[This is for Acey. Sorry it's so strange, dear. Then again, from me, what would you expect?
Assigning words to people is too damned hard. Matt decided that a long time ago. Because words are commonplace, run-of-the-mill sort of things and he kept running into them when he neither needed nor wanted a reminder—and who needs a record—I mean honestly—making records of stuff is dangerous now, more dangerous than it's ever been. The pen mightier than the sword? It's so stupid. He can picture it. He does. He's hitchhiked halfway across America by this point and he's wondered who, what, why the fuck, one of those hunched-over boring statistical people strolling into an OfficeMax can stroll right the hell back out, two packages of Pentels in a plastic bag: no one'll mind either. This is the United States, after all. Major corporations are endorsing Kira all over the place. He doesn't care. He shouldn't. He doesn't. It's stupid. He isn't. Mostly.
--if they—
Words are a big pain, but sounds he can manage. Sights. That sort of thing.
With Misa it's smells.
She sits him down on her carpet, her hands resting lightly on his shoulders before she stands and moves to the window-sill: the curtains are always drawn, and they're black and lacy, and she smooths her skirt before taking the lighter from the small wooden ledge.
The fluid—theclick—for a second Matt's so damn entranced by the tiny flame that he—
But Misa (Amane) Misa in the light (Amane, remember?) when the room is dark, ten o'clock or so (long past dusk) the way the light turns her face into a garden of shadows that bloom and shift and wilt outlined in heavy makeup, and the way he can't tell whether she's trembling or the fire is—
It's, it's.
Distracting.
Reckoning a bouquet of incense, she selects a stick and leans it carefully on the stand, some sculpted-stone that looks like it has skulls carved into it.
Great.
The strands of smoke are different from what he knows, what he remembers; somehow thinner and more delicate curling around themselves. The room's sweet, musky, strange. What. He doesn't know what to do with sweet. He never has.
He points to the lighter.
She looks a question at him.
"Can I borrow that?"
"Oh—sure!"
Sure.
Ironic. Sure?
Matt, perpetually unsure, lights himself a cigarette and watches vague haze mingle with those odd exquisite incense-strings and the two smells together add up to something that's, eventually, going to take his breath away—in theory—in practical theory—
But, like—
Really, who actually—
If he wants to asphyxiate himself he can just keep staring at Misa some more, can't he? She's sort of addictive. She's—
What's addictive is what's forbidden; that's why it's addictive; it's like, if you just keep doing it it'll somehow become less wrong and less dangerous because after all you know what the fuck you're about by this point, you've been doing it for weeks, months, years and so why the hell would you ever stop? God. He knows all about that. When it came to studies of psychology, back at Wammy's, he scored pretty damn high. Higher than Near, sometimes. He never told Mello that. Mello was way better than him at realpsychology, scary good, you know. He knew people and Matt felt it as sheer force thanks to his own intuition, some sort of glowing indicator watch out watch out I treated it the way he might've treated bosses in his old games, right? That's what he did. High levels.
Mello never scored higher than Near even though he tried so hard, but Matt's always thought that at least in some areas it was just 'cause he was so sure somewhere that Near was going to beat him anyway.
Fuck the numbers, he told Mello. First time he'd ever used that word out loud when someone else was listening. They don't matter. None of this, it doesn't matter, seriously—
But that's all he--!
All who?
Near!
What exactly are you—
What he understands! Numbers! It's like—I can't—I'm learning all these languages but still, I—God! (and then he'd slipped into a bitter sequence of Russian invective, hadn't he, those jumbled syllables harsh and somehow vulnerable falling out of his mouth with the honesty of a native speaker.)
Mello's gone, now.
Matt doesn't know what to associate with Mello. Couldn't pin that guy down when he was alive and now that he's dead it's even harder. Mello was Mello and he was a crazy ass but he was smart and he was vaguely glorious and he was a criminal and he was a lot of crap, really, but he wasn't ever cruel and he was always human and Matt kind of knew he was going to go out like that. Fuck it, they both kind of knew. They danced conversations around it. They did a boogie. Mello cast dramatic shadows when he wanted to on any number of dirty pavements. And Matt would think stupid things. Matt would think, I'm going down with you.
