A web of blond hair slipped from Mello's ear and fell in front of his eye. Singed, the tips of his hair clung to sticky flesh on the ridge of his sharp cheekbone and his cracked lips were parted in a weak attempt at breath. Mello's spine curved against a mass of tangled pipes and concrete spewing torrents of smoke and giving of waves of heat. Hooked strips of a beaten black jacket linked Mello's crumpled body to the reeking wreckage. Overhead the pink sky was smudged by a thick grey that stretched indefinitely. Matt felt his lungs freeze.
Matt's nervous cigarette fell onto a carpet of ashes and debris. He stood a fair distance away from Mello, his own figure blending in with a heap of metal as he fought an inclination to sink to his knees, touch his nose to the hot earth, and clutch his hair, to be consumed by the steaming wasteland. This was too much.
Too
much. Not now.
The steely smoke emanating from the landscape mingled with the taste of the remnants of his cigarette's smoke in his mouth as he thought of the compiled years and questions and blanks and dark corners and nightmares.
And now all of this at once.
He knew his lungs would dissolve eventually but this sudden loss of function was unexpected.
Why did I come?
20 feet away Mello's body shook with an emphasized breath.
Why did I come running?
Matt stepped forward, his boots noiseless. His pulse quickened. As he crept closer, he began to notice the details he had attempted to glean while hiding in the shadows, observing unobserved. Mello's head was slumped back, revealing a neck ravaged by flames. This was the first thing Matt noticed. The second was the lump near Mello's fingertips, his cell phone, the source of the summons. And suddenly, Matt was swamped with the anger that had been left to simmer and for long years.
He thought back to a night of icy rain spent ringing out a simple note that now lay rotting in the middle of a forest. The night that left him bedridden for a week after trudging through black woods in the pelting rain and rigid wind. He remembered being found by the black-haired man that had never before looked at him twice. The old Matt had died then. This new person that he was lived without an identity.
He thought back to a sunny day where he craned his neck to watch the treetops swallow the stone rooftop as his feet carried him farther and farther away. He remembered a cigarette leaking smoke from his mouth and imagining Linda staring sadly out of a window.
What happened to Linda?
He thought back to earlier this morning in the café, talking to Glady at the bar, sipping a coffee. The twin scars on his wrists were paler than ever and Glady's gaze was less maniacally protective. His hand shook less when he lit his cigarette. He remembered his phone ringing, vibrating against his hip.
And now this happens.
Matt stood five feet away from Mello and roared, his fury echoing throughout the devastation. He ran his hand through his scarlet hair violently, teeth ground together, the grimace of a beaten dog. He felt the pinnacle of rage throbbing in his heart.
"Goggles..."
And then his whole body stopped, his hand frozen, laced into his hair. Mello's voice was choked with soot and grime and had a muffled quality. He hadn't moved, but his eyelids fluttered, the dying spasm of a butterfly.
"What?"
Matt was pretty sure he was inaudible and yet...
"Goggles... damn goggles..."
Mello's frail chest shook with a breath. Matt's fingertips brushed the tinted shield of his goggles absently and he looked upward. One lonely bird sailed through the smog above, looking rather lost and misplaced. And then Matt looked back down, staring at Mello's gruesome arm where clothing and skin had been burned away. Matt thought how Mello resembled a mangled cat bleeding in the middle of a busy street, unnoticed. Which made Matt wonder,
Why did he call me? Why didn't he call... someone else...
Matt was angry again. Angry because he knew that Mello had called him because he had no one left. Time to open up the reserve supply. The only-for-emergencies-safe. Matt abused his hair some more.
And then Matt let his chin brush his chest and he stood motionless. There were so many thousands of words he could and wanted to say to the blonde in black and blood. But he didn't say anything. He just stepped forward and peeled the dying cat from the asphalt, the crook of Mello's bent knees supported by the crook of Matt's right elbow and his shoulder grasped stoically. Mello weighed so little. Even less than the last time Matt had felt the full of his weight. For a short second, Mello opened his eyes. Mello's near-black eyes matched the darkness of the soot that covered his burnt body and in that small second they met Matt's green eyes which writhed with conflicting emotion. Mello lost consciousness and Matt felt his own shoulders slump, felt like a statue cracking apart.
And then he walked forward, through the forest of perishing architecture, through the layers of smoke, through the endless tones of grey and black under the dimming sky. His wrists hurt and his hands shook under Mello's frame.