This chapter's a little different (though it follows the same general pattern), and it's set probably a good decade or so after the last one. And just so there's no confusion, the character described at the beginning is not L. ;)
From the moment he was born, people were waiting for him to die.
He was small - far, far too small - and so premature that he had to be kept in an incubator for weeks and weeks. He wasn't expected to survive, so his parents didn't want to get attached to him. They named him, though, so they would have something to put on the tiny headstone.
When he did survive, everyone was shocked. However, it wasn't time to celebrate. He was still too small, still too weak, still too breakable. His blood was too thin; his bones were too brittle; his immune system was too feeble. He was in the hospital again and again. No matter how many sharp corners of furniture were covered over with padding, he still had accidents. His parents began dressing him in white so that they could tell when he was bleeding. He didn't need normal clothing, because he wasn't allowed outside. The neighbors' children thought he was a ghost. And still, his parents waited for him to die with a kind of resignation he didn't understand.
He had no friends to speak of, so he invented them. He named his stuffed animals; he named his toys; and when those weren't enough, he invented imaginary friends. When nobody could hear him, he talked to them. He didn't talk to anybody else, and seldom did anybody talk to him. When he was in the room, they spoke in hushed whispers, as if at a funeral. And still, his parents waited for him to die.
Instead of him, though, it was them. The house burned down while he was spending the night at the hospital, and he mourned quietly for his lost friends all the way to the orphanage.
Now he is curled up silently in the corner of a room, looking at the floor. People tried to talk to him when he arrived, but he didn't want to talk. He wanted his friends back. He wanted to be a normal little boy who ate normal food and didn't take medicine and played outside. He wanted a chance to live without people constantly waiting for him to die.
The door opens, but he doesn't look up. He doesn't want to talk to anybody. He doesn't want to be told how lucky he is to be here and how special he is because he's so smart. He doesn't want to be special.
Footsteps cross the room and pause as their owner kneels down beside him, and then, after a moment, a hand settles on his shoulder. He looks up into a pale face with wide gray eyes, and its owner smiles tentatively before extending both arms invitingly. Hesitantly, he lifts his own, and the stranger pulls him close and hugs him tightly - not as though he is about to die, not as though he is in danger of breaking, but as though he is something precious and beloved.
For once, it isn't someone else afraid to touch him - it's the other way around, because this is too bewildering and too wonderful and too perfect and this stranger is too special, and hopefully he's never going to let go of the small white-haired boy in his arms.
Nate River holds him timidly.