Tierfal and I made up the other Wammy Kids who show up in this one, because three plus Linda wasn't enough for a whole fic set at Wammy's House. XDD And I promise, the mystery will really get into swing in a couple chapters. ;)


Oranges and lemons…

"Mel?"

Letters and numbers…

"Hey, Mel?"

Bells and cathedrals and rhymes and mysteries…

"Mello, wake up!"

"Huh?" Dazedly, the blond boy shook himself awake, and the world swam back into focus. He was curled in his computer chair, L's email open on the screen and a notebook and pencil before him, the desk littered with chocolate wrappers and scraps of paper covered in dead-end attempts to draw some sort of code out of the rhyme - arrangements of the letters, results of changing them into numbers, different ways the lines could be organized, notes on the possible meanings of the phrases and the histories of the cathedrals mentioned, grids for codes that hadn't appeared as of yet…

Blearily, he glanced up to see Matt looking down at him.

"Hey," he managed wearily.

Matt smiled. "Hey. Want to take a break from that?"

Mello shook his head. "I can't stop now. I feel like I'm just about to figure out part of it."

"That's what you said yesterday," Matt pointed out. "C'mon, it was probably just a prank or something. There probably isn't any kind of code in it."

"Or we just haven't found one yet," Mello insisted.

Matt was silent a moment. Then he said, "You know, you don't have to find some kind of message in this to prove that you're smart. You already are. I know that. L knows that, too. Everyone does."

Mello sighed. "It just seems like there must be something."

"Maybe there is," Matt admitted. "But that doesn't mean that we have all the pieces to the puzzle. Maybe there's something we're missing. And anyway, you're going crazy over this; maybe you should take a break."

Mello didn't want to give up, but he had to admit the possibility that his friend was right.

"C'mon, Mel," Matt was coaxing. "Just put it away for now and come do something fun. Everyone else is; they've got a campfire outside and Watari's telling ghost stories." He took ahold of one of Mello's hands and started tugging gently. Reluctantly, Mello allowed himself to be pulled out of his chair and towards the door.

"If L was trying to solve a code, though…" he began, glancing back at his desk.

"He'd take breaks," Matt insisted, continuing to pull his friend along. "Come on; L is out there with everyone else. They're roasting marshmallows. It'll be fun."

The last of Mello's resolve broke, and he allowed himself to be dragged down the stairs, out the back door, and across the lawn to where a number of the House's inhabitants were gathered around the fire pit, sitting on chairs, logs, and blankets, wrapped up in warm clothing. L had four or five children in his lap and clinging to his arms, and Watari was seated on a stump in front of the fire, just finishing a story.

"And so they returned to the house with the townspeople, convinced that they were going to be proven right. As they got closer, however, they began to doubt their own memories - they saw no house, and, when they arrived, there was nothing but a burnt-out shell overgrown by years of neglect." He paused and took the opportunity to look around at the children. Mello followed suit and saw Near struggling valiantly to stay awake under a pile of blankets, Alex watching Watari, hands on his omnipresent Rubik's cube stilled for once, and Kat listening raptly and wide-eyed while Quicksilver set marshmallows on fire. Mello dropped into a free spot, and Matt joined him moments later.

"However," Watari continued quietly, everyone's attention focused intently on him by now, "while exploring the wreckage, convinced by now that they'd fallen asleep in the woods and had dreamed up their mysterious hosts of the night before, they found something unusual - on the table, gleaming against the soot and the ruin, was the new, shiny silver coin they'd left in that exact spot earlier that morning."

Silence for a moment. Then…

"How did it get there?" Kat breathed.

"That's the mystery," Watari explained. "That the house they'd stayed at had actually been abandoned for years."

"But then who were the people they talked to?" Kat demanded.

Watari shrugged. "Whoever you imagine them to be."

"I'll bet they were ghosts," Quicksilver said confidently. "The guys who stayed with them were lucky they didn't get eaten."

"Not all ghosts eat people," Fiona protested from across the circle. "Maybe they were friendly ghosts. You know, the kind that help people."

"Or the mischievous kind," Quicksilver agreed. "The kind that like to play tricks on people just for fun. Like Gastly." She nodded assuredly. Meanwhile, Near seemed to have fallen asleep at last, and Alex was working on his Rubik's cube again, fingers whirling away at the patterns that always seemed to be so clear to him.

"Tell us another story," Mello begged. Watari seemed to know so many - and they were always just scary enough to make you shiver but not so frightening that you couldn't sleep at night. In other words, perfect.

The elderly gentleman smiled. "All right. This one comes all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, from Mexico, and tells about a legendary monster." He paused to give everyone a chance to listen, and Mello shifted closer to Matt, shivering partly from the cold and partly from anticipation. A moment later, he felt his best friend wrap a blanket around both of them, and they curled up happily against the autumn chill as Watari began the story.

Eventually, as the setting of the tales passed from Africa to Japan to Russia to India (because Watari always knew stories from everywhere), as the moon climbed towards the summit of the sky (full and bright and as silvery-white as Near, though probably a warm orange harvest moon through Matt's goggles), as the campfire crackled and the autumn wind mingled the smell of October with the smell of woodsmoke and they roasted marshmallows (Mello always managed to scald his, but that was all right because Matt liked them burnt and would trade him) - a feeling of peace settled, and Mello stopped worrying about rhymes and codes and bells.

They can wait, he thought drowsily to himself.

Ten minutes later, he and Matt were both soundly and happily asleep.