Communication
"I don't like this," whines the shinigami on the back of the bus, where she was sitting next to Near, who is chewing distractedly on a thumbnail. The higher the level of stress, the more they all tended to emulate L, though of all of them, only Matt noticed it. Mello took another bite of his chocolate, across the aisle.
"I don't like this," echoed Near, blandly, looking straight at her and then at Matt. A woman nearby looked over her shoulder at the three of them and then away, disapprovingly.
"It won't be for much longer," Matt says, sort of desperately, "we just need to find somewhere to stay."
Mello snorts
"Somewhere cheap," Matt forged on, because this was where the plan fell apart. At the part where three children under the age of fifteen had to forge their way essentially across the globe to find a person who specialized in not being found.
None of them had once said it was impossible. Because it wasn't.
It just wasn't going to be easy, either.
"The jolts are hurting my wings," whines the shinigami, as they crash over a pothole at high speeds.
"The jolts are hurting my back," Near is almost whispering, and Matt tries to see past the echoed complaints, to guess how he's really doing. Mello isn't helping, he's looking out the window, expression murderous. Probably at being stuck with Near.
Only Matt seems to remember that Near is fucking twelve, and under all that passivity and intelligence and scheming quiet, he is like the rest of them: deeply fucked up, probably suffering abandonment issues and all other sorts of pleasant neurosis, evidently at least mildly agoraphobic and probably not going to let on when he needs help. Probably has been smarter than the psychologists all his life, so never really got any, either.
The whole thing is already giving Matt a headache.
"Why couldn't you own a car, like the rest of the humans?"
"Why couldn't you own a car?"
Matt snorts.
"I'm fourteen. I wouldn't be legal to drive it anyways."
Mello blinks at him, and says, "hey, I'm older than you."
"Since when has that made a difference?"
"I'm older than you?"
Matt gets his shoulder punched, and Near smiles, distantly when Matt snickers and says "Numbers aren't everything. But seriously. We need to make a plan. We can't just sit here and ride."
"Why not?" asks Sighurd, which is rather a change of tune, but she's taken up pulling the cord that requests a stop repeatedly, leading the busdriver to think that it's broken, and is apparently very amused by his swearing.
"Because this is our stop."
All of them look at Near, who's climbing to his feet and making for the door. There's a sign that says 'internet cafe.'
Matt swallows, and lifts the wallet out of the pocket of the man coming on the bus as they get off. With a few stolen credit card details and any luck, they'll be at the airport in the morning.