Note:
I have discovered I am very bad at a) planning b) sticking to plans c) writing Mello from inside Mello's head d) staying on topic in stories with some sort of plot. By the end of this story I hope to have made some progress towards remedying some of these. If you see any improvement, I would be grateful if you would let me know. Equally, if you have any suggestions, throw 'em at me.
If you hate what I have done here, I am sorry for subjecting you to it. But this is an experiment. Sometimes, experiments fail.
x
The Back Door
rate yourself and rake yourself
take all the courage you have left
-
"It's a corridor."
"Or a tunnel, depending on your perspective."
"No, it's a corridor."
"As you wish."
Mello and L are standing at the door to the doctor's office. Only, there is no desk, and no examining table, and no white curtain. Instead, there is a long corridor, dimly lit from Mello doesn't know where, windowless and shadowy. At the end, Mello can just about make out a door.
It looks exactly like the front door to the surgery, as he remembers it. Plastic, with a small window at the top, a letterbox in the middle. White. It is an ordinary door.
"That's not the back door," Mello says, dubiously. "Is it?"
L shrugs. "I don't know. I have never been here before."
"But you said –"
"I have been to the surgery, certainly. But my waiting room was very different."
"What was it?" Mello can feel curiosity burst up inside him. This is strange, this is incredible, this is insight into L he's never had a chance to get close to before.
L smiles coyly. "We are all allowed some secrets, are we not?"
As quickly as it came, the curiosity shrivels into disappointment. Mello feels strange – vibrant and alive and as if everything is exaggerated a hundredfold.
"Right. Door. Let's go."
This door could be all that's separating him from Matt – from all the big bad beasties of this after-world and his chance to show them precisely who they have decided to mess with. Eight long paces, filled with purpose, filled with fire, and he'll be there.
Only the corridor isn't shortening. The door isn't getting closer. Mello stops, and turns around, and he knows L has not moved, but the distance between them has remained exactly the same.
"What the fuck?"
He spins back around, quickens his pace, and there is still nothing. He runs. He can feel the ground moving under his feet, hear his boots smack against the ground, and see the little lights dotting the walls flick past him and why the fucking hell is the fucking door still all the fucking way over - fucking - there?
"It doesn't work that way," says L, from behind him. "This place doesn't follow the normal rules."
Mello rounds on him, frustration and fury crackling over his skin and channelling like electricity through his veins. "Then how does it work? What are the rules?"
"Sadly, you must work it out for yourself."
L is calm and composed and slouching against the wall, and it strikes Mello how weak he looks. He is just this skinny man, none of the muscle Mello has, none of the grace of Near or the lopsided longness of Matt. He is skinny and awkward and ugly and smug and calm and isn't it his fault Mello is here in the first place? Isn't he the one –
"Just tell me."
"I cannot do that, Mello."
He feels his lips pull back in a sneer, and it's automatic, it's instinct. "Thought you were all about breaking the rules.
L looks at him strangely. There is something like vague disappointment in his eyes, and Mello feels the crackle of rage once again. It is getting harder and harder to keep control. "You're still thinking wrong, Mello."
You're thinking wrong, Mello.
Years and years ago crouched under the side porch of the orphanage, unwilling to go back inside, as rain starts to fall. This strange skinny man who met him at the gate is crouched with him, and Mello is fuming and firing off his tongue every which way about how much he hates this place, how much he hates them all, how much he hates L. He is saying how he hates being told what to do, how he hates being confined this way, how he can't stand how they make it so clear he's never going to be more than the back-up back-up. And the strange and skinny man with the dark eyes and goose bumps running up the pale skin of his neck, he sits there, and he says, "You're thinking wrong, Mello."
And before Mello even thinks to ask how he knows who he is, the man has begun his story.
"Why am I thinking wrong?" Mello challenges him. His nails dig into the palms of his hands.
L spreads his hands. The corridor is not wide, and his fingertips are less than an inch from the walls. "You are thinking like you're alive."
Mello snorts. "Might come as a surprise to you, but I haven't been dead for as long as some of us. I'm not used to it."
"Understandable," L concedes. "But not acceptable."
"Yeah? Who decides that?"
L is still giving him that strange from underneath the shadow of his fringe. "No one decides it, Mello. It is simply the way things are."
A wicked little smile pulls Mello's lips back over his teeth. "I've gotten quite good at going against the way things are."
