Chapter Text
Matt died with his wedding ring in his pocket. Mello knew; he was the one who took it out.
He hadn’t liked to wear it while he was working. “It makes me nervous,” he told him, once.
Rubber-gloved, Mello pulled the ring out. Wallet, paperclips, carton of Seven Stars, mostly full. A receipt, which tore when Mello pulled at it, because it was cemented at the bottom with blood. The drenched jeans fabric was like cardboard; Matt’s skin was like clay. His body’s skin. Matt was elsewhere. Long gone.
Mello was in the back of the ambulance, riding with the body. It wasn’t sound-proofed at all; the siren was so fucking loud, whanging around the steel walls like a bullet, driving into the sides of Mello’s head and into his ears.
“Hey,” he snapped at the driver, and when he didn’t hear him, hammered the dividing window with his palm. “Hey! Turn that shit off.”
“Sorry, boss.”
“Fuck’s sake. Fucking drive.”
In the silence, he turned again to look at him.
Mello didn’t have an eidetic memory, but he had a very good one. From childhood he had been able to lean against a moment and never forget it. He leant against this moment, now: the clattering ambulance, the eyelash on Matt’s cheek, the faded stripes of his jumper and the holes which interrupted the stripes. He was guarding himself against any possible future states of denial. Pragmatic, Mello thought, even though he wasn’t the self-deluding type.
Anyway, there wasn’t much to deny. Matt had not gone easily. He didn’t look peaceful, wouldn’t look like he was sleeping even if Mello closed his eyes for him, and so he didn’t.
()
Matt had wanted to get married because of Kira. Well, that’s what he’d said. In Mello’s opinion, he’d been looking for someone to marry him since he was about ten years old and washed up snot-nosed and puffy-eyed against Wammy’s wrought-iron gate.
“Who the hell is that?”
“Language, Mello.”
“I told you I’m not having another stupid roommate.”
Matt cried harder at this, prompting Watari to pat his shoulder awkwardly. “It’s just for a month, now. Don’t make trouble.”
“What h-happens after a month?”
“You’re not staying for a month,” Mello seethed, over the old man’s outstretched arm. “So don’t worry about it.”
Mello kept his peace for two days. On the third, while Matt was outside being coerced into a game of football, he gathered up his sparse belongings, threw them into the hallway, and locked the door. Satisfied, he lay back on his bed with a book and waited for weeping. What he got instead was dead silence, followed by the quiet clicking of the door lock being picked.
In five minutes Matt’s unwashed jersey stink was slinking into the room.
“Get out.”
“No.”
“This is my room.”
“It’s my room, too.” The pale face twisted. “Why do you hate me so much? Like, I don’t even know you.”
He had come to stand next to Mello to push his things back onto the top bunk. Up on tiptoe, his shirt rode up, giving Mello an eyeful of the livid bruises coating his stomach.
Startled, Mello said, “I don’t—hate you.”
“Okay…”
“... How’d you get in anyway?”
“Uh, a paperclip, I guess.”
This didn’t explain much; irritably, Mello watched the grubby ankles ascend the bunk ladder. He didn’t think he’d had a bath since he got here. The boy slept with all his things piled around him, like a rat in its nest. He still cried, but he did it quietly, so that Mello wasn’t too annoyed about it.
Like a spiderweb, his stranger’s voice came drifting thinly down from the ceiling: “I’ll show you how tomorrow, so, like. Please don’t throw my stuff away again.”
He sounded like a net full of holes. “Okay,” said Mello, taking pity.
“Okay,” Matt echoed faintly. “Thanks.”
Matt had always been good at breaking in. Mello’s room, Mello’s heart.
Mello bought the rings but he was the one who knelt, in the crust of the linoleum kitchen floor that they never cleaned.
“Mel,” Matt said, and Mello said, “For fuck’s sake, get off the floor.”
They went to city hall in masks. Everyone wore masks nowadays. It was the seventh year of Kira. L years in the grave. They stood in a short queue. There was a television above the clerk’s window, playing footage of Kira’s latest justice. The woman standing behind them in line saw Mello looking. “Fuck him,” she said to them, tiredly.
It went without saying that they were married under false identities, with false documents, and so the little scrap of paper they signed—Mello first, Matt second, carefully drawing the loops of his fake signature—was in Mello’s eyes denuded even further of any meaning it might have held.
Matt stuck it in his jacket pocket. On the curb outside, he said, “Wow.”
“Do you feel different?”
“Maybe. Do you not?”
Mello shrugged. “Has the whole world changed? Is the sky a different color?”
“Fuck off, man, seriously, like… could you not be a dick for ten seconds? Could you let me be happy?”
In the empty underground lot, Mello conceded to holding hands. Just for a minute. Mello’s right, Matt’s left. Their non-dominant hands flapping uselessly in the stale air of the garage.
That night, when Matt had him on his back, he panted in his ear, “Mihael.” Mello scratched up the thin, familiar back. Jeevas, he thought.
()
On the plane back, Mello began to feel sick. Boeing Dreamliner. Purple light. He was in economy, and Matt was in the hold. The sun rose and fell too quickly, and he couldn’t get to sleep. The smells of breakfast being served induced stomach-turning nausea, and finally, ten minutes before the descent to Los Angeles, he went into the bathroom to throw up.
Matt and him had sat in the same row, on the way to Japan. Purely a coincidence. They hadn’t paid for assigned seating. Out in the aisle seat, exhaustion seized Mello by the neck; he slept and woke and slept, woke to find Matt swapped into the middle seat, his head picked up from Matt’s shoulder.
“You kept falling asleep on that lady,” Matt said blandly, oblivious to Mello’s glare. “I felt bad for her.”
