Chapter Text
In Mello, Mihael Keehl was given new life. Big fucking deal; he’d been christened, he was familiar with the concept of rebirth.
He tested this line of thinking on Matt one day in the library. He said: ‘Self-consistency is fucking stupid. I’ve been baptised, we’ve all changed our names. Why not take the opportunity for self-improvement? I’ll be whoever I choose, and everyone has to deal with it.’
Matt said: ‘You saying fuck now?’
‘I’ve always said fuck,’ Mello said.
‘Not that I can remember. And I think that’s an oversimplification.’
‘What?’
‘I just think it’s an oversimplification of the philosophy, and you’ve been pretty consistently a bitch since I met you. Can I see your... can I see those Ethics questions?’
Matt was too perfect in apathy. He was tilting his homework so Mello would have to look at the spelling errors and feel compelled to correct them. ‘You just don’t get it,’ Mello snapped. ‘And it’s e-n-i-g-m-a-t-i-c. Give it to me.’ He snatched Matt’s paper and started erasing.
‘No, because... you give your name, like, all this importance... and then say you don’t care.’ He immitated Mello’s growl, ‘“It’s like baptism, but I don’t give a fuck.” That’s transparent as shit. It isn’t baptism because there’s no water, and you clearly care because you haven’t shut up about it for like the past 20 minutes.’
‘I’m not saying I don’t care, Matt, I’m saying... what I’m saying is... I’ve been christened, and baptised, and renamed. It’s...’
‘Old hat.’
‘Depersonalising.'
‘Depersonalising?’
‘I’m saying I don’t need to be consistent. I need to be whatever it takes to achieve my goal.’
‘I just think it’s a name. I was called Mail and now I’m Matt. I’m still, like, a dude with red hair and a big dick. What is there to have a crisis about?’
‘Roger says not to tell people your old name.’
Matt shrugged. ‘Roger says a lot of shit and it all goes in one ear and out the other.’ Matt was stick-insect skinny and floppy like a damp biscuit. He had sprouted his thickest thicket of freckles yet when summer had set in that year, and his cheeks bloomed with sunburn in the shape of his goggles. He was draping his arms over the back of his chair, his sharp ankles crossed in Mello’s lap.
‘You’re average,’ Mello said.
‘What, in general? or do I need to take my pants off?’
‘Both.’
‘Here?’
‘Dare you,’ Mello said, picking his textbook up and pointedly tracing the page with one finger, performatively focusing. ‘Coward.’
‘Aw. I guess I am. Sorry.’
‘Schrodinger’s penis. Simultaneously large and micro.’
‘Well, definitely not micro, I mean, c’mon.’
‘The more you talk about it, actually, the smaller it gets in my mind.’
‘Well, stop picturing it! Poor thing. Damn.’
Mello shoved Matt’s legs off his knees and stood. ‘I’m going to dinner,’ he said.
‘See ya.’
Matt rarely braved the busyness of the dining hall; it overwhelmed him. He was sensitive about odd and specific things like rough wood and fruit pits. ‘Come to my room after, I got stuff for you’, he said to Mello’s back, craning his neck around the antique back of the chair. ‘I’ll trade it for a pudding and you have to say I’m above average.’
‘Two puddings and I’ll believe it when I see it.’
‘It’s, like, pulling teeth to make you be nice to me.’
‘I’m nice enough,’ Mello said, and then disappeared around a bookshelf.
Matt was the only kid at Wammy’s brash enough to put his sticky-out bits anywhere near Mello’s bite. In a fairer world, his eccentric joviality, fearless physicality, and casual wit would make Matt a uniquely exceptional person. Unfortunately, in Wammy’s, which was their world, there was no third option. You could be L, or nothing. So Matt was nothing and, in the eyes of the system, nobody.
Mello sat alone on the edge of the ruckus in the dining hall. Near was in his sight line, sitting silently in the centre of the room, pushing his food into the corners of his plate with attentive seriousness. Near was somehow gravitational, sucking in admirers. He never sat alone, or walked alone from class to class. It baffled Mello: Near was, in his opinion, not charismatic enough to deserve the attention.
