Matt awoke slowly. He reached for the nightstand and groped blindly for a cigarette, but found only a pile of empty boxes. That prompted him to lift his head groggily and crack an eye open.
The other flew open in surprise as well when he spotted Mello lying next to him, still asleep. He stilled, forgetting all about cigarettes. He almost never caught Mello sleeping—the blonde was both a morning person and a very light sleeper. On the rare occasions that Matt managed to wake up first, his stirring usually roused Mello within seconds.
He watched Mello sleep for several long minutes, a contented smile slowly blooming on his face. Everyone took on a more gentle appearance when they slept, but Matt had always thought that Mello looked the most different. He had a pretty face, but while awake he managed to hide it quite effectively with the sneers and glares he perpetually wore on it. But when he was asleep—especially if he was on his left side, as he was now, hiding the scar—he was beautiful. The surrender of sleep wiped away his driving passion and relentless energy, and left behind someone who looked soft, delicate and innocent. He looked like an angel, his hair a golden spray of sunlight shining into the room.
Matt grinned to himself. That train of thought would have offended Mello. He worked hard to be able to present an intimidating appearance to people twice his age and size. He didn't appreciate having adjectives like "delicate" applied to him. But Matt could think whatever he wanted in the privacy of his own mind. A rare sight: vulnerable Mihael with no defenses up. Mark the date and time. It would likely be months before he saw this again. 8:32 am, November thirteenth.
Then Matt froze. November thirteenth—that was already an important date, independent of Mello. November thirteenth was Death Day, a personal holiday that appeared on no one else's calendar.
Exactly two years ago today was the day he had died.
Matt blinked rapidly, trying to clear the cobwebs of sleep from his mind. How had it snuck up on him? Last year he'd felt it looming over him for a month in advance. He'd celebrated with a night of quiet sobriety and self-reflection that left him utterly depressed and itching to crawl out of his own skin by morning. He wondered what he could do to celebrate it this year that would slip under Mello's radar. All days were sober days now, so that was a given. Maybe he could burn a symbolic candle, or something like that. In any case, he'd better figure it out before Mello woke up and ordered him out on errands.
Matt still didn't really understand how he had arrived at Death Day. In a way it had probably begun when he left Wammy's House at age fourteen. He'd been so used to living under Mello's rule, with the blonde dictating every second of his waking life, that he'd been completely at a loss without him. He went back to the United States, but it didn't feel like home anymore. No one was obligated to take an interest in him now, and no one did.
The sheer size and unfeeling harshness of the real world hit him like a slap across the face. Lost and shell-shocked, Matt limped through his first few months aimlessly. He was often plagued by his memories, especially those of Mello. Even though he knew that leaving Wammy's had been the only way to save his sanity, he still missed him. Recollections of the happy times they had spent together became demons that stalked him in the night, tormenting him with the knowledge of what he had had and lost.
Drugs, when he discovered them, had come as a great relief. When he was high, he didn't have to think about anything.
Matt began systematically suppressing thoughts that caused him pain. He broke old habits one by one and threw out everything that had sentimental value, even his sunglasses. He applied himself rigorously to unlearning the deductive thinking patterns that had been ingrained in him at Wammy's, and ruthlessly buried his memories of Mello. Over time, it became second nature. Matt slowly stabilized and became a new person, one that was completely disconnected from his past. He made a few friends, picked up a girlfriend, and got a job. He sank into apathy, but accepted it because it was better than misery. His days were tolerable as long as nothing threatened his drug supply.
Maybe the turning point had come when he first discovered downers. It started innocently enough one day when he swallowed a handful of Valium to stave off sickness until he could find a good vein to shoot in, but he quickly discovered that those little pills and their tranquilizer brethren delivered exactly the dose of oblivion that he craved. From then on, tiny prescription bottles became his almost constant companion.
His first blackout had been a terrifying experience. There was a yawning three-hour blank in his mind that plagued him for days with what if's. But then he realized that he really had no use for those memories anyway. So what did it matter? He developed what bordered on a morbid fascination with pushing his limits, seeing how many pills he could pop and still wake up the next morning. It was almost a challenge, Matt daring the world to do its worst. His girlfriend dumped him with the complaint that he was like a zombie, but he picked up another one pretty quickly. There seemed to be a certain type of girl that was drawn to unsociable junkies, just like there were those that liked starving artists and out-of-work actors. They thought he was mysterious, and that he must be secretly sensitive. They thought that if they tried hard enough, they could save him from himself.
