Mello breathes in too much and coughs too loud.
Matt takes a hit for him, maybe a hit too many, but whatever.
He cups Mello's face and Mello inhales.
Matt hates blowing shotgun, and when he's older he'll hate riding it.
But it's a hate that doesn't suck so bad, so long as he holds his breath and doesn't swallow.
Mello was out the door swatting moths away before Matt could say goodbye.
It's fine.
Even when he's gone, Matt sees yellow in his goggles and feels black in his lungs.
On the road, Matt lives by his hand.
Five finger discounts applied at every gas station and convenience store.
Four finger Vulcan hellos to boys coming out of the arcades he wishes he could crash in.
Three fingers raised in front of passing churches, like devil horns with a man stuck in the middle. That's all this is, Matt says to himself, deafening himself to another sign.
Two fingers salutes to old houses he could've grown up in.
And a one finger wave to the cop who busts him at the 7-11 on Tuesday night.
To be cool is to be brave and to be brave is to be right and to be right is to win.
Matt's seen what winning does to you, so he posts his bail with Chuck E Cheese tokens and sets out to make a phone call.
"Bullshit, you fucking missed me."
There, he said it.
He follows Mello the way you follow creeks to rivers and rivers to seas. Mello's great and all, but so is a high score and scoring a high, joy rides and riding girls who want to be called Joy (even though their name tag says "Michelle").
The time that passes and the distance that grows between them only makes the air brisk.
There is a boy out somewhere, but for now Matt's busy tracing the ulnar veins of other people and charting courses clear of Winchester.
The truth of the matter hits Matt when he's sitting in a family-owned kitschy pita place, phishing passwords of Apple executives on a busted Dell laptop and drowning in his fourth pot of red-eye.
Mello is a teenage boy trying to kill a god. Or avenge a god. Or become a god.
Either way, the whole mess strikes Matt as unholy business. He can't wait to join in.
After he dicks around though.
He's driving someone else's Plymouth Road Runner somewhere summery and nightish and his mouth keep screaming fuck that out of the rolled down window. He is a redheaded terror tonight, maybe a blue-haired bastard tomorrow, depends on how many dye pots he has in the trunk.
He thinks he'll go through the whole fucking rainbow this week, test-drive while he's still feeling like a new car guy. Right now, he is good smells, clean engines, tires squealing. The windshield's a bit blurry, but who needs vision anyway?
(In the morning, the trunk's filled with nothing but boxes of strawberry blondes. Sober Matt groans, says damn it not again before tipping the dyes promising shades of gold just like you had when you were younger into the recycling bin.)
Video games are fun.
(The gigs are easy, holy shit, rerouting addresses and credit card scams? He could do this in his sleep.)
Video games are fun?
(Hell, he could probably do it high.)
Well shit, they better be.
(He does it high.)
It's when Matt wakes up in someone else's bathtub, surrounded by half-eaten bowls of mac and cheese, hands tied with ethernet cables and a pipe bomb duct-taped to his feet counting down in red digits that Matt decides to finally, at last, after all this time, start locking his front door.
When the phone rings and Mello kicks off the call by saying super cool gangster shit in his ear, Matt figures it out.
"I think I'm into you," he says.
"Sure," Mello says, and a gunshot rings, a man screams and Mello is laughing all harsh and happy.
"Like, dude, I'm pretty sure I loved you then too," he says.
"Weak," Mello says, voice drawling like he wants Matt to go on.
"Where are you now?"
Matt's just driven past Vegas' city limits. He had stayed there for a year, soaking up the clinking of coins and dinging automated winner responses. He would miss the valley. Matt had a home in Paradise, in Enterprise, and hell, even in Winchester, although the latter was more like a bachelor pad shared with several other freelance black hats.
Mello was asking him to go from a Las to a Los, in half a day. ("In current traffic, it'll take you four hours and twenty min- oh, hell, stop laughing Matt and listen, you assfuck-")
"You must be in deep shit."
Before hanging up, Matt catches Mello exhaling very, very carefully.
