So Long, Pierrot

Fifteen years, seven goodbyes. They say you can never go home again. Wammy's.


"Matt, it smells in here," Mello said as he let himself into the dorm room the third and fourth ranked students shared. He went immediately to the little window on the far side of the room and began tugging at the brass crank.

The high tempo music from the laptop on the bed died down momentarily. A snarky little grin crossed and left Matt's face in time with the changing of light from the LCD screen. The game he was playing transitioned from one level to the next with a poorly animated cinematic scene. The cheesy voice acting was of little interest to him, and so he was willing to talk over it. "It's stuck," he told Mello, speaking from the corner of his mouth that wasn't occupied by a cigarette. His fingers wouldn't leave the keyboard—they were busy instructing the computer to bring a separate process to the foreground. A grainy camera feed popped up and occupied a space off to the right of the screen.

With one foot propped up against the window sill, Mello put all of his weight onto the crank. His effort was obvious by the strain of his voice. "Don't you have a screwdriver or something?"

"You think Roger wouldn't be miffed if I started taking apart his hardware? Let him smell the smoke. He has his pipe, I have this."

Matt stopped tap-tap-tapping on his keyboard when the window crank gave a grating shriek. Mello did quite a bit of stumbling but managed to find his balance before landing on his backside. The dorm was instantly chilled with the cold air of autumn.

Mello dallied a moment to flex his sore fingers, then he marched over to his friend's bed and snatched the lit stick of tobacco right out of Matt's mouth. "You know what'll happen, don't you? You'll be thrown out."

"And then who will you nag?" Matt muttered, turning his attention to the new level of his game. He wasn't planning to get too far into it. He pressed intently at the keys until Mello decided he was fed up and left, and then Matt called up the camera feed again. In black and white, the video displayed a Constable's patrol car pulling into the street and was leaving the area. Seeing this, Matt shuffled off the bed, dug his shoes out from under the mess of laundry by the door, grabbed a book bag and snuck out of the dorms.

...

"Hey, kid. What's your name?"

This is how it starts. There couldn't be a more offensive question, not for someone like Matt.

"None of your business." You can't have my name. You can't even have my alias. Yeah, it's confidential. I'm important shit. Go on, lay a hand on me. I dare you.

The walls of the convenience store seemed to lean in, making the space feel more cramped than it already was. "It is my business," the man behind the counter grumbled, "you've been pinching cigarettes. I see them there." He curled his fist, but one pointing finger, against the counter. "In your jacket. I got you on the cameras, so be a smart boy and hand them back, and maybe we don't need to involve your parents."

Matt turned his wrists in his pockets to cup and cover the box that might've been showing. It was an amateur's mistake and he knew it as soon as he made it. He'd been stealing for a long time, longer than the clerk suspected, but Matt had never refined the art.

The shopkeeper was bluffing, but he didn't know it. Matt had tinkered with the shop's surveillance and set up a system months ago whereby he could set the feeds to loop whenever he liked. It was the only way to sustain his really cool addiction that none of the other kids back home at the orphanage understood. The police didn't really get it, either, because they kept trying to arrest him for it. This time, if he let the man behind the counter come out and rough him up, Matt was pretty sure the Constable would take the side of the battered child who, according to the cameras, did not steal anything. As pleased as he would be to saddle the know-nothing, nobody clerk with assault charges, Matt really couldn't afford the bruises.

So, he bolted.

...

"Tell me your name."

It kept on going like this.

Matt winced. The brick façade of the building his face was slammed against and the pain of his arm being bent backwards against his spine was all he could think about in that moment. That, and he was completely out of breath from running. There was really no way he could answer the Constable.

And then his arm was rotated a few more degrees the wrong way, and he found the strength to rasp, "Matt! Wammy!" There was a pause wherein Matt, given the time, would have thought, yeah, that Wammy's. Sod off. Really, the Constable was just shifting his weight to put a knee in Matt's back so that he could get his handcuffs.

...

Roger, with a heavy hand set on Matt's shoulder, had words with the Custody Sergeant. Old words. Rehashed points. The two men might've become good acquaintances in between their conversations about Mister Ruvie's troublesome young ward. Matt spent the entire hour staring at his muddy shoelaces, lying as the did on the floor. If they'd have stayed tied, he never would have been caught.

The ride back to Wammy's House was silent. It wasn't the sort of I'm-disappointed-in-you silence that filled the empty spaces in the orphanage. It wasn't a faltering I'll-figure-out-how-to-get-this-through-your-head-in-a-minute silence, either. This silence gaped open wide.

Matt leaned his head into the window and its chill crept across his face, his whole body. The warmth of his breath fogged the glass. "It's weird how fast everything changes."

"You do well with your German, don't you?" Roger asked, and sighed, because he knew the answer and Matt seemed too despondent to properly reply. "Quillish has arranged a transfer for you, to an institute in Hanover."

Matt was pretty sure it was just a bump in the road that shook him.

There was nothing else said, and sooner rather than later the limousine was pulling into the Wammy's House driveway. The building looked exactly the same, and yet . . . Matt didn't feel like he was coming home.

...

"Hey," Matt said, hanging off the doorjamb of the room Mello and Near shared. "I came to say buh-bye." He spoke with a stupid little smirk that didn't make sense. When Mello pulled his nose out of his textbook just to roll his eyes. Matt smiled wider, because it was funny that Mello thought he was teasing, and flashed his plane ticket.

The snapping sound of Mello's textbook being shut drew Near's attention. The epic robot war unfolding on the carpet froze up mid-explosion, and then Mello happened to kick the robot hero across the room on his way to the door.

Mello spent a while in the vestry, yelling at Roger. That was after he was done yelling at Matt, of course. Anyway, Matt kind of half-hoped that the old man would be intimidated by his friend's ire and rescind the transfer, but that was unrealistic. This thing was happening, and like so many times in his young life, he was just a butterfly in the changing breeze.

...

It wasn't until much later that Matt learned the institute in Hanover housed delinquents, not geniuses.

"And your name?" The stout woman who worked for the facility asked. She was an impatient woman, he could tell—probably worn wary by all the smart-alecky punks she had to deal with on a daily basis.

He had a little trouble with his fluency, and it took him a minute to dissect the slush of German into individual words.

This again. It never ends.

"Matt."

The woman's fingers roved the keyboard of her outdated desktop computer, then paused. "Matt what?"

He grinned, impishly, because he was far too smart to be caged up by a place like this for long, because he knew exactly what he was doing, because he was a smart-alecky little punk; and he told her, "just Matt."


Author's Notes: Yeah, you can totally tell where I stopped writing for a while and then started again. It doesn't really follow, but it is what it is.