A/N: Woo, repost of something else that had major formatting errors. Here it is again, but... better.
The first words out of his mouth were: "Jeez, can't you take a hint?"
The line of men behind him erupted in a wave of laughter, their faces cruel, their eyes amused. My gun wavered and faltered briefly, tilted to one side, but ultimately remained pointed at the space directly between his eyeballs. My eyebrows lifted. Few men have the gall to jest so carelessly when their lives are ripe for the taking.
"Apparently not." More laughter from the goons. I didn't get the joke. Maybe it wasn't funny like ha, ha funny. Maybe I just couldn't appreciate their humor. In my humor, they laughed like a bunch of fucking Tickle-Me-Elmos.
Mello laughed, too. It was a sick sound. My lips twitched with the desire to smirk at how high and mighty one can act when clad provocatively in leather, legs spread wide, at gunpoint. I supposed it had something to do with his trusty sidekicks who had more weapons on them than I'd ever seen in one place before-most of which were pointed at me. Go figure.
"What brings you here?" he asked casually, as though he didn't know. There was a loud snap of his chocolate bar in the silence before my answer.
"You tell me."
His smirk widened and he addressed his men without looking at them. "Leave us for a minute. There's no real threat here- and I'd like a few minutes alone with the persistent puppy-dog." Once upon a Winchester childhood, he'd begun to call me a sidekick, but then stopped himself and said "my puppy-dog." My. He didn't use that possessive pronoun this time; I pretended not to notice. He pretended not to notice that I didn't notice. There's this old saying that goes, "those who ignore history are destined to repeat it," but I don't really think that applied.
The goons laughed again-the swine-but did as they were told and filed out through the door one by one. The last in line turned and spared a passing glance down the barrel of my gun before looking up into my eyes. It was good that I hadn't worn my goggles that day; all the better to stare judgmentally with. The door closed behind him with a metallic click. When my focus went back to Mello, his gun was drawn and pointed at my head. The smirk was gone from both of our faces. Stalemate.
"Enough with the bullshit. Why the fuck did you come here?" he demanded coldly, all traces of tomfoolery banished from his face.
I rolled my head back lazily on my neck and looked straight at him. "Why does anyone do anything?" His eye twitched.
"Personal gain," he answered tonelessly, though my brain detected a note of sarcasm that may or may not have been present, tucking his gun safely away in the front of his pants. The white laces were undone and I was mildly disgusted. The look on his face suggested that he thought I would or should do the same, but my arm didn't move. So he had remembered the conversation we had all those years ago. What of it? I'd come for a specific purpose, and that purpose would not be forgotten like a used condom under the bed just for a temporary feeling of nostalgia.
"What, are you going to shoot me?" Clearly, he was amused by this idea. Honestly, I kind of was too. So I slowly lowered my gun and stuffed it down the back of the waistband of my jeans, like a real man.
A real man whose purpose in risking his life just became another discarded rubber broken during the backseat quickie on a lunch break.
Instead of wasting time waiting for an invitation that would never come, I strolled casually over and situated myself on the ratty old armchair near the couch, propped my feet up on the coffee table, and lit a cigarette.
"Since when do you smoke?" he questioned, sounding faintly disturbed with his eyes too wide, like some sort of deranged sea creature, through a mouthful of chocolate.
"Probably around the same time you started dressing like a cheap whore."
Mello laughed dryly, but the look on his face was far from humored. I took an inhale of smoke. At least I hadn't lost my ability to seriously piss him off with less than fourteen words using nothing more than my wit, sharp enough to cut through the tense air of a potential awkward silence. It was a skill I treasured dearly.
We were silent for a time-not comfortably, not awkwardly, just quiet-before I allowed my attention to drift around the room. The base of operations for this mafia hideout, I guessed, and if my intuition served me as well as it usually did, it was far from impressive. I saw the computer that I had hacked into and it was still displaying the same loop of footage that I'd programmed into the surveillance system this morning. Another treasured skill. They'd never even seen me coming in that endless monotony of sparse foliage lilting in the wind, shadows quivering, cloudless California sunlight left mostly unobstructed save for by the occasional cloud.
Before I could look back, he was on me-but it was the least sexual thing you could imagine, so don't get any ideas. He was leaning over me in such a way that absolutely no parts of our bodies were touching aside from his fingers wrapped tight around my neck. Maybe I would have gasped in surprise or choked from the lack of oxygen if I wasn't so set on not giving him the satisfaction.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" he began, breathing down the bridge of my nose. When I didn't answer, he pulled me forward and slammed me against the cushioned back of the chair. It lost its effect with the soft 'coosh' the pillows made. He'd never been one for considering the dramatic effect of the environment.
