AN: sorry there was such a wait for this chapter! i'll try and write faster now :)
December 26th
From the window in Henrietta's kitchen the lights of Winchester twinkle like stars. Near is reading Paul Vine's last letter to the newspaper over and over again, hoping that it will somehow make itself make sense if she repeats it in her head enough times. It still doesn't make sense and she's been sitting there for an hour trying to ignore Matt, who's fumbling through a conversation with Henrietta in the bedroom.
50 babies are being born in the time it takes you to read these sentences. 22 people are dying. Every second is both a beginning and an end. There are 28 more people alive than there were when you started reading this, if I got the calculations right. Every day I am astonished by the world. As the year is coming to an end remember that everything will end, but everything also has a beginning.
The language sounds so off that it has to be a code. There must be some kind of hidden message here. If Near didn't have a concussion she would have worked this out hours ago.
She looks at the shopping list again, but that doesn't provide any clues either. A shop name, chewing gum, a litre of fruit juice, grated cheese, peanut butter, rich tea biscuits and wholegrain bread. It doesn't sound like the kind of food a middle-aged man would want, so it must be somehow linked to the code. But she can't work out how, which means she's a failure. A total failure that definitely deserves a concussion.
Matt's backpack is lying on the white carpet, a blob of dull brown in a brilliantly painted room. One wall is white, one red, one blue, and one yellow. There's a five pound note sticking out of one pocket. She wonders if that would be enough to buy everything on the shopping list. Matt's too busy with Henrietta to notice when she puts on one of his sweaters, takes the money, the newspaper and the shopping list, and simply leaves.
She goes around the back of the building to the street and finds that Henrietta's apartment is just above the shop named in the shopping list. Inside is brightly lit and the colours are vivid. Everything seems fresh and wonderful and she didn't realise it before, but she's starving.
Near pushes against the door and it doesn't open. She tries again, then throws herself against it. She falls through and curls up on the floor.
"Hey there, darling, you okay?" someone asks.
She is concussed, has a broken arm, and has run away from the only thing keeping her alive. Of course she is okay. The stranger does not need to know this. The stranger is a tall, pale boy with dark hair and lines under his eyes presumably from nights spent working here. He is holding out a hand to help her up. She gets up herself. "Yes, I am okay."
"You don't look okay. Do you normally jump at doors?"
"Yes," she answers, and then ignores him in favour of finding chewing gum.
December 2nd
"Are you staying anywhere?" Light asks L the second time L stays for the evening.
L stays silent.
Light glances over at him from the desk. "Because if you're not, you can stay here for a while. We don't have any sweets but you can figure out how to buy your own."
L is crouched on the edge of the bed, gazing at Light blankly. His eyes are hollow. Light still hasn't been able to shake the feeling that L is just a corpse.
"If you're tired, you can use my bed for now. I'm going to be working for a while, and you look like you need it."
Light gets back to the mind-numbing work of typing up names he'd written down on white paper months before. After several hours he's too tired to type any more, and turns around to find L lying on his side in the bed. His eyes are clothes and his chest is rising and falling evenly. Light doesn't think he's ever seen L sleeping before; even when they were handcuffed together, L wouldn't sleep while Light was awake. He seems so vulnerable. He almost seems human. It's quite disturbing.
The room is cold, so Light is, of course, just being a good friend when he gets into bed and shares his body warmth with L.
December 26th
Henrietta's bedroom is cluttered and messy, with different vibrant paint colours splashed over the walls and objects scattered over the floor and desks. The bed lies under a small window with a view of dark rooftops and skyscrapers. Henrietta is sitting on the edge, swinging her legs, smiling at Matt like there's some secret he's supposed to know.
He doesn't quite know where to stand. Flicking his lighter on and off, he paces along the small empty gap in the floor. He wishes he had thought to bring his DS. Unlike the feelings of girls he's just met, Pokemon moves are easy to predict. "Thanks for letting us in, Henrietta," he mumbles.
"Call me Henry. Henrietta Fountain is such a posh name it's ridiculous."
"Yeah." He steps closer. "But you think your name is ridiculous? Mine is Mail Jeevas."
She sniggers. "Your parents must hate you."
"Actually they probably did. They abandoned me as a kid." Matt had been trying to cultivate a shaky smile, but it falls away immediately. He doesn't particularly like thinking about his parents. They had just left him on a doorstep with nothing but a terrible name.
"Oh." Henrietta pats the bed next to her, though Matt makes no effort to come over. "Should we talk about something more cheerful?"
"Sure."
"So..." She glances around and bites her lip. It isn't something that Mello would do. Mello would probably already have left – he isn't someone who messes around with small talk. "What are you doing round here?"
"Like I said earlier, me and my little sister are looking for whoever murdered Paul Vine."
"Your little sister is weird."
"Yeah, but she's smart. She was the one who wanted to try finding the murderer. She practically dragged me out here."
