Author's Note: This is actually the first one of these that I wrote. Crazy.
7. Silver
The night is silver, but Mello's hair gleams gold.
They don't call it the gold standard for nothing.
Matt feels cheap here, in this dingy alleyway, dressed in cotton and denim among the leather and lace—which is ironic, because he's the only one who doesn't have something to sell.
Mello has pushed a cigarette between almost-familiar lips, and orange embers light his face, so dimly you can almost convince yourself you saw something more beautiful once. One more step shatters that illusion, and Matt reads it like neon in the skyline—Mello's smoking for the smoke, for the cover, for the automatic enigma. Matt's not sure if he sees it because of his personal experience with nicotine addiction or because Mello has always been the only thing he ever cared about.
By the looks of things, Mello has been outfitted by the devil himself—who was also kind enough to provide the pair of hipbones jutting out above the low-swooping hem, a segue to the shameless V of laces that all the lines and angles indicate.
It should be easy to hate him, to hate him for loving and leaving and never looking back, but Matt has always had a gangrenous soft spot for the little bastard in black.
Though Mello's not so little anymore.
Matt wants to fuck him or kill him, and he honestly can't tell which sounds better right now.
But he knows, deep down but rising, that this is not the same boy who left him behind. That this Mello is not the Mello, not quite, no more than he is still buried alive in Mello's sheets with his world melting to run hotly down his cheeks.
Smoke curls around Mello's chin, and the fading bruises on cheekbones and jaw announce that somebody learned to hurt Mello before he had a chance to hurt them.
Matt lights his own cigarette, and Mello parses the shadows where his visitor stands. Smoke drifts, and the dark plays on Mello's face, and Matt meets powder-blue eyes, which are still too young.
"Well?"
The voice is a little lower, but that could just be two years of cigarettes and seduction.
"'Well' what?" Matt counters. Mello's winning out over the cigarette, and Matt's heart is trying to break through his ribs.
Mello would undoubtedly blow smoke in his face if they were ever so slightly closer together.
"You're here for a reason, aren't you?" is the query.
He would be better prepared if this had been intentional. As it is, he's running on Gatorade and testosterone; the cocktail of the two is the only reason his knees didn't give way the second recognition registered.
"Just walking by," he answers, and part of him wants to follow through.
Mello shifts to disagree, and Matt opens his mouth to defend, and they both see the other and stop.
"Why the hell'd you have to do that?" Mello mutters, pitching his cigarette to the cracked cement as if it's Matt's skull that fractures on impact. The embers send forlorn wisps of messengers to kiss the blue-black sky.
He's mad, because Matt has found him, and Matt knows all the warmth that's gone and all the pain that isn't.
"Small town," Matt remarks, "Los Angeles."
Mello's eyes dart cold, and he bites back the expletive behind his curled lip—a new habit, which Matt assumes has been acquired because even Mello bleeds if you hit him hard enough.
Matt has half a mind to try that out and see.
Most of the other half wants to walk away before he forgets two years of cigarette ash and self-destructive anger and gives up everything again.
"What do you want?" Mello asks, and Matt hesitates, and thinks it over.
He thinks it over for a long time, for minutes that trickle through the cracks between his fingers, one second tumbling after another, the distant streetlamp looming, because Mello is still the only thing he doesn't hate—can't, won't, never will, though he sure as hell won't stop trying.
He takes a long drag on his cigarette, and then he shrugs.
"You," he says, "and fuck all else."
Mello smiles, and he's trying for sardonic, but they both know it's real.
"Dumbshit," he says.
"Always," Matt replies.