Dropped

“We,” Matt groans, and sits up, “we have to get moving.”



Mello moans. Near just whimpers. Matt feels like such a fucking parent.



“You guys.” Emotional blackmail time. “L could die.”



That gets Mello up, back ramrod straight. His hair is all sticking out to one side and he looks dishevelled and tired and frightened. Matt feels kind of like a jerk, but he knows he’s right. Near isn’t stirring.



“Near?”



“I’m.”



Mello is staggering to his feet, in the direction he figures the showers are in. Matt doesn’t even know what time it is, except that it’s light out and there’s noise in the streets, so that means they can get what they need.



“Near, we have to go for food and a library. You can stay here if you need to, but we have to go.” Near sits upright almost immediately, and Matt winces. He’d been just a little bit too right about Near’s... he didn’t want to say neediness, because it seemed to imply that he was being a burden or was asking for something, and he clearly wasn’t... but he doesn’t like to see it, anyways.



Near doesn’t like that Matt can see it. Doesn’t like that this means he might tell Mello, that Mello might think something was amiss.



Because it wasn’t. He could do this. He was very much aware that it was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, and staying close to Matt and Mello, and finding and saving L above all else. Then, catching



Kira. Because what Kira was doing was very, very, very wrong.



“If you spray a plant with caustic pesticides,” he tells Matt, sitting up on the edge of the bed, winding his fingers in his hair absently, “you kill the aphids and you kill the plant.”



“That’s why L’s stopping him.”



Matt always did understand him better than anyone else. Mello probably won’t notice anything.



It’s just that Near likes things a certain way. He wears his clothes a certain way, and brushes his hair a certain way, and eats the same thing for breakfast, and lunch, and then tea and then dinner. He has classes the same times every week. He is brilliant at spotting abnormalities and analyzing them because they are so very abnormal.



Right now, he’s lost his frame of reference. He didn’t pack a hair brush, it was made of wood and cumbersome and a comb was more practical. But he’s tired, so he forsakes brushing his hair completely, and suddenly because of it his grasp of higher level trigonometry is a little bit shakier.



It’s not a problem. Because they aren’t going to need trigonometry to catch find L.



But it’s going to become a problem if he can’t find something to make this normal, and fast.



“Hey Near,” Matt’s voice shakes him out of his reverie, as Matt paws sleep from his eyes. “Do you think Mrs McCaffrey looks more like a bat or an iguana?”



The comment is utterly inconspicuous, totally normal, and something Matt would say to him on any given day whatsoever.



It helps. He ignores it, because it’s childish and immature (an iguana) but it helps.





The librarian that they run into looks like an iguana too, interestingly enough. Near is dubious, at first, that they’ll be able to get into the hotel rooms using just an old library computer, but he may have underestimated Matt.



While the records are being pulled up, at a snails pace, Mello reads them news clippings regarding Kira, with his botchy, imperfect accent that makes Near correct him every so often. Mello hates being corrected, and snarls at him. That’s normal too. That’s really good.



There are twenty nine hotels that fit the criteria for location. Twenty one of those do it for height, too. Near starts writing down names and addresses on hard paper, since printing documents is harder to erase than internet history (play it safe) and they don’t have money on them any more anyways.



“We should get a new credit card,” Matt says as he types. ‘Get’ means ‘steal.’



“Empty the last one first,” Near says blandly.



“They’ll trace it.”



“They already know we’re looking for L. We will only confirm their very well founded suspicions, and it would be less conspicuous than arrest. There’s a withdrawal machine— there.”



He points, through the library window. Outside of a mall, a block away. Mello snaps his fingers at Matt, who, if he finds this irritating, doesn’t let on. He just hands over the card.



“Get as much as you can.”



“I fucking know.”



Lack of sleep makes Mello even more irritable, so Near leaves Matt, and gingerly leaves the library too, then presses his nose against the glass of the convenience store and concentrates on looking waifish and hungry, like Matt taught him, until some annoyingly high pitched girl with a fake smile

looks at him and then he blinks at her and she asks him his name, and when he comes back to the library Matt is still working. Mello is there.



Near hands him the chocolate bar wordlessly, and Mello inhales it and ruffles Near’s hair with chocolaty fingers. Since he didn’t brush it anyways, this doesn’t bother him in the slightest.



“That’s six hotels that he’s been to, so far,” Matt mutters, “Near, you’ve got the map, right? We should look for a pattern.



There is none.



They aren’t near each other. They aren’t even as far away from each other as possible, either. They don’t have names in common, they aren’t going numerically, or alphabetically by street name, or in order of height, or even by when the last review was printed.



It turns out, L has stayed in eleven of the possible matches.



“But these all end weeks ago.”



Mello frowns, and says what they’re thinking.



“We’re missing something. There has to be...”



“Mello.” Matt interrupts him, but it sounds like something has occurred to him, so he doesn’t call him on it, “get me the name of the top three most reliable moving companies in the district that would do hotel to hotel. They’ll have had equipment. I know what kind of computer L uses and you aren’t fitting those sorts of things in a couple of cars.”



Near thinks that this is a stretch. They might have purchased a van, but a legitimate moving company would attract less questions than an unmarked van... possibly one with advertisements painted on the side? But then, Watari wasn’t a young man, and L wasn’t physically built for lifting.



Additional hired help would be a liability, and would open them for infiltration. Much better a moving crew that knew nothing.



Matt starts with the second best, and the patterns show up right away. He gets their address, and subsequently, into their records, and the names of all the hotels pop up. He lists them off... except.



“There’s a hole. We didn’t get this one. There was a delivery from here to... the Royale isn’t on our list. Why isn’t the Royale on our list?”



Mello immediately opens a new browser window, but Near remembers, so he cuts in;



“Ineligible. A new high rise building one city block down, well within danger distance.”



“How new?”



Near looks at Mello, who pulls the information up after a few clicks.



“Very new. Impressive company in charge of the project. Construction was finished after L’s check out dates, that’s why we missed it. And man, whoever built this place, they weren’t kidding. It’s a fucking fortress in the middle of the city.”



Near smiles.



Matt gasps.



Mello blinks, and then swears:



“No fucking way. He built a batcave?” His eyes practically shine. “How badass is that?”



Near doesn’t admit it, of course, but for once, he completely agrees.