Title: Bromine
Description: Sometimes it felt more like a noose. Mello-centric
Pairings: Slight MattMello
Rating: T
Warnings: Potential manga/anime spoilers, kinda gritty
Disclaimer: If I owned Death Note (which I don't sadly), Matt would've had a tremendous amount more of screen time, L would've evaded death and the whole show would've lasted more than 37 episodes.
A/N: Well the muse-fairy strikes again! This time, a more Mello based piece with some MattMello (or Metto) undertones. Told from Mello's perspective except for the last scene which switches over to Matt.
Bromine (n.) - a dark red liquid chemical element of the halogen group, with a choking irritating smell
Quirky fact about H. 92 #1 – I always come up with a title before I start writing a piece.
Quirky fact about H. 92 #2 – I always type out lyrics for each piece before I begin writing.
- - -
You said it once before
You don't do those things you used to anymore.
- - -
"Fuck them. Fuck them all!"
...So he never really was a saint.
Frustrated and hasty steps pounded the old floorboards, making them creak pitifully with each footfall of hatred and fury. Teeth grinded until enamels were shredded to dust, filling each tastebud with something akin to the savor of bitter disappointment. Hands shook relentlessly without consent, merely jittering to their own twisted melodies while clutching at random fabrics within the mildewed closet. Brief sensations of leather and denim registered with each grab and jerk, but were soon drowned out by the stronger perception of hangers clamoring and doors vehemently slamming.
...He had never really sang his hymns in tune either, and his halo always was a little tilted to the left rather than shined and polished to absolute perfection.
"Damn this hell hole..."
A ratty suitcase, worn and torn with neglect, was thrown upon the freshly-made bed, bouncing slightly from the thrust of force behind it. Its latches were nearly ripped off from impatient fingers and mounds of apparel were cursorily stuffed inside along with ever-assiduous Fate and ribbons of Time. Hands were no longer sensing touch and eyes were no longer depicting sight, only the incessant screeching of familiar trodden floorboards ever making it past the barrier of raw, burning hostility.
And just like its raging predecessor, the tornado of anger and spite funneled out, leaving destruction and broken closet hinges in its wake. As the dust settled, but the air ever still hot with tension, he took a step back from the suitcase and clutched a fist full of blonde hair. He pulled and constricted the locks like they were the ones responsible, eyes squeezed shut and mouth grimaced to bare clenched teeth. Opening sapphire eyes, he let his hand fall away from his scalp, pretending not to notice the dull ache the sore roots were now emitting. Snapping the latches shut, sealing his contract on fringed parchment, he glared at nothing before walking over to his night stand that wasn't really his.
His eyes softened as previously malevolent fingers suddenly reached out gently to cradle the opaque beads that laid upon the end table. Gripping the rosary as his eyes suddenly filled with something foreign, wet and hot, he fell to his knees beside the battered suitcase. The floor protested again with a sudden groan as his hands threaded the rounded amethysts through his fingers that still trembled slightly. The cross buried into his flesh as he tightly held it between his right forefinger and thumb, suffocating his skin until it burned red.
"Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, saves us from the fires of hell..."
He didn't realize his eyes were transfixed upon the small cross within his grasp before a muffled sound reverberated behind his closed door.
"Mello?"
Glancing to the door and then back to the rosary, Mello narrowed his eyes as he stuffed the precious beads into his pants' pocket, feeling the small pendant rest just above the skin on his thigh. Snatching his suitcase from his now-rumpled bed, he briskly walked towards the door with an air of finality, twisting the knob harshly to reveal a thirteen-year-old redhead on the other side. The boy's eyes immediately glued onto the suitcase in hand, no doubt not having to go through numerous deductions to figure out just what its presence insinuated. His emerald irises found Mello's.
"You're coming back, right?"
Mello merely raised an eyebrow as his glare hardened before pushing past the other boy, hearing him stumble slightly before the other's footsteps were echoing behind him. The blonde threw open the screen door at the end of the hallway, letting the moon's glow embrace his feminine features. He heard the door slam only to be opened again and he stopped. So did his pursuer.
He could almost hear the nonchalant risen eyebrow and underlying casualness that had always seemed to envelope Matt's voice as he proclaimed calmly–
"So, you're not."
