knife going in
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He wasn't born a runner. His legs were too short and his toes not properly spaced for gripping the ground. Matt could run with his shoes off (with his socks off, even, which always kind of amazed him) and go for miles and miles with the bottom of his calloused feet scraping the ground and kicking up dirt and dust and god knows what else. Matt would shove his goggles above his forehead or into the back pocket of his blue jeans and take off, laughing so hysterically that Roger would come barreling out of the house, demanding to know what was wrong, was anyone hurt and Mello you didn't do anything to Matt again, did you?
He'd sputter and start winding himself up into one of his infamous fits—and then Matt would come racing back of them, his skinny arms waving. "It's alright, Roger!" he'd shout (in that peculiar accent he'd had when they were six but was gone by the time they were seven). "It's perfectly alright!"
--
Their friendship goes bone deep. It hollows out the marrow and takes root. There isn't really room for anyone else--even though Linda had begged.
"You can't. No room, Linda."
"But...!"
"I said there's no room, what part of that can't you understand?"
It was just them. They were a walking-talking-giggling-troublemaking chain reaction. There wasn't an end or a beginning, it just was.
People never got that.
"I think it's very strange." Linda told him at tea time. "It's very curel to keep people out of your games, Mello. You can't always have Matt to yourself. You've got to share."
Linda wasn't the first to tell him this--the other boys, the other girls, Roger, all the gleeful, shiny-faced parents that came to inspect them.
People never got it, but then again, people are very stupid creatures.
--
Near calls Matt a number when they turn thirteen. Matt and Mello, that is. Mello doesn't think of near as aging at all. matt says that's stupid, but he smiles in the way that says he understands.
Near and Mello are always being marched off to see L, always discussing little boys who grew up to be God, politics, statistics.
Mello says, "Matt ought to be here, too. How come he's not?"
Near says coldly, "Matthew is third." in the way that most people say 'you're an idiot.'
Mello thinks his name isn't MATTHEW you stupid twit and breaks his nose.
--
He remembers a lot of things by the things that Matt does. When Matt learns to tie shoelaces properly (something that took him a long time, all because he was trying to do it the way his mother had taught him. "Your mummy's dead, you prat!" Mello told his nastily one day, and Matt broke his tooth, and oh, wasn't Roger just furious), Mello learns how to sing old wives' tales in Russian to make himself fall asleep. He has his first asthma attack when Matt learns to sing back at him in Russian, even though it sucked and was pretty much the worst thing he'd ever heard, like, ever.
He has his first seizure when Matt finds his goggles.
He's on the ground, twitching and his face is covered with a thin sheen of sweat. His thoughts are scattered and all he can think is oh my god this is like totally not attractive or cool. They're in a junkyard down a few blocks from the orphanage and he had felt like—Dude, I feel like really strange right now and it's, like, that s-word from vocabulary? Sinister, man. I'm feelin' sinister—but he'd kind of ignored it.
And then he was on his back and twitching and ew, Matt must think he's some sort of twisted-up freak and oh, gross, he could feel himself making a nice little lake of drool already. This was a kind-of-not-really-well-I-wish-it-was-but-he-doesn't-know-it-yet date slash friendly outing slash brotherly bonding, and the epilepsy wasn't really helping.
Matt's got these disgusting goggles pushed over his eyes and he's on his knees before Mello like he's going to start praying (except Matt never prays, 'cause he says that he'll govern his own self, thanks very much). Matt's got out his cell phone, and in between the dial tone that Mello can hear humming from it, he sings in Russian: It's gonna be alright. It's gonna be okay. You will be fine, and I will be fine and we will go out dancing some day.
--
They don't go dancing. Not even when Matt finally shows up with his crooked smile and his gun and moves right on in, without any sort of explanation. Not when Mello accidentally burns off half of his face and spends two days tracing the burn scar with his fingers, humming in Russian to himself. Not when everybody's been shot and there's none left but them on New Year's, ringing in the new (old) war.
Matt gets shot the day they're supposed to go out somewhere. Grocery shopping, probably. They needed more apples ("I want chocolate!" Mello insisted, stomping his foot. Matt had looked amused. "And how old are we turning this year, little boy?") and juice and yogurt and oh, Mel, you seriously need to pay the rent—
A coffin. They needed a coffin for Matt and a couple of grand to pay the undertaker and the organist, someone to do the autopsy and show Mello exactly where the bullet had gone through his white-bone ribs and tripped up into his heart. Right where it'd speared his heart, separating the parts where he loved himself, and he hated himself, and he needed Mello and didn't need Mello--and that'd be the part right down the middle, 'cause dying was really just a way of saying that you were bored with this world, let's go make a new one.
Mello blows up the building that he owes rent for and goes out dancing. He nearly cries in the bathroom and lets a nearby hooker pick the ash out of his hair.
--
He knows he's dying—onetwothreei'vegotonlyabitandahalfleftoflifeisn'tthatsad—and can feel his heart sputtering and his mouth trembling like he did when he was twelve. Like another seizure, but this isn't one—they went away when he was fourteen and starting preparing to fight the war, back when Matt didn't smoke and looked Mello directly in the eye before dealing out lies.
Matt isn't here to sing to him in Russian, no matter how horrible it was and even if it made Mello's ears hurt to hear his mother tongue (mother's tongue) being snarled up by Matt/Matty/Mail's voice .
It's gonna be alright. It's gonna be okay. You will be fine, and I will be fine and we will go out dancing some day.
Except they never went out dancing and it wasn't alright that Matt was dead and that Mello'd been killing people for one, two, three years and still cried like a baby afterwards and it wasn't okay that he'd never paid the rent and that Matt smiled whenever he broke someone down to pieces and that they'd never, ever, not even once gone out dancing like normal people.
Like they weren't normal people.
He closes his eyes (wishes that Matt was here to lay him down to sleep, like a mother would, like a brother would) and mumbles what little he knows of his last rites in Russian (his mother's tongue, his Matt's tongue). There's storm clouds in front of his eyes and Matt running towards him, barefooted and arms spread open.
He says, "It's alright." He smiles and breathes and absolves all of Mello's sins by putting a hand on his shoulder and saying, "It's perfectly alright."