Death Day hadn't begun with anything so melodramatic as a suicide attempt. It was just the familiar hunt for oblivion, finally taken too far. One moment he was hazily wondering how long he'd be knocked out if he swallowed the rest of the bottle of sleeping pills, and the next he was waking up with a splitting headache and struggling to open eyelids that felt glued together. He took in the bright hospital lights, the I.V., and the tube down his throat, and then sobriety hit him like a sledgehammer. He moaned.
Doctors swarmed him, prodding and poking, measuring his vitals. He was sweating and shaking, already in the grip of withdrawal. One of the nurses pulled the tube out of his throat, and he immediately vomited over the side of the bed. Eventually the room emptied out again, and Matt was left alone with a single doctor. She was a middle-aged, stocky woman with a practical air about her. She made him count her fingers, say his name, track her pen with his eyes. Finally she seemed satisfied that he was with her, and started talking.
"You overdosed," she said flatly. "Your heart stopped for five full minutes. You were technically dead."
"Traitor heart," muttered Matt. In that moment, he didn't know if he meant for stopping, or for starting again.
"The only reason you survived without brain damage is because you were in the first stages of hypothermia by the time it happened." She paused, allowing a moment for that pronouncement to seek in.
Matt blinked dully. "Hypo…" His mind felt sluggish, and he willed it to pick back up to speed. "Why? How?"
The look of pity that she gave him cut deeper than any lecture could have. "Because you were lying in an unheated apartment under an open window during a snowstorm. You were covered in a pile of snow by the time your girlfriend found you."
Matt stared at her listlessly. It was too early for snow. Unless… "When is it?" he asked.
"November sixteenth," she answered. "You've been here for three days."
Three days didn't even come close to rectifying Matt's perceptions. He had thought it was still September. From the vantage point of sobriety, it was truly frightening how little of the past several months he could recall.
The doctor fixed her eyes on Matt's arm and pressed her lips together in a thin, disapproving line. Matt realized that the sleeveless hospital gown left his track marks embarrassingly visible, but he didn't have the energy to move and hide them. What was the point in faking dignity when his whole life consisted of an unending string of shameful moments? Let her pass her judgment; it was no different than his own.
"We restarted your heart, but we almost lost you again when we couldn't find a good vein for the I.V. Then you almost died from complications due to withdrawal three separate times." She shook her head at him sadly, and Matt cringed inwardly. Somehow she had adopted the same tone that Roger used when a student had disappointed him, and it was dreadfully effective. "Listen. It was a miracle that you survived. Don't waste the second chance you've been given—get help." She left him with a stack of flyers for treatment centers.
They let his girlfriend in to see him after that. Katie clutched his hand with wide, fearful eyes, and sobbed out how afraid she had been. She made him promise to be more careful in the future. He agreed obediently and hugged her, but his inner cynic was already tearing her apart. She said those words, but she was high even now. Besides, she was only with him because he subconsciously reminded her of her older brother, who had died of an overdose three years ago. Trying to save Matt was her way of compensating for not saving him. He brushed the tears off of her cheeks gently and sighed. She was a good girl, far better than he deserved, but he couldn't summon up any real feelings for her. He didn't know why. There was obviously something wrong with him.
He remained in the hospital for three more days. He was sick the whole time and had never felt so wretched in his life, but the worst part was that his mind was active the whole time. Even his brief death hadn't been enough to dull his mental faculties. He did not consider this a blessing. He had long ago realized that having a mind like his was more of a curse than a gift when it came to living in the world outside of Wammy's. The speed of his mind guaranteed that no one could relate to him, leaving him perpetually isolated. It also forced him to remain agonizingly conscious of how pathetic his life was. Matt was acutely aware that he was the only junkie loser that Wammy's House had ever produced. There had been a few criminals, of course, but they were brilliant criminals. Matt was the only one to leave the House and do…nothing. He sometimes pictured the sorrowful look Roger's face would bear if he could see him now, and flinched.
