The ghost is some new kid and it's blatantly obvious he's never done this before in his life, because once deposited from car seat to ground the other kids flee and the ghost remains still and then hobbles next to a tree to stand and watch. A dozen tacky fingers have already thumbed doorbells and shrieks of trick or treat flicker bright in the fuzzy dusk. Someone's burning leaves and Matt wants to find the fire or make his own but the ghost keeps picking nervously at his costume.
When he drops his little plastic bucket and then trips over the thing trying to pick it up, Matt is lost.
"Hey," he says to the creature, knowing Roger is watching every breath, "I know where the best candy is. C'mon."
The ghost peeps through its sheet with two eyes so dark Matt thinks it's part of the costume. The ghost shakes slightly and looks down.
Matt notices red flecking white. "Oh."
Disguises ignored, Matt kneels and shoves up handfuls of sheet to stare at the bleeding knee. It's pretty deep and the smeared stuff trails halfway down pale shin.
Matt blows on the open skin gently. Then with all the tenderness of childhood, wraps one hand around the calf and offers a kiss above the wound.
"All better?"
The ghost has never been given a kiss for hurts and is a bit intimidated, so says nothing.
Eh. Matt stands up and hands the ghost his jack-o'-lantern bucket.
"Can you walk?"
Wanting the vampire with his blood-stained mouth to go away, the ghost says yes.
"K. C'mon, then," and the ghost's wrist is trapped.
As they walk the vampire tries to frighten the baby with tales of fires made from bones and witches burned alive and when they get back to the van the ghost's head is full of gizzards and seconds. He falls asleep next to Matt.
He'll always be a ghost. Now Matt is six, and the ghost is everywhere, in corners with his puzzle or eating rice in a window seat or or lurking in every odd bend of Matt's brain.
He's been roommates with a vampire for oh, always now, and they're vampires together, and ghosts can't be with vampires. Mello's a vampire the first Halloween he comes and Matt is some plumber with a princess to save, but secretly he is a vampire too because Mello tells him so. Mello teaches him how to skin cats and squirrels and rabbits and Matt teaches him how to make dynamite and radios, and they're useful enough, close enough, that Matt not talking for a week and Mello disappearing for two days doesn't change anything. It's not allowed to.
But as they grow older the friendship waxes short of obsessions and world domination and beating Near and whatever's on Matt's DS.
They drift apart.
Mello's reading Rand and Matt's stuck little tracking bits to Near's socks, and soon Matt's only with Mello because Mello only talks about Near.
Near plays with his toys and doesn't destroy the tracking devices.
Now they are ten, and Mello helps Matt bake a chocolate cake in secret just as the sky becomes drenched in grey.
They fight over something stupid like Matt not paying attention and Mello gets a black eye.
The coolness between them affects the entire House.
It ends with a punch to the stomach from Mello but Matt gets strep. His tonsils float like murky bits of algae in liquid. He thinks of his throat scabbing and wonders if vampires like the taste of metal as he spits red in the sink, throat throbbing.
Near stays in his room while Matt is in the hospital and tries to hack Matt's system. He fails.
They're twelve when Mello gets it. He doesn't care. So Mello lets Matt help Near with his puzzles but sometimes when he gets Near to laugh Mello wishes he had fangs.
Six months later and Near lets Matt trail a hand through his curls, and Near wishes he was a ghost so he could turn into some bobbing ball of light.
"You okay?"
No, because he is a ghost. He knows his eternities.
Mello starts biting away at chocolate and sometimes studies the marks his canines make when he's alone.
Two and a half years later, Near pads from the shower wearing only that big white shirt over still-damp skin with the first two buttons undone and Mello pretends he doesn't want to bite when he kisses the bared shoulder, curve of neck, top of Near's spine.
Near does not speak for a month.
Mello doesn't hide his triumph, but he eats more chocolate to mask the taste.
Matt can't figure it out except that he did something to him, but neither will say a word.
So Matt shuts down and cracks into the Pentagon, and then Google, and he tells L because there's no one else to.
L says nothing in reply. Matt skips trick-or-treating that year.
Mello pins Near against a tree the year that Matt skips and the plastic teeth scraping Near's neck draw pinpricks of blood that Mello wipes away with one black sleeve. Then he spits out the fangs and kisses Near properly and Matt sits in front of a screen, ignoring the two blinking points of light merged almost to one in a corner.
Ghosts are immortal. Vampires are immortal, but they can die, and Mello becomes the best marksman at the orphanage.
Matt is told you can't be friends with ghosts. Ghosts are have moved beyond the mundane and those left behind race to self-sanctify. Maybe bored ghosts will become gods with all that endlessness stretched before them (and Mello has three gods, his very own trinity). Matt knows each of their faces.
When your god dies you desert your world of vampires, you leap at your one chance for immortality.
There are secrets whispered in Matt's ear between touches that render secrets palpable and Matt wants to believe in Mello's gods and his host of spirits but he has always been a vampire (because he was so told) and he only knows the blood thrumming thick in Mello's throat as they kiss.
Mello doesn't understand how jealousy can warp to desire, when hatred skewed and satiation came only from dark eyes, colors slurred into black.
He can touch Matt, and there's forgiveness in the taste of Matt's mouth that, after, sharpens like bile at the sight of Near.
This is being a ghost, Matt knows, when Mello's grimy sheets that were his coffin lay hollow in their room and he is no longer a vampire but alone except Near, freed from the strictures of mortality, floats into their (his) room with requests that run liquid down his skin. There are no more silver bullets, he pretends it means.
Mello took his own death with him.
Near wishes Matt's fangs were longer. He only feels bites that go deep.
Ghosts and vampires do not speak the same language. Their deaths force a presiding in different realms and he feels the severance when Matt's body is long and fluid against his in summer nights that, to Near, birth new stars as he stares out the window, learning this slice of sky from this angle.
Neither speak because Near's mind is silver.
Fingers run through silver-white curls, nails drag down silver-white skin.
Ghosts are always cold, Matt learns.
Near is newly knighted with godhood and has to leave.
It's such a dumb analogy, Matt knows when their vampire, canines splintered, stumbles through his door and declares himself a phoenix but to Matt he is a witch half-burnt with familiars deformed. Matt has a gun now and enough bullets for himself and none for Mello, because Mello's fidelity to this life mean his pride runs shining-white down his throat as he drinks from his fate's chalice. It runs glinting through his veins, thick and lethargic, and Matt thinks of curls running through their fingers and wonders how he ever let Mello forge his death for him.
You're only a demigod, Matt tells him, because his trinity (now spliced by death) has been too sacred to attain to.
It's the day after Halloween and Mello bought discounted candy (a tabletop's worth). Mello shrugs because Matt's always said weird fragments that he used to have time for. Matt is salaried. He is not an arms-breadth away on the opposite bed.
Remember when we were vampires three years in a row? Mello asks.
Matt shrugs. He's salaried now. Mello is not an arms-breadth away on the opposite bed.
Mello, in the back of a truck, gasps as a weight crushes his chest, rosary clacking on the floor as his body dips. He has been in mortality's chrysalis for so long, and finally, finally—
Near's omniscience does not mean omnipotence. He knows this now. He leans forward, forehead in palms, the laminate of the table comforting in its dullness.
Bullets, Matt thinks as he dies. I really am a vampire. His last giggle is molten with blood.
There's a scar on Near's knee, and he sometimes wonders where it came from.