside the mansion.

Lumière, Quillsh Wammy soon found out, was insatiably curious. Trying to find some way of entertaining the boy Quillsh had taken the child to see his workroom, opening the door to the proverbial cave of wonders and watching with mild amusement as his feather-haired smaller companion nearly tripped over his towel in his haste to enter. Everything within was studiously examined, poked at, made to spin and dance where viable, glittering in the light from the overhead lamp and casting rainbows on the floor. L ran from one thing to the next, clearly having fun.

"Don't break anything?" Quillsh still stood at the door, debating whether or not it was alright to leave the boy in his workroom while he went elsewhere and tried to find out where the child had come from. His vague worry seemed unnecessary however – Lumière handled everything he touched delicately, carefully, holding items by his minute fingertips and solving the various puzzles Wammy had made that were scattered about the room.

The child looked up at him for a few seconds, gaze clear, honest, and solemn. He then went back to solving the massive 3D jigsaw Quillsh kept in the corner, deeply engrossed in fitting the pieces together.

Wammy quietly withdrew, and left him to it.

They ate together in the warm little kitchen, L managing a little of the chicken he was plied with before becoming distracted by the bowl of sugar cubes – honestly, who had sugar cubes ­anymore? They were so archaic -, taking them out and stacking them up into a glittering castle upon the tabletop. Quillsh let him play, eating his own food, thinking.

He hadn't found anything about a missing boy named Lumière in the system, but that might have been mostly because the system was currently in a shambles due to the local police station having been blown up that morning, and the subsequent explosions around the city after that. Wammy's intellect had allowed him to come up with an invention easily capable of hacking into practically any easy-to-medium-strength-protected database he came across, but still…no Lumière, no mention of a lost black-haired genius boy – and a genius the little Lumière was! Every puzzle within Wammy's workroom had been solved by the time the inventor had returned to check on his young guest an hour later: - the 3D puzzle, a magnificent miniature rendition of the Eiffel tower in France; a large god-knows-how-many-pieces jigsaw that was at least a metre long by half that wide; a massive Rubix cube Wammy entertained himself with on random occasions (that he'd never managed to solve, as it was nine-by-nine instead of three-by-three) – and the boy had even made some entertainment for himself when the preset things were done, building a tower of pencils that had to defy at least one law of physics and, in mimicry of the same sort of thing lying about the room, drawing up some blueprints for…what appeared to be an improvement to Quillsh's computer's security.

Oh my.

No eight year-old should be able to –

But this eight year-old had and was –

"So tell me, Lumière-with-no-last-name," Quillsh broke out of his internal musing, addressing his question to the busy little boy seated opposite him, "when do you plan to return to your guardian?"

"Care-worker." L corrected, not looking at the man. "Care-workers, if you wish to be even more specific." His sugar-cube castle was at such a height he was now standing on his chair to continue building it.

"Why did you run away from them?"

"I walked."

"Why did you walk away, then?"

"The bells were ringing." L looked up then, a glance of life from beneath his ebony hair. "The bells were ringing; I followed them and found you. Who were they ringing for?" The sugar palace gleamed before him.

Quillsh debated lying, but it wasn't really worth it. "A little boy I knew. A friend's son."

L observed Wammy silently for a few moments, before calmly stating: "He was like a grandson to you."

"…Yes."

"Talking about this so soon after the vigil upsets you." Wammy noticed the child before him had a habit of speaking certain observations aloud, as if clarifying them with himself. "I am sorry for distressing you."

There was another long pause, in which the old man looked at him contemplatively. "No," he said eventually, meeting L's onyx-black eyes squarely, "you're not."

L paused his work for a few moments, looking at the man opposite him silently. Then, he went back to adding another tower to his creation.

"Why did you lie?" Wammy asked him curiously.

An affable shrug. "I thought that was what you wanted to hear."

"I'd prefer for you to tell me the truth, whatever that might be."

"Even when you may dislike it?" A gleam in L's eyes, a certain childish streak of sadism allowed rein.

His elderly companion nodded. "Always – and only – the truth, whether I like it or not."

The small head was tilted to one side, L considering the proposal. "…I'm still going to lie to you sometimes. It is physically impossible to tell the truth one hundred percent of the time."

"You have a penchant for stating the obvious at times, child."

"Sometimes things are more obvious to me than they are to other people." 'Lumière' finally finished his work; the castle of sugar cubes a majestic construction before him on the table. The lights overhead made the palace glitter, the background of the slim figure draped in a blanket complimenting the shimmering white nicely, the skyline behind the building. Twin onyx moons hung above, just as bright in their darkness as the sugar-castle's contrasting light, watching Quillsh. Calm. Assured.

