Setting: seedy motel, chapter 98 (though it isn't mentioned)
Tiny chapter 74 spoiler
He knows it's stupid, that he's being the kind of person Mello would hate if he knew, but in the mornings he can't help himself. As he sits beside the cheap, creaky hotel bed he gazes at the fair skin, the lengthening blond hair once so neatly trimmed, and he dotes on the sleeping face as though Mello were an angel.
He knows better, has seen the rage and the more recent desperation, but it's easier to see peace in eyes that are closed. When they open they are always too wide, haunted by what Matt jokingly calls the spirits of millions of chocolate bars but what he knows are fragments of a past scarred by trauma, and they are disquieting. The external scar, he thinks, is really just a counterpoint to a much more massive breakage that has happened within, the scattering of a mind cracked in pieces by inferiority and impotent rage. And when Mello wakes, when his eyes open, he sees every morning as they widen and his damaged short-term memory struggles. As he grasps for some awareness of where he is, of what he needs to do, as the autonomous man is reduced to someone who can't even recall the seedy motel he is living in, Matt watches silently.
He knows that in this vast zero-sum game, he cannot be a player. He is only a piece, one of Mello's last, being moved in subtle, futile acts around a board rapidly filling up with the smooth ebony pawns of Kira. He is the last knight. And that is why, as the wide and haunted eyes glance around at the fan and the lamp and himself, he playfully puts a cigarette in Mello's slightly open mouth and lets a dry smirk take control of his solemnity.
End
I often review back.