AN- I tried to convince myself I could fit this into five to seven chapters.

(I am the virus, are you the cure?)

Self, I think you were lying.

(I am morally, I'm morally impure)

It's four in the morning my dears. I should be finishing that scene for Morning Star, so my beta doesn't kill me.

(I am a disease and I am unclean)

Anja, I offer this as appeasement. I've had a bad week.

(I am not part of God's well oiled machine)

XXXX

Chapter Two

Clairvoyance- The alleged power of perceiving things beyond the natural range of the senses

XXXX

Beyond, at the age of eighteen, was an extremely intelligent man. While it was uncommon for a boy with only eighteen years of life behind him to be considered an adult, there was hardly anything common about Beyond at all. He was of abnormal intelligence, so gifted that it was hard for him relate to anyone twice his age, much less his own, and the level of his maturity only made his relationships with those around him…difficult, at best.

…At least for them, because Beyond never really gave a damn in the first place.

It was arrogance. Purely and simply, it was his arrogance and his contempt that made his life easier to bear. To avoid the complications of human troubles, he merely removed them from the equation, refusing to associate with anyone or anything unless they served a specific purpose in his future. It was generally accepted that he was not to be disturbed unless circumstances were dire, and in a quiet orphan-academy in the English hills, 'dire' was a rare term. The teachers gave him the information they were paid to give, and he was left to his own devices. As one of the older tenets of the house, he was allowed full roam of the house, allowed where he was inclined to go, with only a few absolute restrictions. In truth, they were of little consequence, because had Beyond found reason to be where he was not supposed to, there was not a person in the academy tenacious enough to dissuade him from the notion.

…Aside from the academy's proprietor, but that was another matter, and completely irrelevant.

He rarely exercised his freedom, deeming that once he had seen a seldom-used library in the back corners of the large manor, he was not likely to see much change there. If he'd learned anything in the four years that he'd lived in the manor, it was that the purpose of the establishment was not change, it was grooming, refinement. As the second child to be collected in the six years since it was decreed a program, he had watched the flock grow from sets of twenty, to the small population of three to four hundred children that it carried now. They were tested, trained for a short time in general fields of knowledge and then tested again for a particular aptitude that unerringly fated the rest of their lives. The first test was a full cognizant review, of everything they had ever learned. The children were given thirty days to write a comprehensive report on everything they knew. It was not a formal paper, merely a list of all the information that they, as children, deemed important and knew from memory. They were given room and board and an endless supply of paper, for that first portion of the exam was handwritten. Anything, and everything, summarily an account of their lives, was scribed in small handwriting in pencil, ink or crayon, for later review. Those who didn't survive that portion of the test were moved on to other boarding schools, because regardless of their intelligence, they didn't have the necessary discipline or determination to bother wasting the extensive resources that would be passed on to them from that point. It was considered a waste of the establishment's time.

When and if, a child's paper was reviewed and deemed worthy of accepting, they were then given their choice of name. When Beyond had first arrived, they'd gone so far as to give them numbers, and leave it at that. The proprietor deemed that too cruel, however, and had them organized by letter, with a name chosen from that letter. It worked well enough for the first set, he supposed, because after he'd advanced through the trials and begun to show real promise, they allowed the children to take their own names. They had the necessary back-ups, so the superfluous residents were granted a leniency that Beyond had never known in those first, tortuous years.

After the child's name was chosen, and logged into the register, they began their training. In the beginning, the regime was fully comprehensive, covering any number of subjects, with the child's interests in mind. This narrowed the list substantially, because those who requested certain subjects and then accepted the ones they were given instead were immediately discounted. Those that refused to accept the training until it met their standards began working towards their goals immediately after challenging the system, while the rest settled into what life had given them and called it enough. Two years of general learning, classes and studies and projects and missionary examples to guide them, and they were subjected to the second test. By this point, most had decided what field they would specialize in, and this very select test was a comprehensive mental study of the children themselves, and not of their abilities. It was perhaps the most dangerous exam they would ever face within the establishment's walls, but it was also the only one in which the children themselves did not participate in. It was a full psychological profiling, a silent affair that determined the course of their lives more surely than their own choices ever would. It looked beyond desire and impulse, and into the very chords of their humanity to determine the type of person that they would become and how that person would ultimately behave… children often dream of being an astronaut, but a precious few are of the mental design to pursue that dream to its end. Instead of the ingenuity, the grace and beauty of a young mind left alone to mature, they would rather dissect the bird's wings feather by feather to determine if it was ever capable of flying to begin with.