This boy…

This one boy…

Who was he?

Josephine's guilt was an unending opera in her head, a screaming cacophony of sound and colour that plagued her every waking minute. And she couldn't sleep.

The care-worker's frame was rigid as she lay on a narrow cot in the nurse's room back at Close Haven, the matron herself watching her shrewdly over from her seat by the desk. Josephine was forbidden to rise – the nurse wasn't letting her go until some of the stress had faded, until she looked less like she was on the verge of collapse but –

"This is ridiculous!" Josephine sat up on the cot, her temper suddenly rising once more. A vicious headache pounded away at her temples, but she shoved it from her mind. "Lawliet is still out there, in that god-forsaken city and I-!"

"You are here." The nurse rose once more, looking ready to push down the recalcitrant younger woman if necessary. "You did your job, Josephine and -"

"I lost a child! How is that 'doing my job'?!" Josephine's remorse, and her anger at herself, swirled together violently, a maelstrom of hurt and shame. "I should be back in Winchester, looking for him, not stuck here being mollycoddled-! Let me go – it's my fault he left in this first place and-"

"Josephine, you can do no-one any good in your current state." She was rebuked. "The quicker you rest and are recharged the quicker I am likely to feel safe enough in discharging you – please, try to sleep. You've had a long, stressful, traumatising day; you need to relax now. You can relax now; all is well here; the children are safe."

"All but L…" Slowly, Josephine swung her legs back up onto the cot, lying down on her side with her eyes fixed unerringly on the nurse. "He's not here."

"That doesn't mean the boy isn't safe." The elder woman tried to offer comfort. "He'll be fine, Josephine. L is a smart child, and a resourceful one."

Josephine gave a low, bitter laugh at that, but what exactly she was mocking was unsure. Her eyes closed and she tried to even out her breath, tried to ignore the pain in her head and her heart. In the darkness behind her eyelids her own private performance continued unchecked, the backlight of fire and death, the silhouette of the precocious L standing untouched amongst the carnage, unmoved, analytical. The unreadable child with dark eyes that vanished into the fire and chaos of Winchester, elusive as smoke. Nothing but ash in the hand and the heart and the lungs, sometimes so hard to trace but always – always – there, blowing in the eddies of the wind.

Josephine didn't sleep. She couldn't.

It was the murmuring that woke him up. Tired, Quillsh Wammy had seen his young houseguest to bed in one of the many guestrooms in the house, ushering Lumieré into said room and offering the child an over-large t-shirt to use as nightwear. The boy had taken him up on his offer (surprisingly too – Wammy had been expecting the boy to reject the suggestion and insist he was going to sleep in his soot-streaked dungarees), and was soon dressed, and ready for bed. Undoubtedly the shirt was far too big for the child, the hem trailing the ground at the back and drowning the waif-like figure within, but Lumieré plucked at it only once when Quillsh voiced his resignation at the lack of anything closer to the boy's size, Lumieré scolding Wammy for his pessimism and assuring the elderly gentleman the t-shirt was more than adequate as a piece of clothing. And then Wammy had gone to bed himself. And then the murmuring had woken him up.

Dressing gown on Wammy had descended the grand staircase in his house, trailing one hand down the banister for support in the darkness. His eyes weren't as good as they used to be and it was far too late – or early, depending on how one looked at it – to be switching lights on willy-nilly. And yet, reaching the foyer, with the many corridors and rooms branching off of it, Wammy could see there was light already, a flickering white glare that slid out from a crack between the door and jamb of the entrance to his main sitting-room. With the glare came the noise, the ceaseless mutterings and mumblings of varying tones and pitch, a babble of voices too far away and too confused to pick out individual words.

Quillsh pushed open the door, the wood swinging into the room silently on well-oiled hinges and revealing a scene that had Wammy blinking in somewhat-sleepy surprise.

The white glare came from the flickering light of four TVs, one on its stand where it belonged in the room and the other three – according to the deep furrows in the carpet – looking like they'd been dragged through from other rooms. Wires haphazardly trailed the floor, criss-crossing here and there before finishing at a full extension cord attached to the mains supply. All the TVs were set to different news channels, serious-faced reporters and anchors looking out from behind their desks or in front of ravaged-looking ruins. Winchester. Their voices overlapped and ran into a wall of incomprehensibility – Wammy couldn't distinguish the individuals lost in the jumble of noise.