For years, Mello had fought to paint Near’s motives as malicious. When they were younger, Near had broken an arm falling down the back stairs tripping over a stray tennis ball, and gone to the hospital. This, Mello had felt, was a ploy for special treatment, was deliberate attention seeking. It had irritated Mello to no end, had driven him to tantrum. He had wanted so badly to break his own arm, to break a leg, to die. It would be sweet vindication, he thought, when everyone read epitaphs at Mello’s funeral, when everyone was miserable over the loss of him. They would say that he’d had infinite potential. Dead, he would no longer be able to lose. Forever he would be the gifted boy who could have been L.
Mello was plagued by persistent fantasties of glorious, immortalising death.
Unfortunately, Near met Mello’s every antagonism with nonchalance, insisted on praising him publicly, and never lived up to the role of bitter rival in a way that would have satisfied Mello’s rabid need for his anger to be validated. And Mello never died. Every day, he woke up as unfulfilled as the day before.
When he was finished his solitary meal, he put his plate in the pile of dirty dishes and gathered dinner rolls, cupcakes, and apple slices in a napkin for Matt.
‘Oh, damn,’ Matt said when Mello shouldered open the door of Matt’s dim room on the third floor, spotting the dessert. ‘Can you take the frosting off those?’
Mello put his armful on Matt’s dresser, shoving aside a pile of USBs to make space. He picked up a cupcake and started licking the frosting off.
‘Cool, thanks. Here.’ Matt ruffled around in his bedside drawer and came back with a pill bottle. He threw it underhand at Mello’s chest. The label said Matthew Ruvie. ‘They switched me to Vyvanse.’
‘Why?’
‘No clue. I said I was tired.’
‘You wouldn’t be tired if you slept.’
‘Yeah. Anyway, if there’s a difference or you hate it, I’ll just tell them it’s making me jittery or something.’
‘It’s probably fine,’ Mello said, picking up the other cupcake. Matt had started giving Mello his drugs a year ago, when he’d decided he didn’t like them anymore. Mello had wanted to try them over exam period, hoping for an edge. At first Matt had badgered Mello for complicated favours in return, or to do his homework, but as their friendship progressed and their trade agreement was extended, he’d started harassing Mello for those things at all hours of the day and most hours of the night, too.
‘Mm,’ Matt said, stepping up to grab a naked cupcake and pushing most of it into his mouth. ‘Did you see Grant on your way here?’
‘No. Why?’
‘He’s been lurking around the halls trying to make kids drink piss out of a water bottle.’ He took the other cupcake out of Mello’s hand while Mello was still trying to scrape the last of the frosting off with his teeth. ‘I’m glad they went back to vanilla; that red velvet stuff was too... like, I didn’t like it.’
‘What was he doing that for?’
‘He tried to tell me it was special iced tea he’d gotten in Hawaii. I was like, “dude, you’ve never been to Hawaii. We live in the same orphanage, I’d know if you’d been to Hawaii”.’
Mello furrowed his brow. ‘I don’t remember being stupid like that when I was 8.’
‘I hope you’re not about to say “this is why Grant’s number 13”. I can’t believe they make the little kids compete with us, anyway.'
‘Near was 2nd when he was 8.’
‘Well, who knows what they’re testing. Maybe propensity to lie just isn’t L’s thing.’
‘They’re testing your classwork, Matt. Obviously.’
Matt grinned. He had cake on his lips. ‘I do OK,’ he drawled. ‘Do you want to see an MI5 van?’
‘Yeah.’
Matt went to the window and stood with his shoulder against the frame. A blunt and lighter were sitting next to the ashtray on the sill, and he picked them up. ‘It’s the carpet cleaning one.’
‘How do you know?’ Mello asked skeptically.
Matt fiddled with the lock on the window and popped it open. It had become difficult to open them since they’d put the bars on the windows, since Alternate had committed suicide. That had been just before Matt arrived. ‘It’s broadcasting,’ he said, like that explained it.
‘Why’s it here?'
Matt shrugged and inhaled. ‘Maybe you’re getting arrested.’
Mello’s dad was in prison. ‘Says the asshole smoking weed.’
‘Who? Where?’
‘You’re gonna get caught.’
‘Yeah.’ Matt coughed and banged his chest. ‘Whatever. You want to see the signal?’