A 'noble cause', they quoted, but in Beyond's opinion all they ever wrought was hell…for his generation, at least. One of them was already dead for it.

Beyond, however, was not as weak as that child, for a child 'A' had remained until the day that he died. Regardless, the grooming continued, and to this day, Beyond was still being shaped. A man as he was, he was treated with more respect, but the shadows of his training tainted his every thought, and caused the workers to drop their eyes in shame and admiration when he walked by. Beyond was the next in line, the best, and at the moment…the only hope for the legacy of L, the greatest detective in the known world, to continue.

It was a burden that he hadn't asked for.

Still, as a child, even a gifted one, his voice had been small in the ears of those more powerful than he, and so he remained in these halls even now, continuing his training under the lock and key of his proprietor.

…And sometimes, sitting in the window of his library and thinking of nothing didn't console him in his rage, and he would walk the halls, breaking his pattern to keep from breaking his control.

When Beyond walked, no one spoke to him. To see the young man in a section of the house where he did not normally dwell was a foretelling of something going wrong, and likely very quickly. Beyond's anger was like a scorpion, and while he didn't indulge himself often, he was unerringly cruel. Perhaps the greatest mistake that Quillsh Whammy ever made was to authorize the dissection of the young genius' mind and his fallacy to then show the boy the pieces. It was an interesting experience, no doubt, to know the darkest secrets of his own mind revealed and categorized into an accurate self portrait so intimate that some of it, he'd yet to even grow into. His entirely personality was torn apart and spoon fed to him prematurely. Even discoveries that he'd yet to make himself were scripted and laid before him in that report, all the private trivialities that composed his mental makeup in black and white. His sexuality, his eventual stance on religion, even his method of dealing with himself and his troubles… his very identity was taken from him and then given back in ragged pieces.

He thought of repaying them all by confiding to them the day they would die.

…But in reality his fate was so much worse.

It was not within his power to change what he was to become. The code of his mind was written so early on in his life that he was no longer able to direct its course, the learning years of his childhood spent in a long line of broken homes and strange places. Everything, from his first steps, to his first cognizant interactions with people, were simply too far behind him to allow a change in the person that he'd become. He'd passed the stage of evolution that decreed what strengths and weaknesses he'd had to survive with. When they tore his mind open and penned its pieces to the white board for display, he found he had nothing to look forward to. There would be no real emotional growth, because he already knew how he would react in a given situation, down to a point and line graph of the what-ifs and possibilities. Growing up would be like watching the doctor administer his lethal injection…he would know the process, the details of the drug and its influence, but no matter how he railed and screamed in the depths of his mind, the needle was damn sharp and he would never escape it. Even when the inevitable thought of fighting finally occurred in the midst of his panic, the drug would already be in his system, stealing the strength from his rebellion. He would die knowing that not once over the course of his lifetime was he a free man. Never.

…So when Beyond walked, he walked with the intention of venting. It often led to damage, sometimes to property, sometimes to the other children. As of yet, nothing overly serious had occurred, but his bouts of instability were notorious and he was often shadowed by one of the bulkier attendants, should the violence become personal. His discrepancies ranged from the minute, such as plucking the toy from a toddler's hands and setting it upon a high shelf, to the extreme, such as the occasion that he set a piece of paper on fire, and left it burn upon the carpet. They'd nearly lost an entire library's worth of books and knowledge to that fire. It was the event that earned him the guard.

His walks were not limited to conclusive actions. He did not always roam the house for insignificant troubles to amuse himself with. On occasion, he merely walked. One of his more recent endeavors was to merely stalk the grounds endlessly like a stray cat with mange. If left undisturbed, he would walk sometimes for days on end, until his legs would no longer carry him.

One thing that never failed upon these ventures is that he never spoke. Granted, he rarely did so anyway in his day to day encounters, but when he retreated into the gaping wound of his memories, he was utterly and completely dissociated from the rest of them. He would often pull away from life, leaving them to weave in and out of his field of vision, but when he walked, he disappeared. It was widely rumored that his unintentional meditation slowed his heart to a point where he simply couldn't respond to external stimuli, but as of yet, no one had developed the nerve to stop him in his wanderings and find out. When Beyond walked, the staff merely informed one another, and sent someone to watch the young ones while a man fell into step a few yards behind him if he looked overly agitated. He supposed that it was better they lock him up, but it was his understanding that the proprietor had undergone the same training that he himself had, and was also allowed his little quirks.