Wammy cut over the babble, his own weary voice startling in the near-darkness. "You know it's dangerous to place too many plugs at an extension from one socket?"

There was a shift in the shadows, a pile of blankets heaped before the televisions stirring, the light from the screens picking out glossy black hair, liquid eyes of darkness beneath the shadows of the fringe, the curve of the pale skin. Lumieré – silent, thoughtful, strange.

Quillsh tried again, coming further inside the room and addressing the boy. "Child, couldn't you sleep?"

One small hand uncurled from its hiding place under the warm blanket to point unerringly at the brightest of the four screens before its owner, where a bold yellow title proclaimed 'Breaking News'. "They blew up the hospital at midnight." Black orbs never broke eye contact with Wammy.

The elderly man hesitated, looking at the boy – and then Quillsh sighed, already turning about and heading for the kitchen. "I'll go get us some hot chocolate, shall I?"

As the morning light crept through the cracks of the living-room's curtains Quillsh Wammy ruefully rubbed at his eyes, slightly wistful at the many hours of precious sleep he'd given up to his peculiar houseguest. Little Lumieré had been active most of the dark hours, drinking the hot chocolate brought to him by the elder gentleman, watching the television with dark eyes, talking when prompted about psychology and criminality and other terms that vaguely flummoxed Wammy. Lumieré had an adult's vocabulary, and the mind of a prodigy. Wammy had never…he'd lived a long life already, but never had he met someone quite like the little boy curled up in his nest of blankets beside him on the ground. At about four am the child had stopped talking and then suddenly dropped, mid-sentence, fast asleep before he'd even hit the floor. The boy's energy had been clearly spent, the whole affair reminiscent of children half Lumieré's supposed age. His own children had -

At half-six, when the images on the switched-to-silent televisions changed from the scenes of the ravaged cathedral, guild and hospital to the smoking heap of Winchester Castle, he woke Lumieré up again, the boy blinking at him rather blearily for a few milliseconds before becoming totally alert, sleep-mussed hair pushed back off a young face as the boy directed his whole attention to the four sets before him. Wammy got up and left the room after opening the curtains to make some breakfast – it was too early to expect his housekeeper to be up. Behind Quillsh, the murmuring babble of the night before started up once more.

"You don't work in law enforcement."

"That is correct."

"You don't work for the government."

"That is also correct."

"Then this system," and here Lumieré actually removed the thumb from his lips that he'd speaking around for the past twenty minutes, waving a small hand at the computer in Wammy's workroom, "is completely illegal."

"Just so," and Quillsh smiled.

"Mr. Wammy, sir," the hand dropped, and the child spoke with a straight poker face any seasoned gambler would kill for, "I do believe you are an extraordinarily bad example on my impressionable young mind."

"And you, child," was the elder male's response, gently ushering the boy into the seat before the main monitor, "are absolutely loving every second of it, aren't you?" Lumieré only looked at him from quickly from the side, dark eyes gleaming entirely too wickedly for an eight year-old boy. "Come," Wammy reached over to switch the computer on, "don't you have some files to look at?"

"Do you think they'll have pictures already?" The question came off as innocent; L perched on the very edge of the slightly-too-high computer chair, swinging his legs back and forth, back and forth. "Pictures would be helpful." He sounded like he was inquiring about a children's storybook.

"Probably," Quillsh put in his string of passwords, well aware of the little boy beside him tracking every keystroke with his sharp gaze, "the first explosions were yesterday." He hesitated for a moment, conscience pricking him slightly. Lumieré was young, and the bombings catastrophic, and to inflict such gruesome sights upon a child –

"You needn't worry about me;" L was quick to pick up on what caused his companion to pause, accustomed to his age giving others problems. "Mr. Wammy should know I have seen worse things than a few blown-up buildings."

"Dead people? People maimed, injured and screaming in agony?"

The answer was simple: "Yes."

Quillsh was silent for a few moments, opening the system and going in to draw up the files they wanted. The clicks of the mouse and the tap of the keyboard's keys seemed suddenly more solemn than before, the tick of time marching ever onwards. "…Why am I doing this for you?" He questioned finally, somewhat resignedly. "Gruesome interest aside, why do you want to see these files?"

"I like puzzles," was the immediate response from the dark-eyed Lumieré, "and I'm bored."

Quillsh – despite himself - let him see the files.

The bells rang sweetly through the air, even though they cut through smoke and ash and death, and an ancient city deep in fear and mourning. The bells rang out as they'd always done, day following day, month following month, year following year. Noon following night, the bells rang out over Winchester, singing out through coronations, births, deaths and war.

