Author's Note= Happy Birthday Mello! A few days late, I apologize. ^^" Pure laziness is the cause, but here it is. ^^ A one-shot for our dearest Mello.

Matt's POV

Remember Mello, there's a side to me that you haven't seen.

Pray you never see it.

Yeah, pray, that odd thing you do when you're stressed. When you think that there's something wrong that you can't fix. You grip that cross of yours, and hope that some higher power will save you.

It's the one part of you that I don't understand. The bane of your existence, the center of your universe; and no matter what I do I can't seem to get it. I don't know why someone who always does things for themselves can depend more on some imaginary entity than the one you've known since childhood.

But as I said, you grip that necklace, and go over each bead with a wish.

You confide your utmost desires and your most horrifying sins. You give your soul to that piece of jewelry.

You leave me hanging; you just leave me wishing that I were one of the beads. Yeah, the one that you cherish; the one you got on your fifth birthday. The white one.

Once, when I'd gotten you drunk enough, you'd told me that your grandparents had given your mother a bead-less rosary when she was born. Then she added a bead for every year she was alive. You said that she'd joke that between the two of you that you'd make it to two hundred beads long.

Right. At the age of twenty, you still only have twenty-nine beads.

But back to the bead you got when you were five; it's different from all the other beads, it's the only white one on your chain of black for your mom and red for you.

It was the last bead your parents ever gave you.

Every year, I give you a bead on your birthday. Every year it goes onto a second rosary that this year will have fifteen beads.

That necklace goes into a drawer and doesn't come out until it's time to put a new one on.

You'll never know how much that breaks my heart.

I really wish that I were that white bead. It means so much to you, and lately, that's all you care about. Just two things, this case and that bead.

I've tried so hard, but it's never enough. I suppose that that bead means more than my life.

You must have really loved your parents, Mello. Or be a really good liar. I mean, you tell me that you love me; and I believe you. You look at me with a softness, and I used to think that I was the only one who got to see it.

Then I began to notice how you looked at that bead. And I realized something.

I'm nothing to you. I'm just a bed warmer, a shoulder to cry on when you're god doesn't fulfill your wishes, when your faith is broken.

Sometimes I want to take that faith, I want to take that moment when your beads have failed you to convince you that I'm worth more than they are. That I can give you things that they can't.

But I can't. I can't give you all the things that your mind thinks that white bead can give you.

No, I'll never compare to that white bead.

I'm turning nineteen in two months, what will I get? The same thing that I always get. A night where I feel like that white bead. Where you cradle me, and whisper sweet nothings into my ear. On that night you tell me that I'm beautiful, that I'm unique, that no one could ever replace me. On my thirteenth birthday I started asking you to tell me that nothing could ever replace me. You had stared at me, then left.

I'd cried that night. I'd messed up my one night of feeling like that bead. That was the first time that I realized that you always wore your rosary. Even on that night when you tole me that I was special; it had been there, mocking me all those years. My birthdays were never the same.

You left that year, and you only took your rosary with you. At that time, the necklace I'd bought you only had nine beads. For the next four and a half years, I added a bead religiously.

I've never told you that. It isn't something you need to know.

Then, earlier this year, you show up three days before my birthday. You missed it, and I didn't say anything.

Because you prayed that night. You took a spot in front of a window and prayed to that white bead.

Two months later, you ask me when my birthday is, you forgot. When I tell you, your eyes widen. You apologize, wish me a happy belated birthday and carry on investigating your case while playing with that white bead.

Now your birthday is here. And I place the fifteenth bead on to the chain. And I make a wish.

I wish that one day, I'll mean as much to you as that white bead does. I do it just like you do.

Only when god doesn't answer my payer, I have no one's should to cry on. No one's heart to break because they love me so.

All because of that deceptively pure white bead.