The first thing Mello was aware of upon waking was heat. One kind of heat was his face it was burning his face and made him want to rip off his own skin just to make the pain stop. The other…

He opened his right eye. A cat was lying in a furry ball next to his bare stomach, watching him with bright green eyes and twitching its tail reflectively. When it saw he was awake, the cat butted its head against Mello's hand.

How strange. Mello sat up and carefully opened his other eye, which hurt like the fires of hell but which he could still see out of with relative clarity. The cat unfurled itself as well and nudged his hand again, more insistently this time. "What do you want?" Mello growled at it. The cat gave him a reproachful look and batted at his wrist. "I don't have any food," said Mello. "Go bother Matt to feed you. And make him get me some chocolate while you're at it." Contrarily, the cat climbed into his lap, curled up, and appeared to go back to sleep.

"Useless fleabag," Mello muttered.

"Mello?" said a voice from outside his room. His muscles tensed automatically, which reminded him that he had, after all, been blown up yesterday. Everything hurt. A pair of orange-goggled eyes appeared in the doorway. "You're awake," said Matt.

"Obviously," responded Mello. His erstwhile friend nudged the door fully open and walked in, flipping the light on with one hand while with the other he held out a pristinely wrapped bar labeled Hershey's. Mello snatched it from his hand.

"I figured you'd want that," said Matt dryly over the snap of chocolate breaking in Mello's teeth. God, that tasted good. Not even high-quality chocolate, and already the pain from his face and shoulder seemed to be subsiding. Matt sat down gingerly on the end of the bed, shoving the goggles into his hair, and Mello surveyed him as he ate.

Four years hadn't made much of a difference. True, Matt's shoulders were broader now, and he no longer had the half-starved look of the gangly fifteen-year-old he'd been last time Mello saw him, but his hair was the same dark red it had been then, if a few inches longer, and his eyes (when he wasn't wearing those ridiculous goggles) were the same shade of green. The same color as the cat's, in fact. Mello smirked to himself. The cats were a surprise.

"Your burn looks better," said Matt, watching Mello's face, and Mello had the uncomfortable thought that the same sorts of reminiscences were going through Matt's mind. He hated to think how he must now appear: burnt, scarred, deformed. Mello snapped off another bite of chocolate and looked away.

"I think the cat's hungry," he said, to stop Matt staring at him like he was.

"Who, Moxie?" Matt said, and the cat in Mello's lap perked its head up. "I just fed her an hour ago."

"Well, she keeps hitting me like she wants something," Mello began, but trailed off as the cat– Moxie, what a weird name– made the same insistent gesture against Matt's hand. The redhead gave a low chuckle and started scratching her behind the ears. Moxie closed her eyes in contentment, and Mello could feel her purring.

"You're a little attention whore," Matt said to the cat. Mello raised his eyebrows and immediately wished he hadn't… but it was bizarre, hearing that much affection in Matt's usually careless voice. Matt didn't care about things, except maybe his video games. Had that changed too?

"So Mello…" Matt began, the shadow of a familiar grin on his face. "You have some explaining to do."

The vision of a small, ghostly white figure putting puzzle pieces together flashed across Mello's mind, and his hands balled into fists. "It's all Near's fault," he growled. "If he'd've left me alone–"

"Near's here too?" Matt interrupted.

"Of course he is," said Mello. Just hearing the name sent a jolt of angry energy down Mello's legs, and he tossed the quilt aside, ignoring the cat's protests as he began pacing the small room. "Even here I can't get away from him. He's looking for Kira too. He formed some organization for it here in America– the SPK, he called it, but once we got the notebook I took care of–"

"The what?"

Mello had forgotten, in the heat of the moment, all that Matt didn't know. Quickly he explained the Death Note, which would kill anyone whose name was written in it as long as the writer knew their face, and his own plan to acquire it from the Japanese police force who had gotten it shortly before L's death. Matt sat quietly, frowning slightly as he did whenever he concentrated hard on something, and took in the story: Mello's kidnapping the director of the Japanese police, and when he committed suicide, the daughter of deputy director Yagami. The look on Matt's face didn't change, even when Mello told him of the shinigami that had come to claim the notebook and foiled a raid on the hideout. Then…

"Kira," Mello spat. "Somehow he found out where I was. Yesterday all my men collapsed at once, all from heart attacks." Strangely enough, it was this that got a reaction from Matt, though not much of one: at the words "all my men," his eyes, which had been steadily fixed on Mello's blue ones, flicked away. Mello saved this for later analysis and pressed on. "The NPA decided to attack at the same time. Convenient, really, and it put me in a hell of a spot. They got the notebook back, and when Yagami–" He stopped, swayed; Matt stood up to catch him but Mello couldn't even marshal the strength to glare at him under the numb shock of memory.

"My name," he choked. Your real name– it's Mihael Keehl. "Matt– they know my name."