Knowing that he was totally wrong.
Did he know?
Maybe he didn't know.
What is he now.
He's asked himself that: What am I now. Right after where and forgetting why and discarding who since he's trying to stick to something simple. What. He's made lists. Post-it notes on his rusting fridge that froze the half & half he got for coffee. Little scribbled things. He never was much of a writer and he liked games better than books.
The name Horatio comes to mind, sometimes.
Fuck you, Mello. L. Fuck you for leaving me here as the last one standing.
Because Near doesn't care Near doesn't count. And Matt's more the Horatio type, anyway. He has this loyalty he never wanted that half the time makes him feel like a good person and the other half makes him feel like he's getting six organs operated on at once. He stays in the background. He tosses out some good lines. He's been given praise that he doesn't know how to accept.
Except that it doesn't add up since Denmark's none the wiser.
I want…
But what's being known, anyway?
For too long being known's just been the quickest route to being caught.
So now there's Misa, right, and so when he first met and got into Misa he didn't think oh it's the model he thinks it's that girl, you know, the one I watched for a while back when—
Yeah.
"Matt?"
Her voice does strange things to his name, really—all questioning like that, and it makes Matt feel like he shouldn't be here. He ignores it. Shouldis bullshit anyhow. "Yeah?"
"Are you okay--?" –as she sits on the bed, bouncing slightly, leaning over and peering into his face. Trying to catch his attention (he's not sure about this but) she's caught something in his look that stinks of too much thinking, the kind that comes with a side order of distance; she probably got that from Yagami a lot. "Misa thought, you looked sort of—"
"I'm fine," he says.
The thing is that he is.
Isn't he just?
-----
It's two days before Christmas. They're not as into it here in Japan but he can feel Misa's silver crosses winking at him from her wall, some with grotesque…Jesuses? Jesi? How would you spell that?...all twisted in accusing agony and uh, yeah, it's a little disquieting. So he doesn't see the harm in thinking about some kid shining with Holiness. Kids are cute. Noisy, but cute. He's an atheist himself. He's never seen eye to eye with anyone he knows on religion.
Except for L, maybe?
Not sure.
He doesn't know what Misa thinks of religion, really. Doesn't even want to know.
It's funny how little he wants to know.
He likes Misa here, now. For Christmas he's getting himself a present free of pasts or futures. He doesn't know whether he deserves it but he sure as hell doesn't think there's anyone he trusts to judge that. So he's going to let himself stay here. Misa's going to ask him to ask if he can stay the night, because she likes to be asked, and she's going to say yes. She's a good-looking girl and she's not Socrates, fine, but she's deep enough to dive into without cracking your head open and getting blood all over the pool.
And there's something about her that back then made him want to grin like the little kid he'd been once. The kind that runs downstairs in early morning to fun, fun, fun—
Except he's never been into running; never had that much energy, lazy ass that he is.
Still he thinks he might run towards Misa, or at least her smile, while trying not to feel like he's running away from something: yes because he likes Misa, sure, he's always liked Misa. He's going in about two minutes to get up on the bed with Misa and sit next to her, kiss her on the cheek maybe, tell her something interesting but not too sharp and lean his head on her shoulder and she'll say Misa already knew that, silly! and maybe she'll give him some of that bubbly champagne laughter and he'll laugh, too. Giggle even. A little bit rough from the cigarettes but pitched low and warm somehow. He likes being near her. It's weird. He never went to high school. He never did this. Sitting next to her he feels lucky, that here and now and after everything he gets to sit with Misa Amane in her room full of candles, playful flames instead of flames of ruination. He gets to hold her hand as they walk down city streets knowing, both of them, that cities are always cold even when they're not. He gets to smile at silly things and laugh at sillier ones.
Except she's got Light Yagami branded on every inch of her skin and so Matt feels like he's trespassing on something that's not his. But that's okay. He doesn't belong to Misa either. People don't have to belong to each other. They don't have to belong to anything.
Sometimes they do but they, they don't have to.
----
He watches her.
