A/N: Sometimes it's so hard to be a writer. I'm a slave to it, always, always, ALWAYS a slave to it, and this collection is a good example of that. There are other things I should be doing. But enough of my angst.
I'm doing this to tie things off with nice bows. I said I'll never stop writing fanfiction, and that's true, but I've got to take my mind off it for a while to give my real work a shot. And yet… my mind can't rest if there are still bits of fanfic ideas floating in my consciousness.
This is a collection of Death Note blurbs and one shots. Things I had written and left sitting — mostly because I couldn't turn them into longer stories, and they didn't have enough substance to pose as pieces of their own. But I didn't want to waste them; there were some good moments I felt I had captured. So what I've been doing is cleaning them up and collecting them here for the enjoyment of my readers. They'll probably feel disjointed and lacking something. They are. Think of each chapter as a fragment, I guess. (But what's cool is that although they're fragments, should I ever want to expand one, I will do so.)
I'm sure none of you are surprised that I've chosen to start with Matt and Mello.
Matt inhaled the smoke from his cigarette, looking up at the stars. He couldn't fathom the way they twinkled so brightly, the way the light filtered down through billions of miles of empty space to glitter in the night like flecks of silver. Even when the sky was polluted and clogged, even when he wasn't staring hard at them, they shone enough to let a man know they were there.
They never stopped shining. Matt exhaled and his smoke shrouded their sparkle. He had always felt like it should mean something, the eternity of those stars. But really, no one would ever know why those astral bodies were there. And all the romantic explanations that infused their presence with significance had been clichéd for ages. There was nothing credible in a cliché.
He inhaled again, and the tip of his cigarette glowed brighter than the spots among the clouds. Matt took his eyes off the sky.
He had always been grounded in reality, hadn't he? He loved what was simple. The complex corrupted, destroyed, depreciated with its intricacies and masked what was small and impermanent, and therefore beautiful.
Mello came out onto the balcony.
"What are you looking at?" he asked quietly.
"The stars," Matt said, and then he flicked his ash to the ground below. "They're too cosmic."
A long silence passed. Mello raised his head to stare upward.
"They make you feel like you'll never add up, like nothing will ever be worth it," Matt said. "Like no matter what you fucking do, you can't compare to the might of the universe and everything it stands for. Can't change life, can't enjoy it. What's the point in the existence of something that kills a person's spirit that way?" He breathed another puff of smoke into the air, and when it obscured the sky again, he looked at Mello.
"You never could accept the infinite," the blond said. Then he turned and brushed his fingers over Matt's long enough to lift the cigarette from his grasp. Matt's eyes followed the movement before realization hit.
Mello had just swiped his fucking cigarette.
Matt had fucking let him.
"That's why it can't be anyone but you, Matt," Mello went on, smoke winding up from the stick between his fingers. "That's why I need you with me. A man looks up at the stars, and he sees a vastness that swallows him whole. He thinks of eternity, and how he can never be a part of its endlessness. Then he cries himself to sleep." He brought the cigarette to his lips — slipped it between them, sensually, slowly. "It takes something more than a man to look up at the sky and ignore its magnitude. Something more than a man to live his life without caring about the uselessness of living."
Matt watched Mello take in a breath, the cigarette held loosely in his glove. He bit his lower lip in silence when Mello's mouth formed a smooth O, and the smoke that left looked like an artful swirl of incense exhaust.
"You should give me that back," Matt said, and his voice wavered. "It was preserving my self control."
Mello licked his lips, the movement an unconscious one, but Matt felt longing dip deliciously down through his core, all the way to the soles of his boots.
"What's the point, Matt?"
"The point of what?" Matt breathed, debating whether or not to take his cigarette back by force.
"The point of refraining from anything," Mello said, letting the hand with Matt's cigarette sink to his side. As Matt tisked in annoyance, he realized Mello's question had been meant to provoke him into some sort of philosophy.
Fuck philosophy.
It never got him anywhere.
"The point of what, Mello? There isn't a point." The longing was shooting through his blood now. Mello looked exquisite in the starlight.
"No, there isn't. Just like there's no point in envying the stars. But sometimes no one can help it. Where others fall short in strength and begin to fear their mortality, you only follow what's before you, and it makes you immortal. You're fucking immortal, Matt. Because you're living every second. Because you don't care about the end. To you, the end might as well not exist. This moment could last a lifetime for you, couldn't it?"
Matt's breathing hitched when Mello took a step closer. "You're fucking confusing the shit out of me." He had to have his cigarette back, or he'd let the moment take him. He couldn't afford that; there were more important things, weren't there? But, hadn't Mello just said…? Shit, now Matt was thinking too hard. All he wanted was to—
Mello dropped the cigarette to the ground as if to end the conversation. Matt opened his mouth to protest the waste of a good smoke, but Mello's expression stopped him.
Why did Mello look so serious? Perhaps Matt shouldn't have brought up the stars at all. Suddenly, he hated having to backtrack and worry about the possible implications in what he'd said. What did it matter? Didn't he have the right to follow whatever whim he wanted? If he wanted to discredit the stars, he'd discredit the god damned stars. Life would suck if he spent time stressing over the consequences of all his actions. Damn Mello and his philosophy spiel; all Matt wanted to do was to tilt Mello's head up and show him what happened when he walked out looking tempting and had the gall to steal his cigarette. Should he have been trying harder to reign in those feelings?
Then Mello smirked — seemed to read Matt like an astrology chart. It lasted only a second, and then the hint of awareness was gone, replaced with something tense and insistent.
"You're fighting yourself," the blond said. "Maybe I was wrong. Aren't you as immortal as you seem, Matt?" Mello leaned in until their lips were a wisp away from touching. "Lose control," he commanded in a husky whisper.
Matt felt the ripple of wanting take him high, and with a tiny shift forward, he captured Mello's lips. Mello let out a soft noise of release, of breaking, of melting into surrender.
Matt felt like it was supposed to mean something, something weighty and complex, but the idea flew with the taste of Mello's kiss, the slickness of his tongue, the firmness of lips that went suddenly pliant when Matt made Mello gasp and collapse into him.
"Shit, Matt, you're something incorruptible…."
"I don't know what you mean." He could feel Mello's fingers digging into his shoulders.
"I mean that even with someone like me dropping bombs on your 'carpe diem' mentality, trying to make you think about the risks we've been taking, you don't give a shit about half the things you do. You just do what you want."
Now Mello's grip on him was painful. "You had to push me into it this time, though." Mello had told him to lose control. Matt was beginning to comprehend the conversation. "I almost got bogged down." He glared up at the sky. Fuckin' stars.
Mello moved his hands to Matt's hair. "Damn it, how do you do it, Matt? How the hell do you keep on going?"
"Dunno," Matt murmured against his jaw line. "And I'm not about to try to figure it out." Then he kissed Mello again.
He really didn't give a damn what the universe stood for.