"They sound different today," L remarked softly, wrapped up in some other child's coat, his own –clean - dungarees beneath. His hand was gloved in some other child's glove, lost in Wammy's larger grip. "The Cathedral bells aren't ringing." The boy hadn't asked where the coat and gloves had come from, accepting them silently from Wammy's housekeeper and cook with a solemn nod. (One didn't ask why childless adults had children's clothes, especially not when they were obviously so new.)

"You can tell that?" Quillsh looked down at the small boy walking beside him on their way to the hospital, feeling the fragile hand in his grasp, brittle bones that could all too easily snap if he applied any real pressure. The weak January sun shone down on them through the smoke hanging over the city, the thick taste of charcoal on the air spelling something sick, something special, the birth of something new.

"The bells all sound different," L replied.

"And you can tell the difference?"

L looked at his companion rather blankly. "Mr. Wammy, I've been in Winchester barely a day, and I have had more distracting thoughts to occupy my mind with than the sounds of the city's many bells."

"But you knew the Cathedral's -"

"The Cathedral's bells can't ring if the building itself is blown up, sir." L's wide-eyed, faux-innocent expression spoke volumes for the 'well, obviously' thoughts that had to be going on in his head. "I would've thought the fact an apparent one." Quillsh fell silent at that for a few moments, the elder man clearly somewhat embarrassed at having missed something so obvious, so L took – a rare – pity on him. "…I assume you know all the bells' different voices?"

Wammy nodded, slowly becoming properly accustomed to being out-thought by his little companion. "I do. They all have their own voice, their own message that mingles with the other to tell their tale -"

"Like in 'Oranges and lemons'?" Genius or not, L was still an eight year-old boy, and knew the playground nursery rhymes as well as any other prepubescent. "It's not as if London's all that far away."

'Oranges and lemons,' says the bells of St. Clement's.

'You owe me five farthings,' says the bells of St. Martin's.

"It's a good comparison." Quillsh agreed. "Though I never did understand why that rhyme always began with a reference to fruit."

'When will you pay me?' say the bells of Old Bailey.

'When I am rich,' says the bells of Shoreditch.

"Because it sounds like the noise the bells of Saint Clement's are supposed to make, I have heard…" L looked ahead, a quiet thought pricking at the back of his mind, his quick two steps matching Quillsh's larger stride as they walked along together.

'When will that be?' say the bells of Stepney.

'I do not know,' says the great bell of Bow.

L's hand tightened on his companion's for a moment, his dark eyes serious as he suddenly stopped and looked up at Wammy, the man stopping as well and looking down. "The package that was sent to the police station at six am yesterday…the one which exploded – that had citrus fruits in it, didn't it?" The boy probably already knew, having poured over all the news throughout the night, but confirmation never hurt.

"…Yes."

Here comes a lantern to guide you to bed;

Here comes the chopper to chop off your head!

Someone had sent oranges and lemons to the police station, and six hours later the Cathedral had been blown up…only an idiot would think it was a coincidence. The package sent to the police station pointed the way to the Cathedral, but what would be the point in sending the package alone? Two bombings within the same day would've provided the link regardless of the package's arrival, and so the package had to mean something, had to establish some sort of pattern, a message the bomber had left behind for – what? They wanted attention? The sort of people who committed such acts of extreme violence and left messages behind wanted to be noticed, hated, loved, reviled. They wanted attention, redress for some grievance that had been done against them, or against someone or something they loved and/or believed in. Their message had to be consistent, their trail there to follow could only people find it, and so…

There should've been something odd at the Cathedral, something noticeable, left behind by the bomber for others to find. L, standing amidst the still-smoking ruins, had seen nothing, looking around him at ash, blood and death. Human suffering had been the main concern, the shriek of the ambulance, the cries of the wounded. L, like everyone else who still had a beating heart within the Cathedral at the time, had been preoccupied with fleeting mortality, and not the deranged psychology of a bomber's mind. And yet, he'd still been thinking, thinking, thinking, and then – those…those dolls…

L's free hand went to his pocket then as they resumed walking, to the place where he'd put the dolls the day before. Through a layer of denim he felt them, three individual lumps that Wammy's housekeeper – her name was Hannah incidentally, he'd discovered this when she'd offered him the coat – had obviously not removed before putting the clothing in the washing machine.

