Chapter Text
Winter in North Dakota was fucking miserable. Who had ever heard of a place where a person’s goddamn eyelashes froze?
Although Mello didn’t mind it. He’d come from a colder place than this. Not that he ever told Matt this outright; Matt had just pieced it together from a few things, like Mello’s snotty attitude and self-righteous self-reliance, his passive-aggressive refusal to complain about anything, ever.
Mello was standing over him. “Could you turn that shit off?” he said. Matt followed his pointed finger to the television, which he had forgotten was on.
Neither of them ever said “Hey” or “Hi” or anything like that anymore. There was no point in greeting one another when neither of them ever went anywhere, ever really left. Their days grew on them like the beards on their faces. Matt hardly recognized Mello underneath his. Some days he hardly recognized himself.
Matt sniffled. “I’m watching it.”
“Are you?”
“Yeah.” He coughed with phlegm and a vengeance into his sleeve.
“Are you sick?”
“Dunno.” Matt picked the remote out from behind his back, where it had been wedged for the last few hours, and hit the power. “Sorry.”
Mello took it out of his hand, and turned it back on.
His shoulders were set tight as he trudged past Matt, heading out back to split up some firewood.
Matt did not get off the couch, and he did not offer to help. Good on Mello for remaining all sunshine and daisies, but Matt was suffering. His mood was suffering. His sex drive was suffering. Shambling around the house in doubled-up pairs of long underwear tucked into doubled-up pairs of knit socks, Matt looked, felt, and was completely unfuckable.
That, at least, should’ve been a problem for Mello. ‘Cause who the fuck else was he gonna fuck out here? And Mello needed fucking, the horny motherfucker. Chastity might’ve been the only thing he ever failed at.
On screen, Vanna White walked on stage in high heels. The jazzy Wheel of Fortune theme was giving Matt a headache. He lowered the volume. From outside came the ch-chunk, ch-chunk sound of the axe biting wood.
Mello had actually tried it, for about three months when he was fourteen and Matt was fifteen. Watching Mello deny himself just for kicks was the worst fucking ordeal of Matt’s teenage life. In the weeks after he’d turned fifteen, Matt had been starting most of his mornings rock-hard from wet dreams of Mello throwing a pale thigh over him and riding his dick. At that point they hadn’t yet done so much as dry-humped, or made out, or anything. Matt was burning up. Odd exposed parts of Mello aroused him, became masturbation-worthy material: his sparse eyelashes or cracked elbows, the grubby sole of his foot. Shifting around in the upper bunk, listening to Mello shifting around in the lower, Matt had fevered fantasies of Mello breaking his dry spell with Matt; taking Matt by the neck and cramming him facedown into his own pillow.
“I’d like to solve?—Yes?—‘It Was The Best Of Times.’—Very nice, very—”
In the end Mello had chosen to disappoint his God with some jocky older high-school guy. As for Matt, he’d had to settle for having his first encounter with a man years later, in an uncomfortably well-lit alley that smelled of laundry detergent and Chinese food. It was the sloppiest blowjob Matt ever gave. In the moment, he distinctly remembered thinking that he was glad it wasn’t Mello’s cock in his mouth. Matt was convinced that a guy like him would only have one shot at a guy like Mello. He needed it to count; he needed to blow his fucking mind.
After Matt had reunited with Mello, he was beyond relieved that Mello wanted to sleep with him. He didn’t know what the fuck he’d have done if Mello refused him—beat off until his dick chafed off? Fuck off and be by himself again? And then what, kill himself?
The thing was, nobody actually wanted to hear, “I’d die for you.” It was romantic in theory, but very, very unsexy in practice.
Even on the best of days, Matt wasn’t sure what Mello would like to hear from him. Recently it seemed like all he wanted Matt to open his mouth for was to announce things like, “The house is clear,” “Rod wants to talk to you,” or “Abernathy showed up in Philadelphia.” Rod was their (Mello’s) boss. Jack Abernathy was the man they’d been hunting for the past three months, because Rod wanted him dead and Mello liked a challenge. The Philadelphia tip (a month’s worth of work for Matt) had turned out to be a bust, just another dead end. The feds had squirreled Abernathy away deep in witness protection in exchange for screwing the mob. He was proving nigh-impossible to find—not that that was stopping Mello.
The floor shook. Mello had come in from the snow and was stamping his feet just inside the door. He was wearing one of those fur-lined ear-flapped hats and about ten pounds of flannel. He looked like a fucking hick. His lips were aggressively chapped from the cold, and yet—and always fucking yet—Matt wanted desperately to kiss them.
