Save You - Emilie Autumn

Notes: I had this song languishing on my computer for ages before I rediscovered it and went, '... Wait, she fangirls for M&M too?' I love songs like that. This is perfect, from 'how do I look into the eyes I love and send them down this path? I know it isn't right' to 'I can't deny the past, it's written on my face.' Asdfhjkgagllk.

-

Mello came back to find Matt asleep, stretched out on the couch with a game controller half-hanging out of his left hand, which had fallen off the edge of the cushion beside his long lanky body and was almost on the floor. He'd drifted off with his goggles still on, the idiot; Mello sighed, and bent over his friend to carefully work them up and off his face, and onto the coffee table beside him. It was cold in the apartment. He flung a blanket over Matt, and stalked into the kitchen, feeling as though he were acting unbearably motherly. He made himself some coffee and returned to the living room, leaning against the side of the couch and watching his best friend sleep.

He should be angry, he reflected, that Matt was ignoring his duties for the mere human need of sleep. He should be furious that even after all these years and all this time, Matt still managed to make him feel in ways that no one else could.

Matt had been looking after him for a long time now, while Mello recovered from the explosion. Matt had spent a lot of sleepless nights wordlessly making sure that Mello's were as pain-free as possible and restful. He'd cooked - badly. He'd made an honest effort to clean, to keep Mello from tripping when he did get up, to keep the place where Mello was clean enough to avoid infection. Maybe Matt deserved a break, for now.

It didn't explain why his closed eyes, lids blue-white with their pallor, and relaxed mouth made Mello want to do kind little things for him like making sure he didn't wake up with goggle-marks, but then nothing ever had, and Mello was helpless to discover a reason why.

Things were going to be very dangerous now, since Mello was back in the game, and looking at Matt, so still, so much bloody younger than him and so... innocent (though that wasn't the right word for Matt at all and it had been years since Matt had been anything but cynical in regards to everything else in the world but for Mello), he knew he didn't want him involved. He couldn't ask Matt to do anything more than he had.

It was going to be a game of life and death from now on, even more than it had been before, and it was bad enough that he was gambling with his own life. If Matt stayed... If Matt stayed, Mello would end up using him, like all the others, like the mafia men who were now all dead, like the SPK. Matt wasn't a pawn, but Mello knew himself well enough to know that he couldn't stop himself from making him one. And that meant Matt would end up dead.

It was the subject of nightmares.

Yet it always came back to one thing, when he woke up, something that was both comfort and fear combined. Matt had been the one to track him down. Matt had been the one who had, very calmly, righted their friendship and set it back on its tracks despite Mello's long absence from his life. Matt had been the first one of them to say, I need you in my life, and this is why, as though it wasn't a big deal, just simple facts that could not be changed. Matt would always come back.

Making him leave - if he even could - would shatter their friendship's careful balance and break Matt's heart. Mello didn't think he had the strength to do it.

Because as much as he hated to admit it, he needed the boy who slept beside him on the couch as much as he needed Mello. He'd let Matt stay, all this time, let him maintain their personal status quo, let him track him down, let him come back and reinsert himself in Mello's life and felt himself the better for it.

Damned if he did, damned if he didn't. Mello closed his eyes, Matt's gentle breathing filling the room, and tried to hold back the bitterness, tried to shore up the floodgates once more. How could he protect someone he couldn't bear to keep away from him, even though he was the problem? If Matt was so cynical, why did he always fail to see how dangerous it was to be with Mello, how dark and twisted Mello had become - thief, manipulator, kidnapper, murderer - and why did he never understand that being with Mello would sully him, would drag him down into the gutter too and hold him there until death? How could he make sure Matt would be safe when Matt was happiest only next to the person who was the worst for him?

He wasn't good enough to save even one important life. Mello's fingers trailed unconsciously over his still tender scarring skin, his mark of shame and inadequacy, and wished there was even one way that he could tear them apart without killing them both.

-