Doggedly, Matt followed him down the aisle to the bathroom, and then into the bathroom itself.
“Sorry, did you want to watch me take a piss?”
“Nah, not really.” Matt yawned massively, drenching Mello with stale breath. “Fuck, I wanna have a smoke so bad.”
“Don’t you fucking dare.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You want a line or something?”
“You brought—?”
“Yeah, man, no sweat.” From his hoodie pocket, Matt extracted an expertly resealed candy bar. Slitting the wrapper open, he tapped out a bump of powder onto his wrist, and then gestured at Mello to do the same for him.
“It’s an unnecessary risk.”
“It’s literally not. They only care if you’re packing like, a Beretta.”
“You should’ve told me.”
“Uh-huh,” grunted Matt, reaching out to hold Mello’s arm still. Digging the tip of his oily nose into Mello’s wrist, he said happily, “You’re such a square. Still.”
“Hurry up, before it goes all over the fucking place. This fucking turbulence.”
Afterwards they raised their heads and looked at one another. Matt was ghastly in the blue light: eyes pouchy, face stubbly. He looked about forty, instead of what he was, which was twenty-eight. Young by anyone’s standards but theirs. L died when he was twenty-eight. He’d looked ancient, too. Mello should’ve turned his line down and made him get some fucking sleep instead.
“You look like shit,” Matt said.
“Thank you.”
“Anytime. Also, you missed some.”
He took the liberty of rubbing the residue into Mello’s gum himself. He was wearing his ring. His index finger tasted like pretzels and tobacco. He’d gotten into the disgusting habit of chewing tobacco. Despite Mello’s bitching and potent stink-eye, he kept on at it, first in the last months of Los Angeles, and then all the time they were in Tokyo, right through to the end. Mello never did manage to break him of it.
()
From the airport, Mello went straight on to the house on Mariposa. There was no need to linger. Their people would be on the runway, taking care of things. The body would go to Rose and Sixth and its deep freezers. Mello’s preferred parking spot.
He stumbled around the house with one hand on his own forehead. He really was sick, warm and feverish. When he spoke his voice cracked like old paint.
One-handed, he dialed one of their dispatchers, then pinched the phone between his shoulder and cheek, so he could haul Matt’s computer racks into the bathtub.
“Good morning.”
“Molly.”
“It’s good to have you back with us.”
Mello closed his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve got something coming in at Rose. In an hour or two, maybe.”
“I have it down.”
“Listen, I might—I need to get out of here for a while. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”
She said nothing, waiting for him to go on.
“The.” He had to stop to clear his throat. The sight of the server lights going dark in the water was somehow profoundly upsetting. “The body coming in today is important. For evidence. I need you to keep it for me. Have it embalmed, if I’m not back in time. Whatever you need to do. I might be a few months. Maybe a year, at the outset.”
“Yes,” she said, once it was clear he had nothing more to say.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Before he could hang the line, she said quickly, “Mello—are you alright?”
She had never asked him this before. She wasn’t one for chat, which was one of the reasons Mello liked her. Coming from her, the question was as intimate as a stranger’s finger stroking his cheek. Together, they sat in silence, contemplating her trespass of his boundaries.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, finally, although that wasn’t the question she had asked.
()
Matt stood over the tub, waving the showerhead like a fairy wand over the mass of chips and circuit boards. Messy-headed angel of death. Mello leant against the doorframe, watching him. He could tell from his posture that he was still mostly asleep. Mornings were never Matt’s time. He’d let him nap in the car, later.
“Almost done.”
“Couldn’t you just break them?”
“This way is better,” Matt said. “Wipes the memory out.”
()
The water in the tub brimmed, overflowed, and made a black layer on the bathroom floor. Mello had forgotten to turn the tap off.
He was standing in front of the closet, rifling through pockets, thinking what he usually thought as he cleared out a house: now this could be anyone’s jeans. This could be anyone’s shirt. The crumpled marriage certificate fell out onto the floor. He went over to the kitchen and held it over the lit gas range. This could be anyone’s jacket.
One of his phones rang; distracted, he picked up without checking the number.
“Yeah.”
An icy little voice said, “Mello.”
He hung up. He had nothing to say to Near, about Matt or anything. They were number one and number two. Nothing had changed.
Maybe it would have been better to be like Near: friendless, perpetually alone, instead of what Mello had done.
God felt very close. He pressed His finger against Mello’s forehead, and said, You.
Mello hadn’t slept in forty hours, was so tired he felt concussed, but he didn’t sit. He couldn’t sit. He was a shark in deep waters. If he sat he’d drown; he’d never make it, and he had to make it.
Glancing heavenwards, he thought, If You wanted me to die, why did You make me this way?
As he left the house, the water was creeping silently across the living room floor. By the time the leak was discovered and the tap shut off, the house was so damaged that the mob was never able to use it as a safehouse again.
()
“This place isn’t so bad.”
“It’s a place.”
“Needs some furniture though. And a hot tub. Why couldn’t we ever get a place with a hot tub?”
“You’re the only person in L.A. who wants a hot tub.”
“That’s blatantly false. Go to the Hollywood Hills sometime.”
“Go sit in the tub if you like baths so much.”
“Maybe I will later, if you’re not busy dyeing your hair for ten hours.”
“Excuse me?”
“Uh, nothing. Leave me alone, I’m on Craigslist. Where am I ordering again?”
“Mm… Mariposa. Mariposa and 21st.”
“Got it. Queen bed good?”
()
In the dregs of a chilly Friday evening, Mello crossed the border at San Ysidro. He was flushed and sweating, reeling with sickness, but he was white and crossing towards Mexico and so the guards waved him through and thought no more of him.
Just for a few months, he thought. Just to tide things over. He crossed over. He would not return to the US for another five years.