Honestly, he thought they were merely so ashamed of their handiwork that they didn't have the heart to punish him for their crimes.

XXXX

Mello didn't know why it was so damn fascinating. Years of being content in a form of stasis with himself and his surroundings had perhaps left him questing for an outlet to the stress he was storing away in the depths of his mind, but by all accounts, it didn't make sense. He'd been fine to ignore everyone and everything but his religion and his studies. His friendship with Matt was as rhythmic as the moon phases… they were always at each other elbow, and then they'd go weeks without speaking. It was at once a comfortable, easy companionship, and a tense pressure, a momentary flash of heat that lingered for days before it fled with the tide. An exchange of gazes would often left them unable to speak, and things would become strange again, until neither saw the point in seeking the other's company when all they did was confine themselves to an uncomfortable silence.

Matt was his cure. Matt calmed him, incited him, and calmed him yet again when he needed the reassurance of a mind at his back, a friend that he could trust implicitly.

But…Matt also wanted him.

In the gregarious, intimate way that boys want.

And it scared the hell out of him.

Something not quite desire or lust resided between them, tossed like a hot coal between the two and determining the sway of their relationship. Neither were sure exactly when it had begun, but it had yet to fade, and remained a mere tension in the framework of their exchanges. Young as they were, it was still something to be feared, something forbidden and something to laugh at themselves about.

But sometimes when Matt looked at him, Mello couldn't look back. Sometimes when Matt stared in that quiet way of his, and the laughter died off into silence, Mello wrapped his fist around his crucifix and marveled at the delicious heat the look imparted. Always, just in his peripheral vision, the magnitude of such a look hovered like the flicker of a candle. He could feel the shift in the other boy's breathing, and instinctively avoided his eyes, removed himself from their wrestling match in the floor, or started off, walking to force him to follow and pull his mind from the haunting tug that he was experiencing himself. Always, so easy, to walk away.

Because sometimes, Mello stared, and he knew that Matt walked away to save him, too. When the sunlight caught his eyes just so, and the blood in Mello's veins broke canter, he would pull his goggles on, and leave the…want, in Mello's heart grasping at something beautiful and only finding smoke. When he was working, concentrating hard enough that the small line at the bridge of his nose appeared from his furrowed brow, Mello would watch, and Matt would hide when he noticed. Usually going to fetch them something to drink, or putting the project away for the night…and so it went.

A game of sorts, a daring little reach into themselves and tentative grasp at the men they might become some day.

At first, they never spoke of it, but as the years passed, it seemed to become more and more common. As the years passed, and shoulders broadened, bodies matured, and self-awareness came to plague them, the game became harder to play. The tension that rested just beneath the surface burned perilously close to the skin in the waning years of their childhood.

Until the day Matt shattered it and kissed him.

It was brief thing, because Mello had broken the rules. He'd felt the look, upon his shoulders while he worked at a report and Matt played beside him. The incessant ring of a paused game had long been repeating the stark silence, and he'd known. It seemed simple enough in the beginning to continue to ignore the heat, the tension curling up his spine, but now that things were different, his pen slowed to a stop against his will. They sat there, like that, for a long time. Simply breathing quietly and feeling out the depths of this new dynamic with the fumbling thoughts of two boys suddenly made terrified of themselves. The look didn't waver, but that was his fault, for not breaking the stare, moving, talking, asking a question….it was his fault for not pulling Matt away from his thoughts. It was his fault they continued licking over his skin like tongues of flame. He suddenly couldn't breathe, and the silence…the silence was too much. He wasn't sure what made him lift his eyes from his paper and slowly turn them in Matt's direction, but the other boy tensed so hard that he jumped, caught in his stare. He was doing the unspeakable, acknowledging this tension, making it real, making it matter.

They sat there for another moment or two, paralyzed by the magnitude that something as simple as a meeting of the eyes had come to bear on their friendship.

Then Matt seemed to remember why he'd been staring in the first place, and leaned over to press his lips against the curve of Mello's jaw.

