HOUND
Matt had seen a rabid dog once. A border collie his parents used to keep on their vineyard in Napa, chasing the bats away from the fruit-laden vines, barking at delivery trucks and fireflies.
Matt had seen it from the upstairs window above the porch eaves, fly-spotted black and white fur in thick tangles, muscles twitching underneath the thick coat erratically. Whenever it barked, its eyes rolled back in its head and its front legs trembled. He had paced in front of their house: a brown beard wagging from underneath its foaming lips, dripping blood, red tongue hanging from its mouth like a lead weight, all the control over its own nervous system gone as the disease consumed its brain, eating its way through the gray matter. It didn't even have a brain then, just a dying lump of meat between its floppy ears. Rotting.
Mello reminded him of that dog, just now.
"Say it," he snarled. He dug his knees into the orange dust of the playground, putting even more of his weight on Matt's lower back. Pain.
Matt coughed out dust. The left side of his face was flat against the sun warmed sand, gritty and hot. The right side was sticky and hot. What Matt could see of the ground in front of him was slightly mottled brown with bloody spit.
His goggles were off. The August sun was too bright. The sky was too blue. The grass was too green.
Up in the sky, which was really off to left, the A-frame swing set sat and watched.
One swing was still creaking from its chains.
Mello's hand was fisted tightly in his hair, ready to pull it up it by the roots like dry grass.
Matt said nothing.
Mello growled, and the world went diagonal, and then briefly black, and then blossomed back sprouting bright late summer flowers of pain.
Mello had slammed his head back into the ground. Hard.
"Just say it!" he barked.
Matt's arm, the one Mello had twisted the wrong way around behind his back, had gone numb before. Mello jerked it. Hard.
Pain. Matt choked back a wail.
"No…" He drew out the vowel in a slow drawl.
Always arrogant.
Gonna get him killed one of these days.
(Of course, it was more than arrogance. Matt knew, better than Mello did, why he was doing this.
That was why he'd suggested the playground. No one else could bear the heat. It was removed from everywhere else. A little sanctuary of innocence and childhood for the little geniuses to reflect upon what they had never truly had.
Just the place to push Mello past his breaking point.)
"I swear I will, Matt…"
It helped that he couldn't see Mello's voice. He could just picture the sudsy white spit dripping from Mello's mouth, clogging his throat.
"Say 'uncle', you fuck!"
His voice was getting shrill and screechy with hysteria, but he only tightened his grip on Matt's arm.
Desperately. His poor dirt devil desperado. The cut on his forehead (where his hairline had split after the collision course with the swing set rails; or the damp red was his hair melting in the hot sun) was stinging from the dirt.
Matt gauged that now was the time to speak.
"You can…"—if he even could speak, his throat was pulverized at the moment— "do…whatever…but…I won't…say it."
Mello howled, and they both reached their breaking point.
Matt…quite literally.
A gunshot broke the torpid air.
Only one.
Matt woke up to rain.
Inside it, inside every raindrop, and it was inside of him too, running up a clear intravenous tube and into his arm.
The one that wasn't broken.
Was an IV really necessary?
It was just a broken arm.
He had blacked out, but that was just the shock, he guessed.
He was still frowning at it, listening to the quiet, repetitive percussion of rain on the infirmary windows, when he heard it.
Matt raised his head a fraction, his neck aching.
Mello was huddled into himself, clutching his shins, face buried into his knees.His fingers were worrying the black coarse cloth of his pants, fingers of light dancing lightly across his knees.
He was talking to himself again.
"Hey, Mello."
His voice was all groggy from medication.
Aw come on. They had drugged him too?
Mello looked up, and Matt instantly forgot about all that.
"Why didn't you just say it?"
His voice was like an eyeful of needles.
"Mello, I—"
That was it. He was on his bed after just those two words, knees back around his hips, hands ready to wrap around his neck and squeeze.
"Why, huh? Why'd you make me do that, huh? Why?"
Mello…Mello didn't strangle him.
It was impossible, and impossible not to notice, but Mello's eyes were swollen and bloodshot and rimmed with gross crusty stuff and so very blue.
"Why'd you—why couldn't you—"
His face crumpled in on itself, everything contracting like some invisible lever had been pulled, cueing the collapse of his jagged persona.
A raindrop fell in Matt's open mouth. It burned.
Pain.
Everything fell apart just then, and Mello didn't even pause to remove the sheets, he wrapped his arms around his best friend and sobbed with his whole body.
Thunder.
Matt had sort of figured this would happen. He consoled and petted and hushed him and didn't mind Mello sort of all over him, even in the bruised tender spots that hurt.
There was the slightest caesura in his fast-tempo storm, and Mello didn't pause to wipe his eyes before he kissed him, atonement for his perfect sins, and Matt held him softly and licked the raindrops from his friend's face, until they were no more.
"It's like I told you Roger." Matt was explaining, a winning grin painted across his young, contused face. "Mello and I--we were just playing."
Roger looked from one boy to the other--one in a hospital bed looking like Christmas had come early, and the other standing next to it, looking like it had been put on hiatus, and it was all his fault.
"--Right, Mello?"
He started. Roger furrowed his brow.
"Yeah. What Matt says. Just playing."
"It's all right, Mail," his dad had said, clapping his son on the shoulder. His mom was putting the shotgun back in the storage locker.
"He's gone to a better place."
The eyes of the dead dog, they had looked so blue...
A/N: What the...?
I don't know either. Where it came from, what posessed me...I-I don't know. At all. I was sitting at the computer watching the Burn Notice marathon and this thing came out. It is also unbeta'd, so forgive me.
Yes. All Matt had to do was say 'uncle'.
...
Questions? Concerns for my sanity? A PM or review will do just fine.
x0x0 Raven