"Not here," L says, and there is something scathing underneath the cut of his tone. He turns to look at Mello and the dark corridor stretches out behind him. "Back when we were alive, things were different. 'The way things are' meant society, or physics, and there were very clear lines between what could and what could not be challenged. It is different here. You cannot challenge these rules. And you cannot even try to learn them. Here, everything changes, everything balances on the edge of the knife, and everything is temporary and fixed all at once."
Mello begins to step forward, begins to clench his fist and draw breath for his retort, when he notices the look in L's eye. It is distant, and hard and cold, and hurt. It is the look of a wounded animal; feral, afraid, and dangerous. Something shifts in the semi-light and for a second L seems completely translucent, and Mello knows he is probably imagining it, but he thinks he can see scars under L's skin.
"There are consequences to disobeying the rules," he says, and in that instant, with the shadow of his eyes and the pale glimmer of skin, nothing has ever seemed truer.
Mello drops his gaze. "What happened to you?" he asks, and can hear the uncertainty trembling in his voice. There is something deeply sickening about the scars he can see glinting in and out of existence just under L's surface. He gets this hideous feeling from them, like agony, like coldness and horror and the wordless terror of pitch dark.
"I have to tell you something, Mello." L's voice is very even, and it is very calm. "Outside this door is a truly great danger. I am not speaking of the kind of intangible threat Kira posed. This is immediate, physical peril and you have to know something. You cannot act like a child out there."
The scars are still sickening but Mello looks past them to L's eyes, with fury brewing. "Are you telling me that I act –"
"You're not listening!" The temper rising in L's tone shocks him. He's met him once, heard him over a computer twice. The voice has always, always been level. This is first crackle of emotion he has heard run through. "Mello, if you are going to view this as a game, as a test, as a way of carrying on your anti-establishment agenda after your time has come, you are going to fail. I have tried, Mello, I've tried, I have been out there! The simple fact of the matter is I have been here longer, I am smarter, and still I failed!"
Mello feels a kind of flush staining his cheeks. He's not used to this. He's not used to being chided like an idiot kid and actually caring. But this – this is different. This is L. He avoids his gaze.
"What are you saying? That it's hopeless?" He can't help but grit his teeth, can't help but let the words snarl out. "That Matt is - ?"
"No." L has moved, somewhere in between fury and rebukes and disappointment, and his hands come down on Mello's shoulders. There's maybe two inches between them in height, Mello realises, and L has the advantage. For a change. "What I am saying is that it will be hopeless unless you are doing this for the right reasons."
"The right...?" Oh, Jesus, it's more airy fairy bullshit. "What the hell does that mean?"
"It means that you have to be doing this for him. Not for you." There is something like distaste in L's voice but he is looking at Mello insistently, silently begging him to understand. "Mello, this is not a glory trip. This is not one last crusade before oblivion. This is not life and death and victory, this is your last chance to do something that will matter."
Something that will matter and there is a cold and heavy thing dropping through Mello's stomach.
He is twenty years old. He is a black leather demon, he is a match in a fireworks factory, he is a mess of unstoppability and recklessness and power and he mars and changes everything he touches. And here, standing before him, is the only man in his entire life whose respect he has ever given a shit about earning.
And he does not think that anything Mello had ever done has mattered.
It is probably that that is the last straw.
"My entire life."
He is shaking. His fists are clenched.
"My whole entire fucking life has been spent – I died trying to – I managed to work out – and you stand there and you say – my entire life I've been –"
"- trying to live up to me." L's voice is calm and cold and his eyes fix on Mello's face. "What have you ever done that mattered to you as a person? To your friends?" He shakes his head. "You are still such a child. Stop seeing everything as a personal slight against you. Think first, for once, and act second. Stop fighting Kira, stop trying to be me. Stop trying to –"
The next words that Mello says have been on his lips for nearly fifteen years. They are a product of anger, of frustration, of an inferiority complex that has coloured and distorted every single thing he has done since he was six years old. And they have been brewing for too long to stop them now.
"I never wanted to be you!"
His voice bounces back from the walls and L is silent.
Then, he says, "then, don't."
Don't. He makes it sound so fucking simple that Mello actually just laughs, right in his face, right in the fact of the world's greatest detective.