It was nothing, less than nothing, he'd thought and fantasized about worse in the quiet of his room, but it was enough. It was enough to rewrite the game into something darker, something that it should never have become. Mello closed his eyes, and the touch was gone, hardly a blink in the course of time, and as brutal as a hammer to their relationship. It was chaste, scared, young, and if given time, he thought, dangerous.

It was amazing.

Matt had leaned back across the couch then, retreating to his corner and paler than Mello ever recalled him being. It threw his freckles into sharp relief, which made him smile, just a slight upturn of the lip. Small reassurance to the guilty parties, but it was enough to give them a grip on their relationship and to face it. Matt returned to his game and Mello finished his paper.

Something that important, something that life-altering, had been years in the making, he realized now. Small thing though it was, it was not the product of a moment's desire, but the slow burning of something that had outlasted the cold of ignorance and stayed with them for years. It was the culmination of everything, and the first step into the unknown.

It was…important.

Fist wrapped around his crucifix, he wouldn't go so far as to call it sacred, but the word seemed synonymous when he thought about it in the privacy of his mind. It rang nearly as true.

It was also nothing like this.

Father Forgive, but it was nothing like this.

XXXX

To call his steps a well-worn path would have been a lie. In truth, he only indulged his need to walk every few months. His path through the house was always random, sometimes taking him through crowded nurseries where the children parted before him like water before hot steel. Sometimes, he wandered so far from the house that he left the territory of the groundskeepers and walked through knee deep grasses, untouched by any lawn machine. It was a candid, straightforward affair, and its calculated arrogance is likely what made the venture so successful…he'd terrified younger boys to tears with merely a glance of his baleful expression.

He hadn't been walking for long. The staff had yet to pick up on his rounds, and he supposed that if he stayed to the back staircases, he could likely avoid detection for another hour or two. He wound his way through the halls, barefoot and silent and blessedly alone. While he probably hadn't seen this corner of the house in half a year or more, little had changed in his absence. The stark reality of his prison was that it served to mock him. What little things he came to wonder at in the majority of the house were cleared away, where here they flourished. Cobwebs and the small house spiders that were ridiculed and killed in the house proper stood as silent sentinels in its dark corners, irrefutably resistant to the human standard. Beyond had developed a quiet sort of regard for the creatures, something that bordered respect but fell short of it in light of the fact that they held little in the manner of intelligence. What attracted him to the spindly killers was the fact that they possessed only the tools they required to survive, and had perfected them to a horrific simplicity that humans were utterly incapable of mimicking. When asked to commit murder, the human mind would immediately reach for tools, not just for the capture of their victim, but for the act itself. When it came time for the death to occur, hardly a single person would want to commit it with their bare hands…and the few that did, such as Beyond himself, were considered sick men that should be locked away for mental discrepancy. Put simply, because the rest of society turned their nose at the thought of blood on his hands, they expected the common man to do the same. They shared an ingrained disgust for creatures as primal and unadulterated as the common house spider, likely because they feared what it represented. It seemed a lack of compassion in the modern day was as damnable as their cowardice would have been hundreds of years ago. Beyond thought that, if perhaps he ever did kill a person, he'd like to get his hands dirty in the process. While a person's life held little value to him, he felt their death was misunderstood. He felt it was not something that should be feared but merely something that should be experienced, like all once in a lifetime events. Beyond thought it would be rather hard to experience one's death if one were too full of fear and denial to know that it was happening.

As he trailed a smooth hand down the dusty stair rail to the second floor, his lips smirked around the jam packet at that particular thought. If he ever did, perchance, find an opportunity to kill someone, he'd have the courage to tell them they were about to die. Then the nature of his anger took over and despite the soothing taste of strawberries on his tongue, he knew that he'd also like to make someone believe they were about to die, and then walk away. In fact, he knew that if it wouldn't lead them to 'find religion' or some other bullshit excuse for their own shortcomings, he'd have likely done it already.

He pulled the empty piece of plastic from his mouth and tucked it carefully into a pocket. His bare feet were nearly silent on the marbled stairs, and as he wondered again how long it would take for the staff to realize that Beyond was missing a class, and not in his dorm room. The first was nothing new, but it was the second that would lead them to a discreet search of the house. Another plastic jam packet slid from his jeans, warm with the heat of his thigh and blackberry in flavor. He paused at the landing to admire the dust on the decorative table and tear the corner off with his teeth. Soon another sweet, slightly more bitter on the tongue, made him smile and continue on his meandering path.