"How many times do I have to leave before you get the point?"
"At least one more," I answered with ironic cheesiness, staring straight into his eyes and earning another non-threatening slam against the back of the chair. It had the same effect as a single shiny red Christmas ornament on a foreign death-machine, or pink bunny slippers on the child-massacring, drug-peddling gang-leader at the top of the FBI's most wanted list.
The first sign of his wavering resolve was the slight increase in distance between our faces, which was quickly followed by the loosening of his grip around my throat.
The grateful intake of breath in my lungs was completely involuntary.
Finally, he retreated back to his couch and picked up the half-eaten bar of chocolate that rested on the cushions. The sensual, almost thoughtless, way he licked the melting candy rather than biting it made my skin crawl.
Ornaments on death machines, fluffy slippers on murderers, and Mafia bosses with melting generic chocolate bars.
"It's been a while," I commented darkly when my breathing stabilized. "You've changed."
My pathetic attempt to ease the tension without the use of wit was completely ignored in favor of a much more familiar and tired topic. "I told you not to come here."
"And I did anyway." How many times had we had that conversation? I was attempting to count, but he oh so rudely interrupted my efforts with an unpleasant glare and a snarl.
"What do you want?" he grumbled. Or, at least, the crinkles in his forehead and displeased droop of his eyelids gave me the impression that he might have been grumbling, though his voice never really changed from its normal toxic calm.
"We're friends," I retorted automatically. I didn't want anything. Friends just stay together. No ulterior motives on my part. Aside from the murder, but you know how that went. I did, however, feel spectacularly absurd speaking that half-baked thought aloud.
"The carpet in the next room over is mauve." That, I will admit, caught me off guard.
"…What?" I asked lamely, sounding exactly as confused as I was.
"Oh, I'm sorry, I thought we were stating shit that doesn't matter." He only ever apologized sarcastically because oh, no one else is worthy of the prima donna's kinder sentiments. I only ever hated him on those same sarcastic occasions, but maybe I myself was being sarcastic in saying that. He's the sort of person that it's hard to not hate, what with there being so many separate and awful qualities to choose from, if you know what I mean.
If my gun had still been drawn, somehow, my arm might have been tired and my finger might have slipped and I might have blown his smug little brains out, accidentally-on-purpose. The reasons that I had come here were starting to seem more and more significant with every impossibly irritating utterance that spewed forth from that chapped mouth of his.
"This is stupid," I told him bluntly. He shrugged one shoulder, allowing that. I watched as the ashes from my cig fell into a tiny pile on the impossibly-stained brown carpet. Either he was lying about the other carpeting being mauve or this place had the world's worst designer.
"You shouldn't have come here."
"Woah, déjà vu."
Mello gave me a look that could've made a variety of seasonal flowers and small animals wither away into nothingness.
Maybe it wasn't ha, ha funny.
That look positively screamed 'Matt, you're an idiot, and I want to shoot you,' and I hadn't seen it in years. As I still couldn't imagine that I would enjoy being shot, I uncomfortably rubbed at the back of my neck and decided that we'd both had enough of the nonsense-and the snide remarks contained therein. It quickly became awkward after that.
"Now that you know I've found you, I can go." I stood, crushed out my half-intact smoke on the arm of the chair, and stuffed my hands in my pockets. It left a dark mark that fit my dark amusement. I hoped he'd paid for that chair. "I live in the city." I stared uneasily at my boots for a too-long moment. Maybe I was waiting for some sort of a response. Probably not. One never came, anyway.
To get to the door, I had to walk by the old computer system. Since I was there, and since it was convenient, I disabled and fixed all of the deplorable things I'd done to their security system over the past few days. The cameras were back to perfect working condition in about thirty seconds, so I stood back up and continued my exit. I wasn't sure what kind of Mafia-grade hacker couldn't recognize a security footage loop, even one as long as fifteen minutes, once it had been playing for over an hour. Maybe they didn't pay attention to that sort of thing here. I had to remind myself that not everyone was trained to be as observant as Mello and I were.
"Matt." I almost flinched. Hearing his voice bite out my name that way, especially what with my previous thoughts, stirred up years upon years of memories I'd successfully buried. It felt as though a migraine was appearing and then fading with every painful pulsation in the side of my head, which was due in part to the vast refresh of information. For half of a second, I thought he might have something significant to say-
"Tell my men they can come back in now,"- but I was kind of glad he didn't.
I swung open the door, paused, and stared emptily down the hallway. "My number's still the same."
And with that, I left.