The dolls were not a regular piece of the Cathedral's architecture, so logic held that someone had put them in the font he'd plucked them from. That the little paper boat the dolls had been floating in hadn't become soggy and sunk in the water meant that the boat hadn't been in the water that long. That the little paper boat had still been floating there so it had the opportunity to get soggy meant that it had been placed in the water after the tour guide had passed by on their rounds around the building – had it been placed there before, no doubt the anal caretakers would've called the thing insulting and swept it, dripping, away and out of sight. Therefore, the dolls, in their boat, had been put into the water font sometime after the tour guide had passed on their round – which was at regular intervals -, sometime before the explosion. And since Dora had been going to grab the next tour available for the orphanage's children –

The dolls had probably, with about sixty percent surety, been placed just prior to bomb's detonation in the Cathedral, which meant it was highly likely that the one who had planted the dolls in the font and the one behind the explosion were linked. Which, in turn, made it highly likely that the dolls were the second message in the series of bombings, and that they somehow led to the scene of the third explosion – the guildhall. Which meant –

"Lumieré?" Wammy called softly to the boy beside him, seeing the child was lost in his thoughts. They'd arrived at their destination, at the main hospital, part of the establishment still smoking. The other parts – the ones that remained undamaged – still held patients, the other hospitals around the city already packed full from all the explosions. "Lumieré, we're here." L glanced up; gaze refocusing itself, giving a quick nod so the two could proceed on forwards into pandemonium.

The place was utter chaos. Policemen milled about, trying vainly to ward off the concerned public, to field questions and conduct an investigation at the same time. Firemen and emergency workers were going through the rubble, searching for survivors, corpses piling up at the side being hastily covered with sheets by nurses. Doctors and nurses were attending to the injured, the dying, the regular wards, and one poor receptionist was trying to direct concerned people the right way and not go completely insane as she tried to be of general assistance.

In the tangle, L let go of Wammy's hand. He'd only held on to it because the man had insisted; claiming that this way Lumieré could pass for his grandson or something. L had acquiesced to the request – not because he actually agreed with Quillsh, no; he could've passed for the man's grandson whether they had held hands or not; but because the man had been kind to him, polite and truthful, and L had seen some of the photographs in the man's home, the older man, the little dark-haired boy who was no longer around. (Because they'd buried him, hadn't they, the day before in the rain?)

L let go of Wammy's hand, and wound his own way through bedlam with a calmness to belie his youth. Everyone was far too busy to query why such a young child was wandering around alone, and so L wandered at his own leisure, eavesdropping on interesting-sounding conversation in the hopes of overhearing something useful. He'd told Quillsh he wanted to go to the hospital to see if his care-worker was there, so he could check on her and find some way of getting home, but that had been a lie. True, Dora would probably still be around, but L had a different mission in mind. People were more inclined to come out with some of the most dear pieces of information when they thought no-one outside their inner circle could overhear them, and to most adults, an unknown child was as good as nobody being there at all. (Nobody ever suspected, or thought much of, a child.)

"Are you lost?" It was a patient that finally asked L the question, a young woman whose torso was completely bound up with bandages as she lay on her bed, a pained smile on her face.

L ignored her for a few moments, but the woman repeated the question, and L couldn't avoid answering without attracting undue attention to himself. So, he looked at her, and very deliberately shook his head.

"Looking for someone?"

A nod.

"A patient?"

Another nod.

"From the bombings?"

A third, and final nod, and L decided to play cute and innocent. "She's called Dora, do you know her?"

"I'm afraid I don't know any Doras…" the bandaged woman looked regretful for a few moments, but then she turned her head to the right, to the curtain dividing the beds, and spoke. "Shea, have you heard of any Doras?"

One pale hand clutched at the curtain, drawing it back, another woman revealed there. She had dark hair, bright eyes, her right arm bound up in a sling. Otherwise, she was dressed normally, as if she were going.

"No," Shea's reply was short, her gaze a little vague as she looked at L – painkillers? "I'm afraid I don't. I've been discharged though…I could probably help you look for her?"

"I don't think that would be a very good idea," the other patient said doubtfully. "Shea, you look so drugged up it'll be a wonder if you can keep upright when you try to stand never mind you off wandering around on a mission."

"Are you left-handed?" L asked the wobbly Shea curiously, sharp eyes following how the woman stumbled to her feet, using her only free hand to support her.

"Thankfully, yes." Shea smiled tightly, standing. "Life would be a little difficult for the next eight weeks or so were I not."

"They say left-handed people are twins," L continued in his usual blasé way, overlooking how his conversational partner swayed, and how the other woman in their trio looked worriedly on.