As he neared the landing on the second floor and glanced through the doors into the hall, he was hit with the scent of incense. He watched the students moving to their classes for a moment, mentally challenging them to enter the sanctity of his closed off stairwell, but none seemed to hear the crimson glimmer of his eyes. The scent became stronger, and with a frown, he glanced down the steps. His training pointed him in the direction of the railing, where the wood shone warmly in the sunlight trickling through strategic windows. The absence of dust and tell-tale dark rubber marks on the marble told him that while no one had joined him this bell, these stairs were not as desolate as he'd hoped. Regardless, he began his trek down again, leaving the hall and its quarry to continue without the taint of his presence. The scent grew stronger, a blend of herbs and spices that mixed with his blackberry jam to put him in mind of a thickly spiced pastry, something savory and bitter to be had with similar coffee. He caught himself going through the habitual description and shoved his personality further into the background of his mind, trying to stifle his grooming and reclaim his sense of self.

When he rounded the banister again, he was presented not with one set of doors but three. To the left of the stairs was a door that led to the hall on the main floor, lined with classes and the central offices. On his right, a brighter source of sunlight spoke of the grounds beyond, a door to the moor grasses…and directly in front of him was an older door, one with stained glass in its insets and a simple copper cross nailed to the hand-span of wall above it. His nose instantly curled, for the incense had an explanation. Wammy's had established its home chapel years before Beyond, or even the proprietor had arrived. It was reminiscent of the God-fearing England that had existed before and during the Second World War. Beyond wouldn't say that he'd avoided it, but merely that he'd yet to find reason to cross its threshold.

His opinion of religion was…not held in high regard by others.

He wasn't sure how long he'd been standing there, scowling at the old maple planking that made up the door and its frame. Beyond tended to lose track of time when he shoved his thoughts away and tried to merely exist aside from the cold coal of his rage. Perhaps he'd only paused a minute, but if so, he'd finished his fresh packet of jam much faster than he had the others. Regardless, when the door swung open and Mello stepped out, he tensed as though caught in the act of something.

Perhaps that's what made him angry.

In Mello's defense, he hardly did more than lift his eyes to meet the older boy's and froze. The scent of incense masked the chocolate and leather that Beyond usually associated with him, as did the calm, displaced expression upon his face. The usual spark and glory that hung in his eyes had deserted him in favor of humble reckoning.

For the first time, Beyond knew for certain that his eyes were indeed blue.

They did not catch the sunlight like they had the fire, but instead captured the entirety of his attention with the simple movement of blinking. Even the slight parting of his lips in surprise was eclipsed by the disappearance and sudden reemergence of those sapphires. The color hovered somewhere between the light and dark just as Beyond's hesitated on the line of black and crimson. A matter of lighting he supposed, but nonetheless, disturbingly real.

They stood there for a moment, and eventually Mello stepped forward to let the door close behind him. The small glimpse of the dim world of faith faded with a click, and left him with only the company of the boy that seemed so steeped in it that it painted his very face. The crucifix swinging from the younger boy's throat glistened in the sunlight, a sharp bronze contrast to the white-gold of his hair. Beyond's sneer only deepened as he slid the jam from between his lips and licked them carefully.

Mello jumped when he spoke. "You didn't strike me as the type to waste your time in a pretentious bid for solitude, trying to place yourself one step above the rest of us with fervent acts of repentance. Did you light your candles, and say your 'Hail Mary-s'?"

"I…." The sound of his own voice seemed to startle him back into himself, Beyond noted, and the pale lips snapped closed again while he considered the insult. The sapphires narrowed as he found a scrap of the spark within himself and sought to burn with it. "If you think so little of what I do here, I might ask you why I most often find you locked in a library in a…a pretentious bid for solitude."

The defiance sent a thrill through him that nothing else had been able to draw today. Not even his pondering of murder and psychological torture had yielded the rush that this boy provided with the mere act of lifting his chin and deciding to bite back. Beyond marveled at that for a moment, before rushing the emotion away for later study and leaving the husk of himself to continue the conversation. "And what did you repent today?"