Mello looked out at the van again. It was parked on the curb on the other side of the street, advertising for Claire’s Cleaning. ‘Sure.’
Matt went to sit on the bed, pulling a laptop and two cellphones into a circle around his crossed legs. Mello crawled up next to him. ‘That’s the tower...’ Matt said, pointing at screens. ‘So many computers in here, see?’
‘Doesn’t mean anything.’
‘No, yeah, but this one isn’t supposed to be here – look.’
‘Looks the same.’
‘Well, it isn’t. It’s new.’
‘The neighbours bought their kid an iPhone.’
‘No.’ Matt huffed. ‘What do you want to do, then?’
‘I have to study Administrative Law.’
‘You can stay here if you want,’ Matt said. ‘I’m not doing anything.’
‘You should also study Administrative Law.’
‘Nah. You go ahead.’ Matt closed the lid of his laptop and started playing with the Network Map on his phone. He slouched against Mello’s side while Mello opened a book and started to read, lapsing into relative silence.
Matt had been at Wammy’s for two years. When he’d arrived, he’d spent a solid six days rheumy and snotty, drifting between classes with a glassy blank look on his face. Mello had tapped him on the shoulder one day and told him that if he ever wanted to talk to anyone about his parents, not to bother, because family was an off-limits topic. Matt had said, “am I here because I’m bad?”. He’d told Mello later that his parents were assholes, so he hadn’t been grieving, just freaking out. But Mello thought it was odd that now Matt couldn’t care less about getting detention, getting scolded, having privileges taken away. No punishment stuck. He smoked in his room and talked back and showed up late to the first class of every day. Maybe he was at Wammy’s because he was bad.
‘Break time.’ Matt decided after an hour and a half of restless shifting, Tetris with the sound on, and another blunt. ‘You’ve learnt enough.’
Mello pushed his notes onto the floor. ‘Wha’d’ya want?’
Matt shrugged, and then flopped sideways with his head on Mello’s outstretched thighs. ‘You ever think about what it’d be like if you’d never come here? Like if you’d stayed with your parents or if you’d gone to an aunt or, I don’t know, got... placed somewhere else?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.'
Mello had a brother who’d gone to foster. A little brother who’d taken a new name, so Mello could never find him. ‘There isn’t any point, Matt,’ he said, touching the red tip of one of Matt’s ears.
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Back to AdLaw.’
‘Or you could keep doing that,’ Matt said, reaching up to tug on Mello’s long sleeve so he couldn’t pull his hand away. ‘Didn’t you finish that book on the beach trip?’
‘No.’ No, Mello had brought Anna Karenina on the beach trip, not classwork. He’d taken his shoes off so he could bury his toes in the cold sand, sat in the shade of an aster, propped the book open in front of him, and then spent most of the day watching Matt meander in and out of the ocean instead of reading. Matt had looked a little like a washed up pirate with his black and white stripes and his jeans rolled to his knees, lazily letting the tide buffet his pale shins.
‘Procrastinator.’ Matt yawned, turning so his nose pointed at the ceiling and his fluttering shut eyelashes pointed at Mello.
‘Pot calling the kettle black.’
‘I never got that one,’ Matt said. ‘Pots are grey, kettles are, like, well, the one in Dr. Invermere’s room is red.’
‘Crockware’s changed since the development of the English language.’
'Maybe they should redevelop the English language, then.’
‘I think they are.’
‘Who?’
‘The children, I don’t know, Matt. You say, like, rad, ZOMG.’
‘Oh, I fucking do not. No I don’t.’
If Matt were to fall asleep here, and Mello, courteous of his comfort, were to study here all night with Matt’s slack face in his crotch... ‘Get up,’ Mello said. ‘I gotta get my binder outta my backpack.’
Matt re-settled up against the headboard, a comfortable distance away. ‘What’s the complementary subject today?’
‘Oh – Applied Mathematical Modelling.’
‘Just running through the alphabet.’ Matt crooked a finger, and Mello handed him the binder. ‘How come I never got this?'
‘You did. Yesterday.’
‘Neat. Actually, I’m thinking of doing this.’
‘Then do it.’
