When he was 9, every picture taken of Matt was burnt.
There weren't many.
Matt's mother had had very long hair, orange like cumin, thick and straight. She'd smoked until her fingers were jaundice. She spent her time looking out the window, a cigarette hanging from her mouth. Matt remembered her as a transparent woman. She died slowly and quietly, over the course of years, wilting without a sound and then crumpling into a heap. They had never had family photos, so the only proof of her had been some glossy prints from a vibrant, long dead youth.
Growing up, Matt would make himself a bowl of cereal every morning and eat it at the table next to his dying parent. He had become a guard dog of her wilting body. He'd once poured her a glass of milk and spilt a bit on the table, and had to clean it up later with a towel from the bathroom while his mother watched on, blank and unconcerned.
When he had finished eating on the day she would finally pass away, he had asked her for the day off school. When she asked why, he pouted his chapped lips, said 'I don't want to be in the photo this year.' She told him too fucking bad.
It wasn't a very good goodbye.
After she'd died, Matt had taken himself to the police station with a backpack containing only the following things: five packs of cigarettes, a Gameboy, and a juice box.
When the officer had asked him what he needed, he'd told him: 'I'd like to be legally emancipated.'
His life had the heavy feeling of a dusky night. Streetlights and traffic and unknown faces peeking out from behind dark clothing and busy intersections were the scenes of his childhood. His emotional range was twisted like the bark on an ancient tree. He'd matured much the way many children with absent mothers did: into a glassy, watery, careless sort of boy with no ability to self-motivate.
Matt didn't mind seeing the snapshots of that past erased. In the school photo from that day, he looked uncomfortable: cotton black t-shirt, jeans, and muddy running shoes. Unhappy expression. His teeth always ached because no one made him brush them, his eyes sagged because he had no bedtime, and his hair was knotted thickly and hung so low it covered his eyes.
It wasn't a very good picture of him, basically.
After that, there was only one picture of him left intact, which was taken at the orphanage. In it, he was standing straight. He was not smiling, but there was a pink tint in his cheeks and across his nose and up to the tips of his ears that made him look contented. His face was heavily freckled from playing outside, his goggles were pulled up to his forehead so his hair bunched up.
Matt started his days in Wammy's chain smoking the cigarettes he had inherited. His fingers never had the chance to become as yellow as his mother's, but his hair was even redder, his skin just as pallid, his eyes the same antifreeze. His reflection reminded him of her.
Mello had arrived at the orphanage two years earlier; Near some years before that. Their youth allowed them to shuck their mourning and replace it with the drive to succeed, until nothing was more important than the battle of intelligence between them. Not even Matt.
The day the photo was taken had been four years after he'd arrived at the orphanage. He had been sitting in the upstairs lab, playing Tetris while Mello kicked at his ankles and read one of their textbooks. Matt had been slouched and focused, ignoring his friend and getting close to a decent score, when Mello had hooked his foot around Matt's skinny calf and yanked on him to get his attention, causing Matt to slap his hand on the keyboard and ruin his game. Roger was watching in the door frame, ready to pull him aside to snap the shot with Matt standing against the lab wall. He said it was for their records.
Matt hadn't thought to take that picture with him when he left the orphanage, but damn, he thought about it sometimes. His whole life was undocumented: he operated under an alias, forged every ID, every bank account. All the proof of his life had been torched. Except that one picture. There was something really nice about that picture.
He didn't mind that the period of his life between ages 9 and 14 was all that would remain of him after he died, the only evidence of his existence a snapshot of that summer day in Wammy's.
He'd grown since he'd moved to the US. A little taller, a little broader, a lot harder. His voice had taken on an edge of paranoia and a commanding clip and his vest had been enhanced so it could carry three concealed handguns. His boots were the home of knives as long as Matt's forearm, from the wrist to the elbow. He didn't feel as good about himself anymore. He wasn't one to worry about image or appearance, but there was a smog that hung over him now that he was always armed to the teeth and comfortable with it. He couldn't place the feeling, but he couldn't look at himself in the mirror anymore without feeling it, without rolling his eyes at himself, without thinking 'what the fuck ever.'