He tried to convey it with his eyes. Making eye contact with Mello was difficult for him these days. Mello always seemed to be in a scary mood.
Mello’s gaze rang and glanced off his like steel off steel.
“I’m going into town,” he said. “You want anything?”
“Nah, I’m good.”
The usual pause passed, during which Matt wished Mello would ask him to come with, and Mello thought unknowable thoughts. On the TV, someone won a trip to Spain.
“Okay,” was all Mello said. He stumped out of Matt’s vision. Matt heard the screen door bang shut, and then the sound of one of their two junky pickup trucks’ engine turning over.
Matt was in a poetic, melancholy mood. These sounds, he decided, were like the firing of the starting pistol in their race to fail to communicate. Then the sound of the truck faded away down the road into white noise, which was the sound of Mello winning.
Matt was alone again. He closed his eyes.
()
He startled awake to a bang. The TV was still on. News tickers and police sirens swam slowly across the screen. Either someone was coming to kill him, or Mello had just dropped a shit-ton of stuff.
Matt changed the channel and shuffled to his feet. Palming a pistol half-heartedly from under the couch cushions, he went into the kitchen, where he was greeted by a can of tomato sauce rolling heavily into his foot.
Matt put the pistol on the kitchen counter and bent over and picked up one can, and then another. He was avoiding looking at Mello, but was keenly aware of him as he stormed around Matt and into the bathroom, where he threw the door shut hard enough to rattle.
Matt finished picking up the things—pasta, potatoes, a 24-piece pack of frozen chicken thighs. He arranged them into a haphazard group on the counter. It was a lot of stuff. Mello had probably tried to carry the whole thing with his right arm. He was always pushing himself, as if he could beat his way into healing like kicking down a door. Matt wondered if he should try to make dinner, or if that would just make Mello even more defensive.
He gave him fifteen minutes in the bathroom before going over and knocking.
“Hey.”
No response.
“Dude. I need to take a dump.”
The door unlocked. Mello pushed past him. Matt went in, closing the door behind him. He took the bottle of Tylenol out of the medicine cabinet and emptied it into his hand, counting pills, doing math in his head. Mello had taken three. Pain wasn’t too bad, then.
Shaking the pills back into the bottle, he waited an appropriate amount of time, flushed the toilet, and came out. Mello was in the kitchen, back to him, taking the tops off cans (left-handed) with violent movements of his shoulder.
So much for making dinner. So much for mercy. Matt didn’t know why he bothered. Mello never fucking wanted it, anyway.
()
Mello chilled out a little after dinner. Sliding headfirst into a codeine high, he tolerated increasing amounts of Matt’s clinginess: first Matt scooting over from his side of the couch, then Matt’s hand tugging down the collar of his shirt, then Matt’s breath on his shoulder, and then his mouth moving tentatively over the skin of his throat. But he didn’t really try to touch Matt much, which made Matt sad. Matt eventually pulled off and left Mello on the couch with his wet neck, zombied-out in front of a Golden Girls marathon, and went into the kitchen to do dishes.
Turning the water as hot as he could tolerate, he watched his skin scald.
Mello had licked one of his injuries, once. They were both kids still. During one of their regular escapes from the house, Matt had sliced up the skin of his palm scrambling over the fence ringing the yard.
He cradled his aching hand to his chest. The wound was bright with blood. When Mello saw that he'd fallen behind, he turned and marched up to him. He wrenched the hand away with the air of authority that always sent Matt limp. Matt watched helplessly as Mello spit into his hand and rubbed it in roughly, and when Matt winced, lowered his head and licked the coppery cut. A shiver split him like an arrow, so violent that he was sure Mello felt the spasm from where he was holding his wrist.
Even now Matt remembered it vividly: the contrast of the pain against Mello’s warm, impossibly soft tongue; the little streak of red left on it as it retracted back into Mello’s mouth.
“It’ll keep it clean,” Mello said, to the silent question in Matt’s eye, which answered nothing at all. At that age, Mello wouldn’t cop to liking boys yet, and Matt didn’t know what he liked at all. They were little idiots.
Years later, Matt had brought this up while Mello was licking something else, and was pleasantly surprised to find that he remembered. Propped up on his elbows, thighs hot around Mello’s head, he panted, “Remember when we were kids, and you like, licked my hand this one time?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wait, really?”
“Sure, Matt. I wasn’t exactly going around licking a lot of people back then. Why, did that awaken something in you?”
“Yeah, it awakened me thinking you were, like, a fucking psycho…” He lost his train of thought as Mello took him nearly all the way down. “... wannabe vampire, or something.”