Matt speed-read Mello’s work. ‘Industry,’ he mumbled. ‘How come we have to learn this, I wonder? Did L have a case involving electromagnets?’
‘He wants us ready for anything.'
‘Even alternative careers in engineering, yeah.’
Mello scowled. ‘There are only two options,’ he said; testing another one of his worldviews on the only person who ever really listened to him, ‘L and nothing.’
‘6 billion nothings and one L,’ Matt mused. ‘You know, I like you a lot better than I like L.’
‘I like you, too,’ Mello said, grumpily. ‘But I’m not talking about that.’
‘Yeah, you’re being pessimistic and too literal and oversimplifying everything, again,’ Matt said. ‘Actually, no, you’re, uh, self-deprecating. Like, that’s not a cool general statement you’ve just made, it’s just emo shit you think because you take this too seriously.’
Mello twisted his mouth and snatched the Maths binder back. ‘You can go be an engineer, then, Matt.’
‘Better than nothing,’ Matt said.
“There are three options: L, engineer, and nothing.” had no ring to it. Matt was brilliant at making Mello feel dumb without making him feel inferior. ‘It still matters,’ Mello said.
‘If it matters to you, it matters. Just don’t be all emo about it.’
Matt was trying to say that he didn’t believe Mello would surpass Near, that Mello should prepare himself to be disappointed. From anyone else, it would infuriate him. From Matt, it was melancholy and fragile.
This connection they had, this bottomless truce, had rushed up on Mello like flood waters rising. A sensitive boy with a gentle smile, a threatening genius without patience for metaphor – Matt should have been a perfect target for Mello’s jealous spite, and yet. ‘I should go to bed,’ Mello said, realising that he wasn’t going to get anything else done while Matt stared prettily at him from under the poster cacophony taped above his headboard. ‘So should you.’
‘Yeah,’ Matt said. He yawned, suggestible. ‘I will.’
The hallway outside of Matt’s room was dark – lights out was 2200, and it was well past midnight by the time Mello left. Mello crept on the balls of his feet down to his own door, opened and shut it with the barest squeak, and turned the lights on inside. His room was ascetic. What had his childhood bedroom been like? It had had a rug with roads printed on top and a bunk bed. His father had painted the walls. His brother had drawn on the bunk bed with crayons. Dragons. Dragons, flames, and little people. It had been busy and homey. He’d never felt at home in Wammy’s.
But anyway a room was just a place to sleep, and temporary.
The days at Wammy’s were strictly regimented, encouraging studious conduct. Breakfast was served at 0545 and cleared by 0710. Every child’s first class of Days 1 and 3 had, before Kira, been a summary of current events and world politics hosted by a Ms Rohrbach in her History classroom on the first floor, but was now a discussion class on Kira guided by Roger and aided by a Doctor Yu of Social Sciences. Days 2 and 4 had been self-study in the old days, and were now lectures and readings on Kira, this time with help from the Japanese tutor. Monotony and single-mindedness were dragging down the already mundane routine, according to Matt. For Mello, the changes in Wammy’s were like apocalyptic warnings. Change was anxious.
The doors were always locked ten minutes after the bell, so every day the entire school was treated to an interruption when Matt tried the door handle and cursed outside before stomping away. Today, they were showing stats on a projector in first period. Matt would have liked it – he was into numbers.
‘You missed out,’ Mello told him in their next class. ‘They were graphing crime rates.’
‘Ooh, axes. You know me so well.’ Matt slumped onto his elbows and looked up at Mello through a waterfall of damp hair. ‘I sort of like this place when no one’s in the hallways, though.’
Mello nodded curtly. He had put his notebook and pens in neat lines in front of him. Matt was always allowed a laptop; he had pushed it into a corner in favour of prodding at Mello’s knuckles with his fingernails.
‘The separability thesis...’ the teacher started, writing it on the chalkboard, ‘and Dworkin. Who can summarise the Third Theory?’
‘The textbook probably could,’ Matt groused.
Mello raised his hand and started to speak in a rush. ‘Well, jurisprudence ...’
Matt opened his laptop and opened a couple tabs. He signed into MSN and sent Mello a string of glitter text (the only font he used when he messaged Mello, to annoy him) and a picture of a circuit board covered in milk.