Henrietta raises her eyebrows. It's what Mello would do whenever Matt did anything stupid, like approach Mello with the wrong expression, or smiled at him a bit too much, or 'accidentally' touched him. "So you're actually serious about finding the murderer."
"Yeah."
"Isn't that kinda dangerous?"
"Exactly. Like I said, my little sister's weird."
"She's weird. But you're nice, and also –" she looks at his lips "- you're also pretty hot."
He swallows. "Yeah, I am."
Then she gets up and grabs his face and kisses him. It isn't the way it would be with Mello – she's too gentle and she isn't even trying to hurt him. Her arms are warm as they're wrapped around him, but it's not right because they aren't even trying to strangle him. He stands there and lets it happen.
"I'm sorry, is this weird?" she asks quietly. "I don't have much experience with this. I think it was love at first sight or something like that. But maybe that was just for me? You don't seem to be enjoying this." Henrietta lets go and steps away. "Sorry, no, that was –" she wipes a tear from her eye " – that was stupid of me. I'm a stupid person."
If this was Mello Matt wouldn't have let him let go.
"You can kiss me if you really want," he tells Mello. "It wasn't weird."
"Oh, good," he says with a grin, and goes back to kissing him. Matt returns it this time, concentrating on his yellow hair and his black leather and the fact that it's definitely Mello and he's not projecting his fantasies onto some misguided teenage girl.
After what seems like an eternity, Mello steps back and grabs Matt's hand. "I like you, Mail Jeevas," he says with a grin, pronouncing it totally wrong. It doesn't matter that the name's wrong, because everything else is right. It's so perfect it could only be a dream.
"You too, Mello."
The illusion breaks when Henrietta squints at him like he's gone mad. "Who's Mello?"
Matt laughs shakily. "I'll go check on my little sister now."
December 26th
By the time Near's found the wholegrain bread, she feels like fainting. The basket is far more heavy than it looks, and so is her entire body. She wrestles it up to the checkout anyway.
The pale boy scans in her purchases. "You sure you're doin' okay, sweetheart?" he asks, head tipped, genuinely seeming concerned. "You've been walkin' like a drunk and you're way too young for that stuff, so it's something else, isn't it?"
"I don't tell my medical issues to strangers."
"Oh, it's a medical issue?" He grabs some headache pills from behind the counter and stuffs it, along with the rest of the objects, into a plastic bag, then smiles at her again. He really does genuinely look like a nice person, which means that he's evil and the pills probably contain poison. "That'll be six pounds."
Near holds out the five pound note. "It isn't enough, so you can take out the pills."
"I'll pay, don't you worry, sweetheart. Keep yourself safe, okay?" He passes her the plastic bag and receipt, glances above her head, and takes out money of his own to pay.
"Thank you."
"That's okay, honey. Now get home, you don't want to to be wanderin' around so late, not when there's crazy murderers around."
Not a minute after Near leaves, the lights in the shop flick off. It must be nearly eight in the evening. The moon is covered up with dense clouds, and streetlamps are the only things fighting off darkness. Near sits on the pavement, leaning against a streetlamp, and reads the letter in the newspaper again and again until the words are starting to blur in the orange light. She still doesn't understand how to pick out the right sentence. There should be some kind of key in the newspaper, but she's tried everything that looks remotely promising. At this point she's close to concluding that Paul Vine was not a very good writer.
At this point she reaches into the bag to get the rich tea biscuits out. The receipt falls out, and she notices that the headache pills are listed first with a price of 0p.
The first word of the letter is 50.
It wouldn't really make sense if this was the code – she doubts Paul Vine would bother making a code based on food prices - but it's worth trying.
The chewing gum is listed as 20p. She skips 2 words, assuming that the zero means nothing, and finds 'are'. The fruit juice cost a pound, so she skips 10 words. 'you'. This is a promising start. She continues with the rest of the prices.
"50 are you alive I am coming," she says to herself, and yawns. "50, are you alive? I am coming." It is at this point that Matt discovers her. She looks up at him and blinks. "50? Are you alive? I am coming."
"What are you talking about?" Matt says flatly. "Why did you sneak out?"
"It's the code. In the newspaper letter. I went to the shop and bought the things on the shopping list and then the prices of them matched up with words. And the words were 50? Are you alive? I am coming."
He kneels down beside her. "Okay, you need to come inside, or you're going to get cold and probably die."
"Thanks to the concussion you gave me, I don't think I can walk."
"Fine, I'll help you," he growls. Near often wonders why he acts like he hates her. They stagger back to Henrietta's apartment together, with Matt doing the actual walking and Near trailing behind him weakly.
The door's open. Matt frowns when he notices this. "Henry?" he calls. "You still in there?"
"Why are you so shocked?"
"I locked the door when I came out. She asked me to. Said she was worried the murderer would come in." He shakes his head. "It's probably nothing."
They walk in and almost immediately find Henrietta. She's lying on her side by Matt's backpack, but her arms are lying in the corner.