Left alone with nothing to distract him from himself, he began to wonder how he had ended up in this situation. He was bright and well-educated; he could do anything he wanted. And yet, here he was, hugging his knees morosely and puking into a trash can. He thought back over his life and tried to put his finger on exactly when he had gone wrong. Drugs weren't to blame; they were symptoms of a deeper problem. Had Mello made him like this? Matt was now far enough removed from Wammy's House that he could revisit those memories without feeling much pain. Mello's fingers entwining with his, secrets whispered into his ear, laughter—they felt like moments from another lifetime, from a stranger's life, unimaginably far removed from his current reality. Mello had pushed him hard, systematically breaking down his will until he was dependent on the blonde for nearly everything. It was insane, in retrospect—but Matt was just as responsible as his former friend. It took two for it to reach that point. Living with Mello had been difficult, but it wasn't Mello that had made him this way. What had, then? Being an orphan? The traumatic loss of his parents that was one of his earliest memories? Truth be told, there didn't seem to be enough suffering in his life to drive him to this point. Orphanhood notwithstanding, he had had a comfortable life that had given him many opportunities. A lot of people in the world had had tougher breaks than him, but they weren't sharing his fate.
His thoughts drifted to Katie, and recognized that her circumstances were reminiscent of his own. She had been born into money, sent to private schools, given lessons in ballet, tennis, piano, art, and anything else that she wanted. She had been attending Harvard two short years ago. She had led a privileged existence, with her junkie older brother being the only element that didn't fit. But now she was his partner in this life. She had fallen almost as far as he had, and also without a clear trigger. Matt realized that it could happen to anyone. The world was a machine that ground on inexorably, and some people were crushed between its cogs. It didn't matter who, because it was completely arbitrary. There were no reasons, no sense or logic behind it, no greater purpose. It was just cause and effect tumbling forward blindly. Matt realized that the whole world was meaningless.
Still, he had to live in it, so he turned his intellect to the task of making himself less miserable. He had done this many times in the past without making any headway, and today was no different. The problem was too deep, too fundamental. The problem was simply him, Matt himself. Something in his combination of nature and nurture had proven toxic, and he was powerless to correct it. And if his mind wasn't up to the task, then whose was? No one. People were sometimes damned by genetics and events that occurred before they even developed a conscious mind, and there was nothing they could do to change it. Alone in the dark, shivering so hard he could barely catch his breath, Matt came to the conclusion that life, itself, was hopeless.
Eventually he got well enough to leave the hospital. He broke up with Katie, dipped into his Wammy's House trust fund for enough money to buy a car, and drove west until he felt like stopping. He ended up in L.A., where he stayed clean for about a month before relapsing. He found a different set of drugs and exercised more self-control this time around; he couldn't face such painful withdrawal again. Deep, black despair settled over him like a familiar blanket. He fell into a new routine and marked time, waiting patiently for death to come and put an end to the meaningless cycle.
Death hadn't. Mello had.
Mello had walked brazenly back into his life and shattered every conclusion he had reached over the past five years. Mello was the master of his own destiny, he showed it with his every action and word. He was the living proof that Matt had been wrong.
Two years after Death Day, Matt felt like a completely different person. The world no longer looked so barren or meaningless. But the world hadn't changed—he was even back in the same old New York City. That meant that the change had to be within him. He looked inside of himself, trying to quantify and characterize what was different, and he found it almost immediately. He could control his future, he could see that now. Mello was showing the way. He could be happy despite being Matt; after all, he'd done it in the past for years, hadn't he? He could wake up and find himself in a better situation one day—and he had. There was a single word that comprised all of that, he realized, and it was hope.
Matt suddenly found himself resisting the urge to clap his hands in delight. It was as if he'd just found buried treasure within his own mind, uncovered glittering diamonds after years of shoveling through barren sand and rotting seaweed. Somehow, Mello had caused this change in him just by being nearby. Matt marveled. Was this the much-vaunted "power of love" he sometimes heard people talk about?
