Mello had seen it all.

He liked to think that while most people on earth saw the world through rose-colored glasses, being the head of the Yakuza for a period of time had taken those glasses and crunched them without mercy under the heel of his boot, opening his eyes to the cruelties of the world and blinding him at the same time. He had seen kidnappings, beatings, rapes, murders, none of which were in a particular order, but all of which arranged themselves in his mind like haphazard puzzle pieces, overlapping and combining behind his vision as if he was watching a multitude of movies on one screen through a kaleidoscope of color. He had seen bloodshed, torn muscles, dismembered limbs, bullet-ridden bodies, the way a mother's face contorts into a scream of agony when her child went limp in her arms. He had seen even vacancies, the way life extinguished slowly from behind someone's eyes, leaving their irises as nothing more than empty mirrors, reflecting up the barrel of his gun, onto his scarred face, the gruesome images burned into his retinas, through them, branded into his brain until the frequent nightmares shook him from his uneasy slumber and sent him fighting the urge to crawl into Matt's bed.

But he had never seen anything like this before.

Plastic bowls of every size and color dotted the counter in a pattern like a zigzagging rainbow. Some were filled with clear liquids while others were holding rock-like balls of dough, flour dusting the rims of each. The white powder sprinkled everything in the room, from the counters covered and sticky with substances he wasn't even sure of anymore down to the floor, the lackluster linoleum spotted with a culmination of what rested in the main bowl stuck to the counter by a glob of melted chocolate, and while Mello didn't know exactly what it was anymore, he knew that it was wet, thick, and a color it probably shouldn't have been.

The kitchen was, to use Matt's vernacular for a moment, a hot-ass mess.

But Matt either didn't notice or didn't mind, probably a strange combination of both that met in the middle of the gray. He hummed and shut the refrigerator door with his hip, a bottle of vanilla extract in one hand and a new DS in the other. He clicked, the tickity-tack ever so annoying, the buttons with an expert thumb as he crossed the kitchen to the counter, kicking up clouds of flour on the way. He paid it no mind as it settled on the tops of his boots, and he unscrewed the cap to the small bottle with a thumb and a forefinger, the black fabric coated in white, never looking away from the screen.

But as Matt poured a whimsical amount into the bowl, Mello narrowed his eyes from the doorway. It was his biggest pet peeve. Not the humming, not the peppy Japanese pop music blaring from the system, not even the tickity-tack of the buttons, though all of them grated on his nerves. It was Matt's inability to keep a cigarette out of his mouth for five seconds. Under normal circumstances, Mello didn't care either way. But it was moments like this which happened all too often, when Matt was making food with a cigarette dangling from between his lips, the blazing cherry emitting taunting smoke, that Mello had a mind to rip the cigarette out of his mouth for his insolence.

And so he did.

Mello crushed the cigarette in between his thumb and forefinger, watching as Matt looked over, face calm, always too damn calm. Mello followed his eyes to the smoking end and flicked the cigarette into the sink, then turned on the water to put it out. "You know I hate it when you smoke in the kitchen."

He crossed his arms and turned his gaze back to Matt, face unchanging, before quirking a brow as Matt shut the game system, the annoying pop music coming to a succinct halt, and tucked it into the back of his pants. Then he did the worst thing he could have ever hoped to do in that situation.

He blew a plume of withheld smoke into Mello's face.

Kill him. Mello was going to kill him.

He growled and grabbed the other by his shirt, the stripes bunched into zigzags in his fists, and pressed him against the counter. Matt slipped against the liquid on the floor and stumbled back into the counter, the slightest of winces arising from him, but with it came Mello's victory. The sound of weakness had given him away, and with Mello's fists clenching his shirt, with his glare hard and sharp, boring into his eyes, the most Matt could do was raise his hands and give a meek, defeated, "Okay, okay."

Mello let him go, eyeing the wrinkled print of his shirt for just a moment before he turned back to the messy countertop. Matt had a way to push his buttons like no one else, tickity-tack, tickity-tack, until he snapped. He was the only person who could get him so hot, so fuming, as if he was just another game in his system, trying so hard to get that elusive high score, but always having to back down when Mello almost knocked his teeth out. Maybe that was why he picked at him in a perpetual manner. Maybe he liked the challenge.

Did Mello already feel bad about losing his temper and pushing him into a counter? Sure. Was Matt asking for it? Hell yeah. He blew smoke in his face. He was asking for it, surely, and yet...

Mello sighed and rubbed his head, biting back the odd feeling rising up in his stomach, that strange taste of regret, flavored with unspoken apology. "What are you making, anyway?"

Matt smirked at that, the silent acceptance, and tugged at his shirt to fix it before cocking his head at a piece of paper barely visible on the counter, covered in goo and powder, the edges deteriorating under liquid. "Homemade chocolate cookies. Wanna help?"

