The thing about being in terrible pain, Mello decided, was that it made it rather hard to think.

The bootleg morphine did help, though. As did the chocolate.

Hannah didn't.

"Sit back down - I swear, walking out of a hospital when you've been shot, and now this - honestly, do you have no common sense -"

Mello would have dearly tempted to give her the finger, had Matt not been there and glaring daggers at him as well. As it was, he fell onto the sofa with not even the semblance of good grace, and glowered at the world.

"And don't give me that, either - you're lucky to be alive, and you're pretty darn lucky to have Matt and me here to help, otherwise who knows what would have happened to you - there's no need to be so petulant about having your life saved. And, for goodness's sake, eat something other than chocolate in a while, won't you? Soup is perfectly reasonable food."

Mello ignored Hannah and her soup, and leaned over Matt's laptop. There were far more important things to do, after all.

It'd been two days since Sully's suicide - two days, and there had been no new news, no new murders or clues, and Mello was growing already restless. The last clues of the last murder had been painfully obvious, and that was wrong wrong wrong. He had to be missing something. He had to be -

"Mels, I swear, if you don't relax for once, I'm going to -"

"What?"

Matt smiled.

"Not buy you anymore chocolate, that's what."

Mello glared at him.

"Chocolate is bad for your health, anyway," Hannah added, primly sitting down in the kitchen.

Mello felt the very distinct urge to strangle both of them at that moment, terrible pain notwithstanding.

There was work to be done, after all. There always was.

It turns cold that night, cold and stormy, the chill seeping through the cracks of the old apartment as thunder rumbles through the night.

In the morning, Matt looks outside and shivers.

"It's going to snow," he says.

Mello nods, then goes back to Zodiac.

No news, of course. Again.

But. The note.

It was in the note, wasn't it? There'd been precious little else in the form of clues - the mutilation of the body had, of course, obviously been an allusion to Backyard Bottomslash, B's last victim. But while the severed limbs of Bottomslash had pointed to the location of the next murder, there was nothing in the room, nothing there to point to the next murderer or murder location. And it had been the same with the other suicides, too - nothing had been explicitly told in the suicides, nothing clearly communicated. No, instead, the suicides seemed to serve some other purpose - symbolic, perhaps =

So it had to be the note, then, something in it. Something in the note - but reluctant as he was to put the notes through Matt's programs, he had to admit that it might have been easier, it was less reliable - more apt to find meaningless words in alphabet soup than something of actual value.

Snapping off another piece of chocolate, Mello tried again.

He'd been at it for hours, trying again and again to find pattern from the letters. The best he'd been able to get - by taking the first letter from the first sentence of the and the second letter from the second sentence of the first note, then adding to it the third letter from the third sentence and the fourth letter from the second sentence, and so on - had been the word "church."

But "church" was such a vague word; no definite statement, no sense of the absolute about the meaning of it. It could signify anything; it, for all the word, could be useless data. It probably was. Perhaps it made some sense with the next note, but when would that be?

Too late, that was all Mello knew.

So he kept at it. Kept at the notes and kept at his investigations.

Matt is right - it snows that week, fat, lazy flakes that caterwaul across the sky and bathe the city in a thin sheen of white.

Mello doesn't notice, though. He is working.

At least, not until Matt comes in, bringing in with him even more of the cold and what seems to be a miniature flurry.

"Goddamn it, Matt - it's cold!"

"Says the one who didn't trek through snow and ice to hear get to downtown," Matt says, calmly placing the package in his arms on the kitchen counter and unwrapping his snow-covered scarf from around his face.

"What were you doing downtown?"

Matt looks at him then, and there is surprise, genuine surprise in his face then.

"Don't you know what day it is? Mels, it's the thirteenth - the thirteenth of December."

"Oh." And Mello was quiet for a moment, silently contemplating the fact that he had needed Matt to remind him of his own birthday.

"I was downtown to buy you cake," Matt said in the silence, placing his scarf near a heating vent to dry. "It's chocolate - I specified they use Godiva, so don't worry, it's palatable."

He smiled.

For a long time, Mello didn't answer.

And then, slowly, unsurely:

"Thanks."

"No problem."

There was cake and wine in the bag - good cake, expensive cake that stands in stark contrast to the shabby state of their surroundings - and they ate it in lieu of dinner, thick slices with rich, chocolate icing, washed down with cool champagne.

And then, afterwards, of course, it was back to their own separate worlds - Mello to his computer and Matt to his desk, a pile of unfinished homework so tall it made Mello wince in front of him: the result of Matt's recent and many absences.

Mello, of course, had Zodiac.

And for a while, there was silence.

Then, tentatively, quietly:

"Hey, Mels -"

Mello turned.

Matt smiled.

"Happy birthday."

Mello's birthday was a while okay, but I had to add it anyways :)