"That is none of your concern." Mello bit off again, and the dark edge to his expression said everything that he himself did not.

Beyond's smirked quietly. "Not a certain habit, I hope. There is no shame in using your…talents to acquire something that you want."

He couldn't have hit the nerve more solidly unless he'd knifed the younger boy in the stomach. Some bastard child of humiliation and rage marred the smooth lines of his face, and his voice took on a cold edge that Beyond rather admired in one so young. "It is not a talent, it's a habit that I should break."

"You obviously haven't come to terms with your sexuality, so I'll play nice and leave it alone." He drawled.

Fists clenched, Mello all but spat his words up the stairs. "That is also none of your concern!"

"Oh you're absolutely right." Beyond murmured, bringing the preserves to his lips again. The line of the younger's boys throat moved with his every breath, whatever peace he'd gained from his prayer obviously shattered. He pulled more jam into his mouth and smoothed it away with his tongue before continuing. "Whether or not you decide to fuck your best friend is none of my business. My most sincere apologies."

That particular insult struck a chord that Beyond hadn't been sure existed. However, the sudden shock of stillness in the younger boy's body said that yes, he'd touched on something sensitive, something worth prodding at.

"Shut up."

"Now, now, I apologized, didn't I? Though, I must confess, I am curious." Beyond sunk his claws in, amazed to find that a person could simultaneously pale and flush. Mello seemed staggered by the fact that Beyond had even spoken to him; he obviously wasn't prepared for the exchange he was trapped in. "Have you ever done it to him on purpose?"

Breathless horror, almost a whisper. "What?"

"Have you ever…" Beyond let the words roll from his tongue, tilting his head in mimicry of innocent curiosity, "taunted him…on purpose?"

Mello took a step forward, and Beyond chuckled. He'd never seen so much emotion on the boy's face, and all of it some delicious combination of embarrassment, anger, and just enough guilt to keep his humanity in perspective. This was the outlet he'd needed, he'd been waiting for, and perhaps if he pushed hard enough he'd get more out of it than he initially expected. He went on, stabbing into the molten heat being directed at him with pinpoint intuition and unfailing cruelty. "It wouldn't be surprising."

"Shut up." Mello snatched his eyes away, and headed across the small landing. There were scarcely eight steps between them, but Beyond had a suspicion….

"You seemed thrilled that I noticed, after all." He offered quietly as the younger boy drew near. "Does it make you feel powerful, to have his attentions on a thread?"

…He was faster than Beyond had given him credit for.

His training had forced him to note the lithe figure that the boy worked to maintain, but it was his arrogance that had taken it for granted. Perhaps he'd miscalculated the amount of false bravado that crucifix around his throat instilled. Mello drew up alongside him, as though to pass him on the stair. He pulled his fist back too soon, and Beyond had enough time to acknowledge what was about to happen before the gloved fist drove a path through his entrails and nearly reached his spine. The jam in his stomach rolled, sending a wave of nausea up through his chest, until he grit his teeth to keep it down.

The next few seconds were entirely instinctual.

He would like to say that he hadn't intended to hurt the boy…but even that would be a lie because had anyone asked him about it directly afterwards, he'd have thrown his caution to the wind and made some quip about attempted murder. If the staff of the house had managed to catch onto his walk and get a tail on him it would likely have ended much sooner, when the exchange of insults began. What he would have liked, in all honesty, was to say that his self control transcended this act of violence, that a mere flash of pain wasn't enough to push him over that edge even on his bad days.

That didn't seem to be case, and as the jam packet fell from his lips to the floor, Beyond experienced his ideal power for the first time. White hot, a sear of pain so real, so human that it pissed him off to know it was possible, even while it humbled his preconceptions of the boy in front of him. In the instant the sweet taste left his tongue to be replaced with the hot copper-bite of blood from the bitten tip, he was aware of everything in minute detail. B, his husk, his shell, his walls, were torn away and for the first time since he left his corner of the library, Beyond resided fully within his own mind. There was no dissociation from the sharp reality of that pain, a beat of truth in the listless pulse of his day to day life. With the slowing, flashing heat of it working its way up his stomach, Beyond's mind reasserted itself, and then completely shut down for a space of three seconds.

In which, he placed his large, spindly hand over Mello's face and shoved.