He's too high or maybe he's too clean, or maybe it's the night's fault for making the roads curve and twist into themselves, he's driving in circles, figure eights, perfect heptagons, cursive loops of a boy's name he should not know, he's not driving at all, he's shaking hands with Dumbledore, he's won the house cup, he's screaming this at Mello at four in the morning while hitting him with a beaten Harry Potter paperback, he's lying flat on his back getting arm broken, he's getting X-Rayed by Roger who's apparently a doctor but not a very good one because the painkillers aren't enough, he's taking double his dosage and feeling fan-fucking-tastic, he's getting his arm signed by every orphan he's ever met and by the time he reaches his room there's no room for the suddenly guilt-stricken Mello to scribble so Mello leans close and says
Oh, there, that's the ramp. Matt takes a U-turn.
Even Mello's directions are encrypted.
"What is this Russian magic fuckery?"
"Look, dickhead, no routes of communication are safe. I can't straight out tell you where I am. I can't even give you a codebreaker. Use that red or green or piss-coloured head of yours and be here by noon."
Eventually, Matt figures out that "take a diagon/ally past the Baba Yaga" means "do that wall-hitting shit we read about in the Philosopher's Stone on the brick alley near that conked up woman selling headless chickens near Pershing Square".
And that "tell Rasputin Anastasia gives good Near" means "say big head to the bouncer of Rouge and he'll let you in."
It takes some trial and error. Matt shows up on Mello's door with hands covered in chicken blood and a fist-shaped bruise on his left cheek. There's $40 less in his wallet and both packs in his jeans are empty.
Of course, Mello is long gone. Someone had ratted, and the only signs the boy was ever there are the chocolate wrappers strewn behind the bar, and the presence of a dying man flailing in his own blood, trying to pull his body up with a stripper pole.
"Can you still speak?" Matt asks the soon-to-be corpse. "Where'd he go?"
The man says "desert" before croaking, slipping down onto the stage. Matt hightails it out of both conversation and nightclub.
He's typing coordinates into his GPS within half an hour, wrapper tucked into his glove and melting remnants of chocolate against his fingertips.
He doesn't know what he's trying to prove. Mello always gets in touch with him sooner or later.
But then again, he doesn't know what Mello's trying to prove either. The one he's trying to prove things to hasn't been around since, well, ever. Whatever.
Matt snaps his goggles on higher and drives a little faster.
He has a lot to do before he plans on ending up dead, and he's got the feeling he and Mello had better do their proving quick, while their lungs are still working.
"If you want to live, stop," they used to tell him, but bad habits die hard and Mello's the fucking worst.
He's on the Mojave Trail, a dirt road cutting through the dried Soda Lake. His hair's still damp from driving through a passing river (GPS had blinked Arroyo de los Mártires before dying, along with the rest of his electronics), and his face itches from sand flying in on sudden gusts. After this, Matt thinks, he's never going outside again.
Matt's used to watching American sunsets on freeways; idling in traffic, his mouth and his Chevy Camaro puffing up exhausts, a knee on the wheel and a game of Tetris beepbooping in his hands. Without all the L.A. smog, the bloody hues of sunset are gone. Quieter too, now that the horns and yells of people slower than him aren't around.
The sun's take forever to go down, so moonrise happens early. The two crescent things rip white into a torn up sky, orange falling with the sun into the horizon so that blazing chromas of blue slope upwards to meet the moon's ascent.
Matt can't say he cares for either, but in the middle of nowhere, he's got nothing better to do but watch.
It's like this, with his head lolled back and his eyes trained up, that a motorbike roars past him.
Matt curses, sits upright and pursues.
By the time he catches up, Mello's on his fourth chocolate bar. He's in a black leather jacket, leaning against his bike and looking at Matt like they should be gone by now. Matt's never seen anyone look cooler.
And Matt laughs because he can feel something in his chest stirring, something that's been held just for that boy, and Mello laughs because Matt's laughing and Matt's laugh is the stupidest fucking sound in the world.
So there they are, laughing and hands meeting on Mello's handlebars when Matt decides, what the hell, and gives Mello that breath he was holding onto.
(When Matt finally leaves Wammy's House, his head is buzzing with a stupid song. He hums it leisurely. Lyrics about making it to California thrum and stay inside his mouth as the cars pass him by, leaving him alone with heat-shimmered dusk. His thumb points west and his arm aches, but it's a soreness Matt's had since Mello became Mihael to him.
He's drunk on pride and high on fumes and brimming with plans to not have plans. When a car slows to see him in, Matt takes one last drag, then inhales deep, before climbing in, and riding off.)