‘At least listen when I talk,’ Mello grumbled under his breath while the teacher wrote “counterpoints:” on the board, under her succinct summary of Mello’s rambling answer.
‘Say something interesting,’ Matt sniggered. ‘Dork-in, more like.’
‘Mature.’
‘Top theorists - legal philosophers - such as...’ the teacher went on, ‘Lon L. Fuller -’
‘Huh; didn’t know you had to be a top to develop legal theory,’ Matt said.
‘Be patient,’ Mello snapped, pursing his lips, ‘she’ll talk about the bottoms later.’
Matt snorted loudly enough to draw the attention of the class.
‘Something you care to share?’ The teacher asked, eyebrows raised. ‘Matt? Mello?’
‘Not in particular,’ Mello said, crossing his arms and tilting his chair back.
‘Just riveted by all these tops, uh, in their field,’ Matt said.
‘Good. I’d like to see your notes after class, Matt.’
‘No, you would definitely not,’ Matt mumbled, sending Mello another line of glitter text that, now that Mello was straining to read it, he saw was mostly swear words. A skill Mello had never wanted to learn but had been forced to anyway was deciphering the code of Matt’s writing – he used a gif of a dancing woman to represent the letter ‘i’. Half the time he sent Mello keyboard smashes on purpose.
‘I don’t want to see them, either,’ Mello whispered to him. ‘What the fuck does that even say?’
‘Says “pay attention to the lesson, nerd”.’
‘Wha’d’ya have against Times New Roman, size 12?’
‘Nothing, I guess. I’m just teaching you visual word recognition.’ Matt pulled up a menu of character replacements. ‘This is a good letter U,’ he said of a sparkling green weed leaf, assigning it.
‘It is emphatically not.’
Class let out to break. Most of the students were ushered outside for mandatory vitamin D exposure, something Matt often excused himself from by insisting that he needed the washroom ten minutes before the bell and then staying there through the lunch period, playing on his phone and smoking. This was one of those days – Mello rolled his eyes when Matt winked at him after winning a disruptive debate with the teacher over whether or not he should be allowed to leave, and slipped out, laptop under his arm and backpack slung over one shoulder, very obviously not coming back.
Matt was not opposed, necessarily, to playing some football on a quiet afternoon. He liked non-competitive barefoot walks in the grass, and punting a ball back and forth between a few kids under a sleepy sun. It could also be funny to watch Mello foul everyone and push people on his own team out of his way, intensely scowling, from a shady spot on the back steps. Mello was super funny when he played sports.
But, nah, he wanted to sit around a bit and be alone. It was hard to be alone in Wammy’s. Someone always wanted something: there was always a game being had, a test to take, a lecture to attend, a kid running in the hall, a puzzle on the floor. It was a hectic, manic environment. Sometimes it was just too fucking much.
Matt locked the bathroom door behind him. They had communal washrooms in Wammy’s, with shower stalls and benches like a locker room, so when he wanted privacy, he had to shut everyone else out and deal with the occasional knock and complaint, the odd talking to from Roger or Sammy Walt the janitor. He sat on one of the sinks, legs hanging down and feet swinging, and opened Age of Empires on his laptop.
He spent an unusually long time playing without ever hearing the bell go off – odd, since lunch should have ended and faded into Literature class (or whatever they were calling it this year – Study of Kira’s Top Five Favourite Mystery Novels, or something equally as absurd, probably) by now. Their curriculum was constantly being revised and, apparently, improved, so it was possible there’d been a schedule change he’d missed. Matt didn’t think the constant influx of fancy PhD tutors with fresh ideas made a lick of difference for the orphans, really: being at Wammy’s meant doing a lot of paperwork and not having a lot of fun. Every once in a while they got practical assignments, and then Matt would excel for a day because he was really good at problem solving, and inspired by real challenge. Sometimes they got to build bombs, which was the best. But usually he felt sluggish and confounded in lessons, clumsy. Studying was brutal, almost impossible.
Whatever L valued, Matt thought, it was a little too specific and close minded. Not that it mattered; he would rather be Mello’s theoretical Nobody than be a cop.