Then the second major realization of the morning broke over him, and he gaped in amazement. Mello could have such a powerful effect on him because what he felt for Mello was more than love; at least, it was more than what other people seemed to mean when they used the word. Mello was actually a part of him. He was the shining sun that Matt's world orbited, his guiding light, his own personal alpha and omega. Mello was his whole universe. That had been just as true when left Wammy's as it was now, though he hadn't understood it at the time. Learning to live without Mello had meant doing more than shelving the memories they had made together. It meant amputating every part of his personality that the blonde had touched. But Mello had become such an important part of him that there was hardly anything left by the time he finished. No wonder he had been miserable! For the sake of survival he had brutally eviscerated his own psyche, hacking off huge sections of his mind and leaving a decaying shadow of his former self in its place. That was the root cause that had led to so many painful effects in following years. In this sudden moment of clarity, the progression of events seemed perfectly linear and straightforward. He had lost sight of everything, even himself, slipping farther and farther until his sanity hung by a precarious thread. Drugs were the fuel on the fire, eroding his physical health and making the lows so much harder to bear. His misery and apathy had increased with every passing day because it was literally impossible to function with that much of his personality suppressed.
Yes, it had been a long, difficult, lonely winter of the heart. But now it was over. Mello was here, and they had sworn on each others' true names that they would stay together for the rest of their lives. Matt didn't have to worry about going back, ever. Spring had arrived at last.
Matt said, "Oh." A massive weight lifted off of his shoulders as a train of thought that had been running for five years finally reached its conclusion. Mello was the answer. Hell, Mello was the question. Mello was…everything. He had finally, at long last, managed to understand! He said "Oh" again. Then he started to laugh.
It was more than enough to wake Mello. The blonde opened his eyes and immediately narrowed them when he saw Matt's face hanging over his. Tension coated his features, driving away the gentleness that had been there only moments before. It reminded Matt that he wasn't the only one who had suffered during their time apart. He didn't know specifics—they had a tacit agreement to let the most sordid details of their pasts lie—but he did know that Mello had been on the very brink of a meltdown into madness during his time with the Mafia. That was when he had developed this twitchy defensiveness that hadn't existed when they were kids. He wasn't used to being able to show any weakness.
"What are you doing?" he demanded.
Matt knew he was still wearing a huge, goofy grin on his face, and found that he didn't care. "I'm smiling," he said. "See?"
Mello's expression hovered between irritation and curiosity for a moment, but in the end he took his cue from Matt's lighthearted mood. His lips twitched. "Awake and smiling before noon," he mused. "Who are you, and what have you done with my Matt?"
"I'm just happy," Matt replied. "Because it's spring."
Mello arched an eyebrow at him. "Spring?" He yawned and rubbed his eye absently. "It's…what…November thirteenth? We're within two weeks of both Halloween and Thanksgiving." Amusement danced in his eyes as he regarded Matt. "You do realize that today's pretty much as autumnal as you can get, right?"
Matt shook his head. There was no way he could express what had just taken place in his head in words. But at the same time, there was probably no real need to. Mello had doubtless comprehended the way they balanced each other out ages ago.
Death Day suddenly seemed obsolete and stupid. What was he doing dwelling on that when he was lying in a warm bed next to Mello? "Today is Spring Day," he declared. "We'll celebrate it every year, just the two of us. Kiss me." He didn't wait for a response, but tilted Mello's face towards him so he could lean in to deliver the softest, gentlest, most lingering kiss he could manage.
When he drew back, Mello's eyes fluttered open slowly to gaze up at him. The defensiveness was gone; Matt had managed to disarm him. "'kay," said Mello. "Just so we're clear, you're aware that I have no idea what you're talking about, aren't you?" When Matt didn't reply, Mello shook his head in bemusement as he accepted that he wasn't going to get an answer. "But okay. We'll celebrate this nonsensical Spring Day of yours right in the middle of November. Why not?" He lifted a hand to brush Matt's disarrayed bangs back behind his ear, then traced his jawbone gently with his fingertips. "It's nice to see you smile like this," he added softly. "I don't see it enough."
"You'll see it more often now," Matt promised.
Mello looked pleased. "I'll hold you to that." Then he grinned wryly. "So how does one celebrate Spring Day? Not with a picnic, I hope. It's cold as hell outside."
Matt hadn't thought that far ahead. He smirked. "I have some ideas. We won't have to move far."
Mello snorted in amusement. "In that case, so have I. Why don't you start with another of those kisses? That wasn't half bad."
"Okay," agreed Matt obediently. His words, when they came, were muffled against the other man's lips. "Happy Spring Day, Mel."