He could feel his chest working to draw air, but felt nothing. He could feel the pulse of his heart in his injured tongue, felt the blood filling his mouth, but not the warmth of it. As Mello's body moved back, much too fast, became airborne in the eight feet of air between Beyond's outthrust hand and the floor below, the only thing that registered in any detail were the wide blue eyes staring back at him.

Shock, fear, and pure blue.

The purest blue eyes that Beyond had ever seen, not tainted with silver or green or gold…only the sparkling shades of a summer sky captured in the clearest of diamond.

He watched those eyes until Mello hit the ground.

It was as though a void receded, fleeing his conscious thoughts like a guilty child. Like a ringing in his ears, the pain worked its way back into his mind and called him back to himself in time to hear the back of the boy's head smack the tiles. It was a thick sound, muffled only somewhat by his hair, but in the second that those eyes closed upon the bounce, Beyond came back, and watched what would forever be a shining moment in his history with the Golden Boy. He cleared the stairs completely, so hard did Beyond push him, and fell upon his shoulders in the sunlight from the door. He gave no cry of pain, only jumped slightly as the shock dissipated through his frame in a silent wave of energy and hurt. His crucifix landed by his hip. Beyond, standing over him, could still feel the warmth of his skin against the pads of his fingers.

-For three seconds, he'd had silence.-

Three seconds, and it was as though someone had shut off a tap in his thoughts, a full cessation of thought. It was a feeling that he'd been trying to achieve for years in the libraries, locking himself away in search of silence within himself. The sheer cognitive ability of his brain had stripped him of something as simple as an internal dialogue, and replaced with what seemed to be multitudes of people inside his mind. Every piece of information he could take in, he did so without discretion, without choice.

Those few seconds of clarity, to act for the sake of acting and admire it…. To stand above Mello's body, watching the way his chest heaved and his eyelids fluttered closed, unconscious or possibly dying…three seconds.

It was possibly the most arousing three seconds of Beyond's life.

He moved down the stairs carefully, unconsciously walking on the balls of his feet because the situation seemed so fragile, so delicate, that one misplaced movement would shatter it. He eased down the stairs, and he should have been checking for intruders, for witnesses, but he couldn't take his eyes off the form sprawled in the floor. It was dementedly satisfying to defy the common sense, the noise, once it came back. He was in control of himself now, and he would never regret any of this, regardless of how it affected the future. He reached the bottom of the stairs, but that did not end his descent as he slowly knelt. Placing his knees on either side of the black boots, he lowered himself further, until the cold tile was a shock to his palms.

Mello's eyes never flickered, and there was only the uneven, labored sound of his breathing to fill Beyond's ears. The pain in his stomach faded, but the tight coil of excitement did not. He felt his own heart in his ears, and realized that he couldn't remember the last time that had happened. Moving slowly, so slowly, he eased himself forward, the scent of incense and leather and chocolate invading his senses to quietly assault his common sense. He inched forward, until the darker things in his mind whispered that it would be sweeter to become even closer, entreated him to lower himself to lie along this young, vibrant body completely. He reined them in and watched the boy's face. Mello's eyes remained closed, his hair across his brow, his blond lashes watered and stuck to his cheek from the pain of impact. He heard the faint hitch and draw in his chest, could feel the heat coming off the younger boy's skin. His pale lips, only moments ago twisted into a scowl of anger, lay parted, revealing a fine line of white teeth and pink tongue below. Beyond did not touch the boy, not to move the intruding bangs, not to wake him, not for anything did he dare to touch…instead he merely leaned to the side, brought his mouth close to the pale throat in the excuse of checking for blood beneath his head. He knew better, knew, because his eyes were closed longer than they were open to check the damage he'd done.

Mello moved beneath him, a faint sound of pain and a shift of the shoulder, centimeters closer to his mouth, a bare shoulder, round and trim and firm to the touch he was sure, and warm…

He pulled away, trailing his nose along the fine line of his jaw and refusing himself the contact through the tortuous motion. He was wondering what it tasted like when a door closed somewhere above him and echoed down the stairwell. Footsteps followed afterwards, coming down the track, and loathe as he was to leave his little experiment behind, he knew that his time was up. He eased to a crouch over his hips and gripped the boy's chin, shaking him.

Those crystalline eyes opened much too quickly.

He didn't have time to consider anything else before he stood, and eased out the door into the hall, leaving him there to either be saved or bleed.