After a relaxed hour of rising suspicion, Matt packed up his things and jumped off the sink. It was quiet outside the door, and the halls were empty. It wasn’t until he turned the corner towards the magnificent wide staircase that rippled down from the upper levels to pool at the front door – that pretentious behemoth every child was dwarfed by upon arrival at Wammy’s – that he saw another person.
Linda was walking briskly from the other direction with a pinched expression, flip flops slapping the floor. Matt made his slow way onto the first step, head down, looking at a game of snake on his Nokia, only half paying her any attention.
‘Matt. There you are,’ she called, stopping beside him.
‘Yeah,’ Matt said, still stuck in his distracted daze. ‘Totally.’
‘You don’t know.’
‘Yeah, no. Probably not.’ Matt leant against the banister, still not facing her.
‘L is dead,’ Linda said.
‘Uh - shit.’
‘Near is L,’ Linda said. ‘Near is L now.’
Matt lost his game of snake and looked up, frowning. ‘Mello -’
Linda shook her head. ‘I think he left.’
It was like being tazed, hearing that. Matt bolted away from her, started hyperventilating as he climbed the stairs, sprinted down the hallway on the upper level. He bumped into and then threw Mello’s door open, making it bang against the wall, expecting horror or misery -
‘Hey!’ Mello said, looking up from folding a t-shirt. ‘Don’t fucking slam my door!’
Matt stared. ‘Linda said you left.’
‘I’m leaving,’ Mello said. ‘Fuck this fucking fucked up fucking...’ he shoved the shirt in his bag.
‘Why? Where are you going?’
Mello stormed across the room to open his dresser and pull out a pair of jeans, which he began to roll up. ‘L didn’t choose. He died. He didn’t choose.’
‘What?’
‘Seriously, Matt, breathe and sit down or something.’
Matt sat next to Mello’s half packed backpack, hands on his knees, slumping. ‘That’s not right,’ he said. ‘Why’s Near got the part, then?’ It was impossible that L hadn’t done the one thing he’d owed them, fulfilled the entire ridiculous purpose of their presence there: found a fucking successor.
‘I let him have it.’
‘That doesn’t sound like you.’
Mello was livid. He was grinding his teeth. ‘It’s what I did.’
‘Why? I don’t get it. I’m like, not following any of this. How’d L die?’
‘Well, Kira killed him, obviously, Matt.’
‘Why are you leaving? Stay.’ Mello didn’t own much. When he was packed, the room still looked the same. It sort of freaked Matt out to see how little impact the departure of Mello’s material presence had made. ‘Do you want some of my stuff or something?’ Matt asked, wildly searching for helpful words and coming up with nothing.
Mello closed his eyes tight and didn’t cry. Oh, he hadn’t cried in maybe 7 years. When he opened them again, there was Matt looking desperate and lost. Mello felt like he was doing to Matt what Wammy’s had done to Mello: rejecting him. ‘It’s for the best,’ Mello said. ‘I need to do things my own way.’
‘What things?’ Matt asked.
‘There’s no point being here anymore.’
‘Sure. Yeah, it’s not like you’re gonna get to succeed Near in the next 3 years. Unless he, like... steps out of the building and gets crushed immediately by, like, a meteor. But where the fuck else can you go? You might as well stay with me and be first for a while. Then we can be, like, engineers. Right?’
‘Matt,’ Mello said, picking up the backpack and putting it over his shoulders. ‘I’m taking this as an opportunity to prove myself.’
‘Why?’
‘If you don’t get it now, I doubt I can explain it to you,’ Mello snapped. ‘I’m going after Kira.’
‘Yeah. So, like, with what army?’
‘I’m sorry, Matt.’
‘No, fuck you. Where are you going? I’ll come.’
‘Just trust me,’ Mello implored him. ‘I have a plan.’
‘Vague.’ Matt deflated there on Mello’s bed, put his head in his hands. ‘Really fucking vague bullshit, that. Really bullshit.’
‘I agree,’ Mello said.
‘Like this is the worst day of my life and I’m an orphan.’
‘Ok. Bye,’ Mello said.
Matt didn’t move. His fingers were white against his scalp and he was gasping, he was crying, spilling water on the floor.