Mello surveyed the kitchen once more. "Not particularly."

"It'll make my bruised spinal cord feel better," Matt teased as he pushed himself off of the counter. He brushed flour off of the recipe and squinted down at it, the ghost of a smile on his face, knowing he had hit Mello's hidden sympathies, knowing he had won, just once, a small victory in their little game. "It'll be easy. I'll even do the baking. You can just read off what I need."

"Because you're doing a great job so far." Mello grumbled as he dared to venture into the kitchen. "Looks like a bomb went off in here."

"What was that?" Matt looked over his shoulder, playing stern. Mello only stared back, eyebrow cocked, and repeated himself louder, unimpressed and unafraid. Matt only rolled his eyes, an overdramatic gesture, and held the paper out to him. Mello took it and skimmed the list of ingredients, already grimacing at the feeling of sticky liquid staining his gloves.

"Items not marked off in red still need to be added."

"Nothing is marked off in red."

"Shit." Matt peeked over the edge of the paper in disbelief, and for a moment, Mello wasn't sure if he had forgotten to make marks or had even had a pen to begin with. He shook his head and let Matt skim it, appraise it. Matt then looked up to the ceiling as if he had made red marks on the plaster instead and it had all been one big misunderstanding, but when he found nothing but overhead lights, he pointed to a spot in the middle and claimed he only needed to add eggs. "I'm making a huge batch, though, so just multiply everything by three. You can math, right?"

Was that even English?

"Sure." Mello stood still in the middle of the kitchen, unwilling to get himself any messier than he needed to. The soles of his shoes were enough for him. Matt, however, tromped across the kitchen without a care and threw open the door to the refrigerator, then leaned in.

"How many eggs do I need?"

After glancing at the recipe, Mello performed the mental math that Matt deemed him incapable of doing, and answered, "You need six eggs."

Suddenly, a goofy grin broke across Matt's face, a rare occurrence, but with his eyes alight and dimples in his cheeks, he looked like a child, as if they were both getting into mischief at Wammy's House again. With his hands full of eggs, somehow balancing three in each with stretched fingers, he replied in a sing-song tone. "That's too expensive."

Mello's brow furrowed hard in confusion. "What?"

Just as quickly as the elated look appeared, it vanished, and Matt was left with a deadpan expression. He straightened and kicked the door shut, eyes never leaving Mello's. "Beauty and the Beast? A Little Town?"

Before he could stop himself, that familiar anger was boiling up inside of Mello. He clenched the paper in his hands, grip tight, eyes hard, his lip in a thin line in an attempt to stop venom from spewing with his words, but to no avail. "You're spitting words at me again. Stop it."

Matt rolled his eyes and moved past him, almost slipping and sliding on the floor. He cracked eggs against the side of the bowl, the liquid inside almost having a film across the top from sitting, eyes more focused on the eggs plopping into the mixture than anything else. "It's a movie, Mel. Beauty and the Beast. A Little Town is a song. And there's a part that goes, 'I need six eggs. That's too expensive.' It's the part where Belle is walking through the market area, and you're getting an animated view of France. Have you never seen Beauty and the Beast?"

Mello was silent for a moment, but then he quirked a brow. "Did you make a list of ingredients just to make a reference to an animated woman singing in a French marketplace?"

"Pfft. No."

Maybe.

Mello couldn't care less as he watched Matt stir the batter. If he was willing to make huge batches of chocolate cookies every time he wanted to reference a line in a song, Mello would quote the whole damn movie. But that started with seeing it. He leaned against the refrigerator and watched as Matt worked the liquid into the dry ingredients in another bowl, then combined them to make what looked more like cake batter than cookie mix.

"No, I've never seen Beauty and the Beast."

"Ha, well, I know what we're doing while the cookies bake." Matt poured the rich brown mixture into a baking pan and slid it into the preheated oven. "It'll pass the time while the cake bakes anyway."

"I thought you were making cookies."

But before Mello had a chance to interrogate him, Matt waved his hand and walked into the living room. Mello opened the oven and peeked inside, stared at the chunks in the liquid batter, before shutting it and eyeing the recipe once more. It was definitely for cookies. How Matt had managed to make thick, chunky liquid cake batter was beyond him. Then again, Matt wasn't a chef by any stretch of the imagination, but neither was Mello, so as long as the food was edible, he wasn't complaining.

"How long does it need to cook for?" Mello called into the other room. For a few long moments, all he could hear was the irritating cacophony of pop music and tickity-tack, tickity-tack. He huffed and grit his teeth. "Matt!"

