[a/n] brotip: Matt's real name is Mail Jeevas, for anyone who doesn't know that yet.
Mail looked around and walked around and he watched but was never a part of. He existed and other people lived and he wondered what he was missing, why he wasn't living like that, and he wondered if they were living at all.
Was anything truly alive?
He was half-dead himself, starved and beaten and wandering the streets. He didn't know why he was still struggling to keep going, stealing food and collecting pennies and dimes for some thing he didn't know. The future, his dreams of the past, maybe just to satisfy his feeling that he should be doing something, anything.
The world felt so hollow, so empty, so meaningless and aimless and useless. He was waiting for something, but he didn't know what.
He was brought to Wammy's, by a faceless man with a kind smile, and they stripped him of his name, his identity, everything he had once been, and told him who he was now, what his goals were, what he would be (if he was clever and lucky enough).
He hated it.
He hated the whole world. It was so ugly. The poor abandoned children studied, each fighting for the same thing, and the caretakers watched and didn't care, just fed and clothed and made little marks on their clipboards, and what was the point of all this? To become a super-detective, locked away in a tower like a princess in a fairy tale, understanding all the workings of humanity and solving their crimes with ease, despising it all? What did that matter? The universe didn't care, nothing cared, the people continued on doing meaningless tasks and waited for death while pretending it didn't exist for them.
Why wasn't he dead yet?
Mello (the others called them "friends" but he couldn't understand Mello at all; why did he still care?) told him that he should put himself on the suicide watch list kept by the authorities of the house. He (he was Matt now, they said Mail had never existed and even he couldn't say any different because where was the proof that there had ever been a Mail?) declined. The list was long already, and no one cared about it. Everyone there should have been on the list.
They were too cowardly to kills themselves. They kept living because they didn't want to die, though they didn't want to live either. Some lied to themselves, and others just hated their cowardice and did nothing about it.
He didn't know why anyone did either, why they existed in the first place, why anything existed.
Why did he have the ability to think? Why couldn't he be like the vapid things on television, in magazines, untroubled by anything but whether they had money or not? He hated them and he was so jealous of them at the same time.
He despised this world with his entire soul.
He remembered the Gameboy, found in the gutter one day, saved and ignored in the pocket of his torn-up jacket. It had a game it in.
He pulls it out from amongst the clothes he hadn't touched since he had arrived at Wammy's and turns it on and loses himself in a world that's just as disgusting and horrible as this one but also right in a way that he has never felt before.
He loses himself in the games, in the hundreds of new worlds on the screens.
He knows he's still waiting for something, but he's content to wait now, with a game in front of him and the world around him ignoring him, and he ignoring it in turn.
It's only when he's not playing that he's so impatient for the mysterious something, and he remembers his hate and wonders why he's living in fake worlds instead of dying in this one.
It's not often that he's not playing.
Then Mello ropes him into his scheme to kill Kira, and he has less time to game than ever before, and all his old thoughts that were suppressed by the tapping of buttons and pixels of light come back.
And it barely seemed like he had taken his head out of his imaginary worlds and breathed real air when he was attacking guards from a car and they were stopping him and pulling their guns on him and-
Oh.
This was what he had been waiting for.
They shot him and his blood stained the concrete.
He had always been waiting for the end.
And now it was here.
He welcomed the darkness and the cessation of thought.