Shea shook her head. "I'm an only child."

"Lumieré?" Quillsh Wammy, speaking from the doorway, having finally found his wandering charge. "Lumieré! There you are, child. Do you know how long I've been looking for you?"

"Mr. Wammy." L looked calmly back over his shoulder at the man, unconcerned for the other's harried expression. "I was wondering when you'd find me." He turned back to the two women he'd been conversing with. "Thank you for your help; I'll be okay from now on."

The two waved goodbye to him as Wammy and he left the room, diving headfirst back into the hospital's chaos. Nothing much had improved during the short interim L had been talking, people still as overworked, still as stressed, still as hopeless and helpless as before.

L saw Dora. She lay, bandaged, on a bed in one of the wards they passed, fast asleep. A man was holding her hand, keeping vigil – her husband? Her brother? L didn't know, didn't care to know, and yet he was too fixated for a little too long all the same, because Quillsh noticed his distraction and stopped.

"Have you seen someone you recognise?"

L feigned confusion. "Hm?" (He didn't think Wammy bought it.) "My thoughts were somewhere else, I apologise. What did you ask?"

Wammy, obligingly, repeated the question. "Have you seen someone you recognise?"

"No." L's lie was a simple one. "I was staring into the distance."

They walked on, leaving the sleeping Dora behind. There was a new future ahead.

L, young as he was, felt that he could easily devote his life forever to one woman alone if she were so wonderful a chef, and so generous a person, as Hannah. Wammy's housekeeper seemed to have taken it upon herself to be the sole fulfiller of all L's sugar-infested dreams. Quillsh's home in Winchester was filled with the smells of sweet desserts, L himself having long since followed his nose and taken root at the kitchen table to be a 'tester' for all of Hannah's delightful creations. The woman spoilt him completely, and it was a certain glee (and a slice of cake in each hand) that L poured over the photographs he'd had Wammy print him out of the police files, searching for something odd, something out of place, in each one. The dolls, having lived in his pocket for far too long, were laid out beside the images, bound, sawdust-filled cotton looking very weary and worn against the wood grain.

The stripes on their aprons were fading, and the hand-drawn faces had been obliterated completely by the wonders of washing powder. The little pictures looked somewhat worse the wear for having gone through the wash – squinting, L could just about make out the outlines of…what looked like a cooked chicken drumstick on the first, a candle on the second, and…a…lump of – wait, no, it was a loaf. So – meat, bread and a candle.

…That made absolutely no sense.

L puzzled over the pictures, attempted to fit the new information in alongside the rhyme of oranges and lemons, but couldn't quite mesh them all. There was something…still something off. Still something –

"Making yourself at home, child?" Wammy, like L before him, had followed the scent of baking to the kitchen, helping himself to a slice of some of Hannah's cake. "Is the food good?" L looked up at him, mouth stuffed full of food like a hamster, and nodded his head furiously. "You seem to be settling in here well, regardless of the fact I'm meant to be taking you back to your home."

L swallowed his mouthful before giving the elder gentleman a decidedly catlike smile. "Doesn't Mr. Wammy have to find out where exactly that home is first before he can take me there?"

Quillsh took a seat at the table. "I don't suppose you're going to make my job any easier and just tell me, are you?" His companion shook his head. "Thought not. Are you not going to tell me your real name either?"

L looked at him, a little curious. "Why do you not think Lumieré is my real name?"

"Just a hunch, child." Wammy took a bite of his cake. "Members of the human race happen to have them every so often."

The boy beside him made a sound that was an exceedingly close approximation to laughter, quickly silenced, glittering amusement hanging behind in dark, dark eyes. "Does Mr. Wammy want rid of me?"

From any other child the question would've been a poignant one, a pointed cry out for attention, for the adult being interrogated to emphatically claim the negative at once. From L…Quillsh Wammy felt he was being humoured.

"Child," the man reached out, brushing some of the boy's raven hair out of his face, a fond gesture that L regarded and received with some mild bemusement, "I have the feeling even if I had wanted you gone I'd have no choice in the matter. You strike me as an exceedingly hard person to get rid of."

L smiled, properly, a child's smile, but his knowing eyes rivalled that of the Cheshire Cat. Quillsh Wammy, it appeared, was a good judge of character.

Shadow: Oranges and lemons is a nursery rhyme about the different bells of London. The sing-song intonation of the words is supposed to sound like the ringing of the bells.

And with this candle... I will light your mother's dress on fire.