A/N: Hola. I'm going to start this off by saying that as much as I love my readers and a much as most of my stories are at least partially for you guys, this one is just for me. It's an experiment. I'll warn you now that it may be difficult to follow, that it is subject to random editing at any given time, and that I will probably end up pulling the characters out of character at least a little in a few places. However, as odd as this story may be, I do intend to keep the core of it cannon. And if all goes as planned then I can guarantee that you will be confused in places, so I encourage you to just keep reading. But here you get a glimpse of the real reason I write fanfiction: Experimentation. It's there in pretty much everything else, just in a more subtle form. So for those of you who are still reading after that, thank you. Please hold on to your minds and remember details, details, details. Sorry about the short intro.
Disclaimer: Death Note belongs to Ohba-sensei and Obata-sensei. I'm just borrowing the characters for a bit.
Mello sat perfectly still in the deafening silence, alone but for the broken mannequins scattered across the checkered tile floor. He was delusional. He had to be. There was no way the horrible images playing through his mind under the guise of memories could be real. No way. The boy felt nearly ready to put a bullet through his head to make it stop. It was painful and strange and rendered him powerless. And in spite of the silence he couldn't hear a thing above the noise.
Somewhere in his mind there were gunshots and fire and people shrieking in terror. Above all the roar, however, rose a single, piercing scream from the throat of a woman. He sat beside her, a little boy with little boy eyes. He had little boy hopes and little boy fears, and he had a little boy way of interpreting the world. The woman could not be dead, no, because that was not how the world worked. Never mind the blood that drenched his shirt, that soaked the knees of his pants where he had knelt beside her in the muck that coated the decimated streets, a tarry mixture of ash and clay and brackish water. No, she couldn't be dead, because mommies didn't die.
The scene, such as it was, seemed to distort around him. Always the colours were never quite right, the sounds elusive, and the whole thing utterly foreign yet agonizingly familiar. And yet when it was gone, it would leave no trace. He wouldn't remember a thing until the next time these supposed memories claimed him, closing over him like the lid of a casket.
Once, through the murky haze in which he found himself suspended during these episodes, he had found the presence of mind to make a rough sketch of what he was seeing. Looking at it had nearly triggered another episode, but this time he had been able to fight it off. Instead he had thrown himself into searching for a source. Where could this have come from? Was there, perhaps, some truth to this? He had his doubts, but he refused to rule anything out. It was against his personal policies. Besides, in the end he was still left with the maddening realization that he had no idea where he had come from.