"It needs to bake until the timer goes off. So that can be your job. Listen for the timer." Matt didn't shut his game to answer, attention distracted, but he still managed to school Mello with his cooking vocabulary. Mello scoffed, and with a haughty, 'Well, excuse me,' vacated the kitchen and entered the living room. Matt sprawled out on the couch, head resting against the arm rest, one leg resting atop the opposing one. His other leg dangled above the ground, swinging to the rhythm of the music. Legs slightly spread, he paid Mello no mind as he continued the play whatever it was he was playing. Mello watched him, took him in, eyes running down his long leg before he shook his head and walked over, then knocked his leg off of the arm rest, making room for himself. Matt smirked and shut his game, sat up, and leaned back into the couch.

"Ready?"

"To watch an animated movie?" Mello quirked a brow and leaned back into the cushions. "I was born ready. You know that."

Matt elbowed him playfully and turned the movie on. Mello tried to pay as much attention as a grown Mafioso could to singing and dancing cutlery, but Matt ended up stealing his attention for the bulk of the film. Not because his game system was open on his lap, not because he himself wasn't paying much attention to the movie past the opening song, not even because he was pressing those damn buttons incessantly, tickity-tack, tickity-tack. It was because of how close he had gotten without even realizing it. Somehow throughout the first half of the film, Matt had managed to practically snuggle up into Mello's side, eyes down on his game screen, until his head finally came to rest on Mello's shoulder, which was falling asleep under the weight of his head, his arm outstretched over the back of the couch.

He heard all of the songs, the dialogue, even caught parts of the movie out of the reflection of Matt's goggles. But more than anything, he watched him out of the corner of his eye, that old feeling of regret bubbling up inside of him as he heard the lead characters bickering on the screen, and for a moment, he fancied himself the Beast, locking Belle inside of his castle by his mere existence, by the fact that he crashed on his couch in his hour of need, had taken over his apartment like an overgrown plant, his roots encroaching everything, tying everything down where he needed it to be, and shoving people into counters when they angered him.

For a few long moments, he was so overwhelmed that he almost didn't hear the obnoxious beeping ringing in his ears, but when it finally became too much to ignore, it was Matt who gasped and shut his game, looked up to Mello, so close that he could feel Mello's breath, shallow as he wrestled with his feelings. Mello stopped breathing all together with Matt so close, their lips almost touching, frozen in place, in time, as if everything would shatter around their ears if he took a step, a breath.

"I smell burning." Matt pulled away and frowned, eyebrows knitted, his game system resting on his knee. "Mel, you were supposed to listen for the timer! Shit, how long has it been going off?"

Mello inhaled sharply, as if the few moments of oxygen deprivation had cost him hours of breathing instead of seconds, and his emotions went haywire inside of him. Anger and surprise mixed uneasily in his stomach, touched by the rough fingers of embarrassment, embarrassment for looking, no, gazing at Matt, for feeling his stomach go into knots at the proximity of his lips, for feeling anything at all. Without time to catch his breath, he sat up abruptly, defensive.

"How the hell am I supposed to know? You're the one who wanted to bake whatever the fuck that monstrosity in the oven right now is anyway. Maybe you should have listened more."

"I did listen." Matt leaned back, already getting ready to dodge if he needed to. "By the time I heard it over the movie, it went off like six times."

"Well, blame the fucking dancing candlestick, not me." Mello narrowed his eyes. "I thought the beeping was your stupid game."

"It isn't a stupid game, and don't take your pissy attitude out on Lumiere."

Mello inhaled, sharp and irritated, bested by an animated candlestick in the midst of an argument. Fingers twitching and ready to snap a neck, Mello settled for the impulse of smacking the DS out of Matt's hand and pushing himself off of the couch.

Matt gasped and jumped out when his DS skidded against the floor and hit the wall. "You son of a bitch! I just bought that for Christmas."

Mello had been in the process of walking away, but Matt was a like a fisherman in these kind of situations. He always found a way, a verbal lure, accidental or not, to throw at Mello and reel him back in, and before Mello knew it, he was storming back across the living room. "I was supposed to get you that for Christmas anyway."

"I just went ahead and bought it myself." Matt kneeled down and picked the DS back up, inspecting it for any damages. No knicks or scratches, surprisingly. Good. "You wouldn't know what to look for."

Mello narrowed his eyes, looming over him. "I would so."

Matt looked up at him, smirking, pushing the envelope, always his downfall. "Mel, you mistook the beeping of the oven for sound effects from my DS. They sound totally different."

Mello scoffed and kicked the DS from his hands. "Yeah? How does it sound now? Broken, hopefully."

"Dude!" Matt shoved his leg and cradled his DS, sighing when he saw a fresh scratch on the corner. He babied his DS and stood, turned it off. The message was well received. "Just let me get the brownies from the oven because they're burning. I can smell it."

"Brownies?" Mello moved aside as he walked past. "I thought you were making cake."

Matt waved his hand and, before he could be interrogated, vanished into the kitchen.