It never seemed to irk him more than it usually did until now, making him tighten his hold on the suitcase's handle and causing the other fist to shake minutely. Damn him for sounding like he knows what to do. Never before had he been so compelled to tear off those goggles and claw out those emerald orbs that were, without a doubt, steadily staring at his leather-clad back. Mello waited until the instinct to turn around and say something ebbed away before continuing to walk on, following an invisible path even he, second in line, didn't know where led to. It was silent behind him. Not a real proper goodbye to your chum for over six years, but he couldn't be bothered with loose ends. He had cut the strings off completely, hoping they'd stay this way for convenience, but knowing some way or other, they'd undoubtedly meet again.
He tried to convince himself that Matt hadn't heard his whispered prayers.
Before he left, leaving all essences of Wammy's behind, Mello uprooted the mailbox – picturing with a sort of sadistic glee that it was a certain white-haired boy's head.
He wasn't a saint, but dammit who was that perfect anyway?
-o-o-o-
It was just slightly unnerving how well the gun fit into his outstretched hand as if it was meant to be there all this wasted time. But he was still young, so his appendage shook as his finger was compelled to tug the trigger backwards, overwhelmed at how he was in charge of life and death at this pivotal moment, that he could make breaths stop with one simple, fluid motion. It was one part exhilarating, five parts nausea. He raised his sapphire eyes to the grimy man before him with a slightly shaky smirk.
"This'll do."
It was also just a tad bit worrisome at how much he liked its feel just inside his pants' pocket, its oddly shaped weight resting on his right thigh and how at a moments' notice, he could whip it out and –
Bang.
It caused a manic gleam to overtake his eyes and he could feel his heart thump at how far ahead he would be (by leaps and bounds) from that snotty-nosed brat who probably still resided at that asylum, surrounded by child's toys. His hand ghosted the slight protrusion of his pocket, fingers barely touching the barrel.
I will win.
He never acknowledged the lingering question 'since when had this all been a game?'
But when he was forced to make a man's heart screech to a halt, to make his knees buckle as something so small ripped right through his skin; shredding, shredding, letting the blood diffuse around his button-up shirt...
It didn't feel like a game.
The mafia wasn't supposed to be in the first place.
The unnamed man crumpled to the floor, body and limbs betraying him as crimson drained from the hole in his chest and Mello was left only to stare in silent shock, arm still outstretched, finger still wrapped precariously around that trigger.
And slowly, the blonde came to a sudden realization that he was still in the presence of others – his own men that were waiting to see if he'd crumple to the floor next for an entirely different reason. So, slowly, ever-so slowly, Mello let a sardonic smirk grace his still-feminine features and convinced himself that it was befitting for a man of his stature.
Mello never said he was a saint. After all, he had an image to withhold.
Later, the door slammed and he could feel the bile racing upward inside his esophagus, burning with such acidity that he was almost sure the thin, delicate lining was disintegrating. His eyes were wide with delayed horror, replaying the sequence of life and death over and over until he succumbed to his knees and vomited. The smell was putrid but somehow didn't measure up to the stench of blood. He gasped and sputtered, trying to rid both the taste in his mouth and the choke hold of guilt that was suddenly strangling his windpipes.
He blindly clawed at his lower half until his hands discovered the damned metal and threw it across the floorboards, watching it slide until it collided with the cracked wall. He buried his face in his hands, slender body wracking from something that wasn't due to the dampened cold that drafted in from spaces between the plaster. Mello slid his hands upward to grasp at his blonde locks (belatedly noticing his bangs were becoming longer) and tried to remember what the point of this was again.
Justice.
Mello almost laughed.
Instead, he crawled toward his lumpy cot and seized the precious beads that laid just beneath his pillow, gripping them tight as if they may fall apart and leave him to face his guilty conscience alone. Mello couldn't remember his verses, couldn't remember the sacred lines at all even though he'd studied fervently for years, but still... He clutched on to whatever last remaining essences of humanity he had and hoped selfishly that it wouldn't be so bad next time. He knew there'd be a 'next time'. Mello was second in line. He knew.
"Oh sweet fuck..."
Mello squeezed his cobalt eyes shut and vigorously feigned that there wasn't a gun laying just across the room and that Matt would be there any minute and that his hands hadn't been tainted by death and that the rosary was actually working.
-o-o-o-
And when it did start to become easier, Mello partly wished it hadn't.