Mello pulled back up, laughing. “But you were into it, Jeevas.” He ran his tongue around the head of Matt’s dick, grazing his teeth lightly over it. “Want me to do it again?”
Matt paled. “Do not cut me in the dick.”
“Here, then.” Before Matt could react, Mello bit him in the thigh, hard enough to sting, and then soothed his tongue over the skin as blood rushed to the surface, one hand teasing Matt’s balls.
“Oh—shit, yeah—”
“Hm?”
“Fuck, please do that again, like...”
“You want me to blow you, or bite you? Don’t want to get confused.”
“Dude. Too much.”
Mello managed to multitask. Matt’s legs were bruised to hell the next morning. It hurt to shove them into his jeans.
“Fuck,” said Matt, after the ordeal of getting dressed was complete. “Why’d I think it was a good idea to let you do that?”
“I dunno,” said Mello. He was still in his underwear, sitting at the kitchen table and watching Matt mince around. Pleased as the cat that got the cream. “Sometimes you get stupid around me.”
It was true then. Still true now.
Matt winced, pulling his hands out of the water. He’d been zoning out, and now they were smarting with pain and looked a scary beet-red. Running cold water over them hurt more. He gave up on the rest of the dishes. His hands were somehow already freezing by the time he went back out. Mello was snoring, arms crossed over his chest.
Matt double-checked he was asleep. When he was sure, he said to him, “I hate this.”
Mello didn’t stir.
“I wanna leave,” added Matt. I want us to go back to normal. He wasn’t able to say it. Not even with Mello asleep.
The roar of canned laughter was the sound of Matt pulling ahead in their stupid fucking dead-end race.
Matt tucked several blankets over Mello, and turned the television off.
()
They weren’t in North Dakota because of Abernathy. They were only stuck here because, after Mello had gotten shot, the Higher Ups thought they needed to lay low for a while.
Matt hadn’t needed to be told twice. He’d driven out of town like a bat out of fucking hell, Mello laying in the back and leaking all over Matt’s custom leather seats, while Matt’s chest fizzed with adrenaline like a shook-up Coke can.
Mello was shot twice. Once in the hip, once in his right arm, an inch or two below the elbow. His hip only got nicked and healed up okay, but his arm was still pretty fucked up. Nowadays he drove left-handed, constantly squeezing and releasing a rubber stress ball in his right to help build strength in the torn-up arm muscle. In one month, he had taught himself to do everything left-handed: drive, write, smoke, cook, shoot. Mello’s teflon adaptability was like a superpower. He would’ve really shone in prehistoric times. Matt could imagine him hunched over a fire, fashioning an innovative spear out of flint and hair and grit.
He was getting a little better, Matt decided—not that Mello bothered to keep him informed. He’d seen him keep his hand shut in a fist for about fifteen seconds or so.
The thought suddenly occurred to Matt: did he jack off with his left hand now?
The idle curiosity boiled off soon enough, left Matt’s chest a simmering pot of rage. So what, Matt wasn’t even good as Mello’s non-dominant hand? Matt’s fucking mouth wasn’t good enough for him, the cocky little fuck?
Half-awake, Matt reached angrily for himself under the sweaty cave of blankets. It should’ve been Mello’s mouth there. Mello owed him at least that, for getting him out of L.A., for tying the first tourniquet of Matt’s life over his slippery, blown-up arm, for having to endure the thirty-hour nightmare where he really, honest to God thought that Mello might die.
Matt’s hands smelled like blood for a week, from where Mello had gotten under his fingernails and couldn’t be scrubbed out. Christ’s sake.
Matt could be adult about this, okay. He was chill with admitting that that whole situation had scared the shit out of him—if only Mello were willing to have a fucking conversation, instead of retreating behind his personal iron curtain of Competence and Cool and O-fucking-kay. But what the hell did Mello expect from him? To pretend forever that Matt had not indeed helped save his life? Like that was what wasn’t cool in Mello’s books, that was one step too far over the line. Fuck’s sake, Matt would’ve given Mello any of his organs without hesitation. If Mello didn’t know that, he was a dumbass. If that freaked Mello out, maybe he needed to grow the hell up.
You know what Matt even did? When the thirty hours were up and the doctor came out and told him Mello was stable and that he could go in? Matt fucking waited. He sat on the hands that had trembled for Mello, and he waited, because he wanted to give Mello time to put himself together. So that Mello would feel comfortable. So that he wouldn’t have to live with the shame of showing himself naked and vulnerable to Matt—a sight that Matt had of course already seen, when Mello had been busy threatening to die on his backseat.
And now fucking Mello was fucking icing him.
Asshole.
Matt came with whatever the opposite of relief was.
Sleep was hard to find that night.