Later he'll burn incense and he'll imagine her the way he'd like her to be and not the way she is now—now her eyes bloodshot more often than not, her lips cracked sometimes and her soprano hoarse and airy like an amateur piccolo and sometimes lower-pitched than it has any right to be. Yes, she'll talk to him. She's Misa. She'll talk to anyone. Matt listens to her, too, just because he's used to listening. Yeah, her voice comes from her throat without any touching-up. He likes that. But she's not used to being listened to. And she hates that. So she pretends that people've always hung on her every word, rather than hanged themselves at her every word as her mood swings like hanged men, and Matt just watches. Watching is different than looking. She's been looked at more than watched, though she's been watched before.
L always watched her (Ryuuzaki, she said, and Matt couldn't give her anything but a blank look) but Matt doesn't know this.
Matt knows hewatched her back then, but it's different now. Because now she knows.
She knows and she doesn't mind. She watches him, too, sometimes.
And there's something in it that's more consensual, more—God, can he say it?—normal than anything either of them have ever had before, only not, because there's this stack of names between them and they've all been written in a little black book.
'cause they're…not normal at all, really.
Who the hell is? –but especially not them.
Misa was always watching Light and Matt was always watching Mello, or watching outfor Mello, or something stupid like that. That stands between them, for one. Although of course he wasn't actually always watching. He's not capable of that. Damned if he's ever been able to have the focus. Only, only sometimes—
The thing is that he sees Misa and he thinks something awful.
Misa's grief. He sees that. She's depressed. She's lost something that meant the world to her and she's never, ever going to get it back and theweight is in her and in everything she does and says. And Matt doesn't want to see that. Matt wants Misa to be happy, light. Trivial even. All that effervescence he saw as she clutched Mogi's arm and pranced around in those stupid lacy outfits, he wants to see that again, the real version of it. But he wants that for all the wrong reasons. He maybe wants it a little because he hates to think that Light Yagami (that--!) was that important to someone. Sure. Okay.
Mostly, though, he wants to feel less guilty: Misa's grief is shaming him, see. Because Matt was ready to risk everything to get Mello what he wanted—what he didn't get—he was ready to die, he felt it, he waved off Mello's warnings and bit the bullet and went, and when he got there, he stepped out of the car and improvised his lines and found he didn't care, he didn't care about anything, but but but he really, honestly didn't. He felt no weight at all. Like he'd been dreading something only to have it vanish. This…surreal…sense of nothing at stake, of effortless confidence. He was going to be shot. It was going to have been worth it. And maybe in the instant between the shot and his death, somewhere in between the agony of it he'd have rebelled at the last second; cursed Mello and cursed a God he didn't believe in, had never believed in, would never get the chance to believe in and pick up on that human despair that surely, surely Light Yagami felt somewhere before crashing and burning
(so to speak)
that dammit God dammit I want to live I—
But the shot never came.
Mello was right even if he hadn't thought he was right.
He got arrested and Near got him out about a month later and he never lost the feeling and Mello was dead, Mello is dead, Mello's always going to—
And Matt thinks that he should, in good conscience, sob his fucking eyes out.
Because.
Well.
Because.
And still, still he just doesn't—feel like it, and he wants Misa to tell him that it's okay, to get over it like he got over it, to tell him it's all right if he wants to live and follow up on all this in the only way he knows how.
-----
Two and a half months later Misa will shoot herself in the head with a pistol Matt never knew she had. Matt won't smoke a cigarette again.
Tonight they're going to sleep together.
No, not like that. They're just going to sleep, together, in Misa's skinny single bed with the too-soft mattress and the pillow that smells like lavender and the one Matt's borrowing, the one he sits on on her floor made of black corduroy that leaves college-rule lines on his face in the morning. He's going to fall asleep before she does. She's going to kiss his forehead after he falls asleep and roll over to face the wall which is never dark enough. He may dream of her. She will not dream of him. He will wake up at two in the morning and remember a strange shred of a dream that was ragged around the edges and warm like a homemade quilt—it will involve his mother, cookies, L, Mello, a kitchen table, a wedding dress, half a dozen roses—he will want to tell her but then he will fall asleep again, and in the morning, he'll have forgotten all about it.