There is no lost and found box for innocence. Nothing could have prepared Matt for the eel-like grace with which he slipped into the mob and became the sort of dick who sits with his feet up on the coffee table, gazing out the window, laptop on his knees, bargaining in the millions of dollars over a job so illegal it would have short circuited his fifteen year old brain. It just wasn't as exciting, as thrilling, as he'd thought it might be. Being a hacker meant he mostly sat around looking at code. Being with Mello meant he couldn't leave the house without stuffing weaponry down his pants. Instead of being happy, or guilty, or resentful, or scared... he was apathetic. Almost melancholy.
Life never got any better or any worse from Matt's perspective. Overall, he faded into change like the effects on a low budget home movie. One might expect that someone who is thrown into the sort of life Matt lived after he left the orphanage would go through shock. Not so. He stayed exactly the same, pushed at the walls of his new existence so they fitted him, adapted, and just went with it.
Matt's transition to Mafia cracker was the equivalent of someone saying 'cool' when informed of a very minute change in dinner plans.
Mello had done much the same thing. He'd bought a wardrobe that fit who he had suddenly become (needed to become), sent himself into a frenzy of learning the ways of a Mafiosi, and just did it.
Matt's chameleon-like adaptation and his drop of a dime changes of heart were all in order to stay on the same track as Mello in the hope that they'd brush shoulders while they walked. Those were Matt's truthful, selfish desires: to end up in the same place as Mello, to be with Mello, to facilitate Mello's success, and to play Portal. And to smoke on the couch.
For Matt, Mello was bait on a hook. He wanted Mello to string him along until he died.
'Find this guy.' Mello brushed past him, pulling his coat off as he stomped into the kitchen.
Matt bobbed his head sideways and up and down. A cigarette hung out of his lips and his eyes were half closed, fingers tapping uselessly on the lid of his laptop as he played a simple, one handed online game.
'Jacob Harris. Fake name. Here's his picture.' Mello walked back into the living room to throw himself down on the couch.
'What am I supposed to do with that?' Matt mumbled.
'Fuck off, Matt. Just find him.'
In all honestly, Matt didn't mind at all. He'd been bored for almost two hours. He spent his life teetering on the edge of disinterest. With any luck, this guy was interesting. Alternatively, he was some soldier, finding him would be easy, and Matt could take a nap.
'Been watching the news?' Mello was looking at him. His legs were spread and he'd swung his arms so they took up the entire back of the couch. Either this was his attempt at small talk or something important had happened and Matt was supposed to have been paying attention.
'Nope.'
'That's what I fucking thought.' The latter, then. 'Are you capable of carrying on a conversation or should I go?' Never mind.
Matt chuckled, just a little, but his whole body shook with it. 'Does Jacob Harris have an address or something?'
'Why?'
'Would make it easier. Was just asking.'
'Don't next time. I gave you what I have.' Mello was staring at the television now: a game was paused on the screen.
Matt finished his job fairly quickly, and by that time, Mello was watching a TV movie, tapping his nails against the leather stretched over his knee.
Matt put his laptop on the table and wrapped his wrist around his friend's, slipping their knuckles against each other, so their fists were intertwined. It was the first time he'd ever held anyone's hand. He really liked it.
Matt was sitting in his car and Mello was on his motorbike.
Mello looked out at the city, through the sunlight. 'I wanted more for you, Matty.' He said flatly. The only voice Mello had sounded like shaved ice and blue raspberry sour candy. The meaning didn't need a soft rumble, or a tender whisper - Mello was so sincere it made Matt's teeth ache.
Mello's admissions of affection (and they were admissions, not declarations, because Mello slips and falls on his ass into love and spits up confessions reluctantly) sounded like an indie cover of a filthy rap song; raw and weird.
Matt would never, ever doubt his sincerity.
He said: 'This is plenty.' He was holding a handgun in his hands. He was not talking about the handgun. He was talking about his life. He was talking about his entire fucking life.
Linda had drawn a picture of Mello based on the photograph the orphanage had taken of him, but she hadn't drawn one of Matt, because he was less important. So, there was no picture to print on the news when his death was announced, or to put on his nameless gravestone, or to remember him, or anything like that.
He'd always thought the only evidence of his existence would be from the happy period between when he was 9 and 14 years old, but as it turned out, there was no evidence at all.