"You don't think I see how disgusting it is?" L brings his face very close to Mello's and there is a colour in the thinness and paleness of his cheeks that hits home with Mello. This is the deep, feral hiss Mello is so used to hearing himself use. This, he realises, this is the L that L has worked so hard to bury from the world, and this is the only thing Mello has ever been good at.
"We take you. We twist you. We break you down and reshape you in a mould that was never meant to exist in the first place. I am a freak, Mello, a one-off, an anomaly, and no amount of effort is going to recreate me. I am L, not you, or Near, or any of you! It is a sickness and a madness and you are all built up to be something you can never be, and don't you think I can see how that destroys you?" L draws a breath. It hitches, halfway, and just that little thing tells Mello more than all of L's words. "You, Mello, you have this chance here. You have this chance to be amazing and to be a hero and to save the day and the only condition is that you do it by being who you are."
Mello turns his face away. His cheeks are burning. "I don't know how to be anything but you."
L makes a dismissive noise and turns to face the doorway. The corridor looks darker somehow.
"Please, Mello. You and I both know you are no fool. Think. It is obvious. You must stop doing things because you feel like it is your duty, or because it is the right thing to do." He turns a little, his eyes shadowed and dark, and the innocence and clearness of his face in this place makes for a frightening contrast. "You must do them because it would kill you, because it would tear you into pieces every single day, if you did not."
There is an edge of finality in his voice, and Mello does not ask any more questions.
Something in him has gone quiet. He does not feel like a scolded little boy now – resentful, embarrassed, and devastated by his idol's scorn. He does not feel like a blazing and angry warrior, he does not feel like the mafia angel in black and gold. He does not feel like Mello at all.
He feels twenty years old and stuck between the awkward planes of boyhood and manhood. He feels lonely and lost and scared and sick, and terrified by the knowledge that he is dead. He feels the loss of a life he had not even begun to live, but most of all, he feels calm.
Mello cannot ever remember feeling calm in his entire life.
He is calm because he knows precisely what it is he has to do now. Mello knows because if there is one thing, one single thing he is certain about, it is that Matt is his best friend and Matt has lived and died for him. He is calm because he has come to the sudden realisation that if something is threatening Matt then there is no force in existence that can stop Mello from helping.
If it takes every last gasp – whatever gasps he has left, in this place, this non-life, this waiting room – then he will give it. If it means oblivion and destruction, he will welcome it. If it means darkness and terror and abandoning every safeguard then that is simply what it will mean.
Just like that, everything seems easy.
Mello walks down the corridor. The door gets closer and closer with each step, and when he reaches it, he walks straight through it. He does not hesitate. He knows that the door won't stop him, just as the corridor could no longer hold him back. Matt is on the other side of that door, so that is where Mello has to be. It is as simple as that.
A new scene melts into focus and the silence is deafening. All around is nothing. A dark and sandy plain spreads out in every direction, as far as the eye can see, fading in the distance into an impenetrable curtain of black.
L appears next to him. Mello looks back. There is no door. Just more sand, and sky, and dark.
"It's a terrible cliché," L says, "but I think it means that when you know who you are, knowing what you have to do comes easy. And nothing can stand in your way."
"Where are we?" Mello asks.
"The Plains of Dust."
He looks around. Nothing, nothing, nothing. No signs of the right direction to go in, no signs of there being anything but the plains anyway he could pick.
So he thinks about it. He thinks how L has always managed to have all his bases covered, moving in every direction at once. He thinks how it's Near's trademark to sidestep, to disappear into the mists at the last moment. He thinks how Matt will always back away from things that don't matter, will always let things go.
And Mello does the only thing he has ever done, and moves forward.
L falls into pace beside him. Mello has never really watched him walk before. It's an odd lope, lengthy and graceful and awkward at once.
"What was it for you?"
L looks at him curiously. All of the heat and temper and animosity from the corridor seem to have evaporated. "I'm sorry?"
"For you. What got you through the door?"
L smiles a flickering little smile. "It is perfectly acceptable for me to act like L," is all he says.
But Mello can see something else in the edges of that smile. "No, there's more to it than that." L was right; they both know he is no fool.
"You are quite right, Mello. And perhaps in time I will tell you. For now, I believe we have a higher purpose than idle chit-chat."
Mello smiles his wicked smile again, but this time, it is different, and he can feel it. All the hollowness and ghoulishness has been washed away, and now, here he is. Mello. Moving forward, through the dust, because it is the only thing that makes sense.
And it is time for him to finally do something that matters.