-o-o-o-
Through the fire, dirt and slabs of concrete that had pummeled and trapped his body, he could feel the rosary still threaded between his fingers, broken but still holding on. His breaths were merely wisps against the cold, frigid air, barely making clouds of heat. The pressure on his chest was slowly crushing him and his face felt like it was melting off, strip by strip of skin.
He wasn't so defeated as to whimper out in pain, so he merely gritted his teeth, tasting acerbic blood.
Damn it...
Mello could hear himself wheeze, breath gurgled by the presence of crimson slathered onto his throat and lungs. He was dazed, wondering how on earth he managed to dial that cobwebbed number and whether he even did, perhaps just imagining he had pressed send on his cell. The blonde didn't dare to open his eyes because he always had been a bit claustrophobic and he knew he was surrounded by walls, concrete and wooden frame work – all directly five centimeters away from his face. But his periodic blindness didn't help him to be ignorant of how the screams of agony from several men had eventually hushed.
Opening his dry, blood-smeared lips, Mello whispered hollowly, wrapping his broken fingers around the rosary all the more tighter, "Mary...Mother of God...Pr-pray for..." His lungs quivered and deflated, causing him to gasp for air, unable to recite the only words that may still keep him sane.
Mello loosened his grip on the amethyst beads tiredly, "Shit."
"I'd say."
The blonde snapped open his sapphire orbs, but all he could see was utter darkness. It took a minute before his mouth would obey his commands, finally letting him whisper softly, "Matt?"
Mello could hear shifting of materials and suddenly smelled smoke that undoubtedly diffused from a cigarette. He closed his eyes again and let his head rest gingerly on the board of wood he thought was behind him. He almost smiled when he heard the nonchalant voice answer back, "Yup. Still here. Looks like you've outdone yourself."
If Mello was any more alert or conscious, he would've heard the underlying worry and desperately concealed urgency that laced the redhead's voice. But he couldn't, perhaps due to his half-lidded eyes that were glazed with something that even he didn't know the origin of and the way he choked on his shallow breaths.
He wasn't sure what Matt was doing, whether he would even be able to claw him out of this rocky entrapment; the only things registering within his internally bleeding mind being the distinctive smell of nicotine and holy shit his face fucking hurt.
-o-o-o-
"Don't let me fucking die here."
-o-o-o-
"Like hell I will."
-o-o-o-
His hands weren't clean and pure – they had been tainted with his brothers' blood and have held murdering metal. His mouth wasn't so pristine either – profanity just rolled off the tongue so easily. His mind was all calculations and labyrinths while his heart pounded with such blind fury that sometimes he was engulfed by the embers of his temper, eyes wild and glazed.
No, Mello was never really cut out for sainthood.
But the rosary beads, worn and smooth with use, still laid within his blood-marred hands that shook with pain and regret on those nights blackened with insomnia. And as he prayed to whatever god who would still take him in, he never noticed the smell of cigarette smoke that silently filtered in from just beyond the threshold, merely focused on rushed verses that still trembled with his broken voice. And on these nights he was watched from orange-tinted lenses (from another who couldn't find solace within the moon's embrace) that saw all the raw, bitter tears that streamed down burnt and malformed skin; fists clenched with anger that would never be fully amended.
And when the whole scene before him (sapphire eyes squeezing shut with remorse and knees raw and dry from the old wooden floor panels) became just too real, Matt would turn away and lean against the wall adjacent to the ajar door (that would never really lock). He'd take another drag, fill his lungs with half-baked promises and nicotine, and inwardly recite the lines.
"...Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of death..."
- - - -
A/N: Yeah... it had more of a plot but then my mind decided to take a detour. I tried to keep the motif of the rosary but by the end I got sidetracked. Oh wells.
Quick note, those are actual lines from rosary prayers. I, myself, do not own a rosary and had to look them up online.
Second Death Note fic and I'm proud to say that there will definitely be more to come (once the Muses decide to finish their coffee break). I wanted to do a little character analysis of Mello and I'll probably do a dribble-drabble of Matt next.
Soundtrack:
Ugly - The Exies
Bunch of Story of the Year
Loads of Paramore
Lyrics at the beginning:
Handle This - Sum 41
Review, as always, with comments/suggestions/ransoms, etc..
'Till then,
- - H. 92