Disclaimer: I don't own Matt or Mello, but the cleaning implements are all mine :) Oh, and my mom told me about turmeric.

A/N: Okay, my chapters are getting progressively more random. The base idea for this was taken from Dess, when we were debating how Mello would best wreak havoc. I went with this, although it started out as redecoration and ended up as just plain old cleaning. I think this is funnier than redecoration, though.

Chapter 9: Dusting

I had thought that I could handle anything that Mello could possibly throw at me. However, I had underestimated his singular abilities to wreak havoc and sow the seeds of total destruction. These abilities were magnified about three hundred seventy percent when he was in excruciating pain. Even so, I thought I could handle him.

That was before he found himself a new foe to take on.

I didn't realize quite what was coming when he vanished into the kitchen. When the loud clanging started, I began to worry. I didn't panic, though, until Mello came back out into the living room, a ragged, moldy feather duster in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other. "You're going shopping," he informed me, passing me the paper, which proved to be a list. "There's nothing in your kitchen fit for human consumption."

…I had always thought of myself as human. "I just went shopping two days ago."

He brandished the feather duster. "Canned soup is not food. And there's nothing here that you can use to clean, which I really should've expected, judging by the fact that there's nothing clean in this shithole, so you need to go shopping for that too."

I sneezed at the shower of dust the feather duster had sent up in my face. "Where did you get that thing? And why are you waving it around?"

"I found it under your kitchen sink. I'm trying to find somewhere to throw it out. You'll be going with it if you don't get your ass going." He smacked me with it.

I then made the mistake of attempting to relieve him of the feather duster. That resulted in me being bludgeoned with the thing before being forcibly booted out the door and having it locked behind me.

At least I had a list.

* * *

"Sir, can I help you?"

I looked at the salesperson, who was staring at me with what looked like puzzlement. Then again, if I'd seen some guy standing in the cleaning product aisle blankly staring at the shelves, I would've been puzzled too. Nonetheless, I resisted the urge to succumb to my inner Mello and tell him that stores should be arranged in fucking alphabetical order. "Could you tell me where the turmeric is?"

He looked at the shelves, then shrugged. "I can't say I've ever heard of it. What sort of product is it?"

"Um…I think it's for cleaning sinks." That was my pathetic best guess.

He looked at the shelves again. "Well, you might be looking for turpentine," he suggested. "Turmeric sounds to me like it might be a misspelling, so I would go with turpentine."

I checked the list. It sure looked like turmeric, but then again, Mello wrote in cursive, and it had started getting a bit scrawly halfway down the page. "Yeah, I think you might be right," I decided, grabbing a bottle of turpentine off the shelf. "Thanks."

"No problem."

I looked back at my list. Chicken breast – I was pretty sure I could handle that one. Then again, with my luck, I'd get the wrong thing somehow. Truth be told, I did think the turmeric to turpentine misspelling was a bit iffy…

* * *

I was very glad that I'd managed to grab the car keys before I was dusted out the door. I had so many bags of groceries and junk that it took five trips to get them all inside. It might have gone a bit quicker if Mello had helped me with it, but the second I set the first bags down inside the door, he'd snatched them and made for the kitchen. The other bags I brought in similarly vanished when I went to get more.

When I'd gotten all the groceries in, I headed into the kitchen myself, since Mello might want some help putting things away.

All thoughts of assisting him, however, were dusted to the back of my mind by the sight of the kitchen. Or, rather, the room that had the same general setup as the kitchen. Something had happened to it. Most strikingly, the table was not only visible, but clean. It hadn't been that uncluttered since the day I'd moved in. And the floor had been mopped, too, by the looks of it.

I didn't even realize I owned a mop, much less a mop that wouldn't have been trashed with the feather duster.

"Matt, quit staring at the floor. I know you've never seen it, but the chicken's thawing." Mello pointed pointedly at a bag of frozen food.

I tore my gaze away from the room I was beginning to doubt was my kitchen. "Right." I pulled the freezer door open, prepared for anything. Sure enough, Mello had attacked that as well, which meant that there was plenty of space for the chicken breast and frozen vegetables, and space to spare.

I was about to start putting things in the fridge when I heard Mello say, "Matt, what the fuck is this for?"

I shut the refrigerator door and looked at him. He was holding up the bottle of turpentine. I shrugged. "I don't know, you're the one who wanted it."

He chucked the bottle at me, annoyed. I'd probably be annoyed too in his position – he had to be hurting. He hadn't been using his left arm at all since I'd gotten back. "What the hell would I need turpentine for?"

I looked at the bottle. Then I thought about the guy at the grocery store. Then I pulled out the list and looked at it again.

Fuck.

"Turmeric's not a cleaning product," I realized. Unfortunately, I was about half an hour too late to correct the mistake.

Mello stared at me. "Of course it's not! It's a spice!" He pointed at the list. "Did it not occur to you that I was looking for spices when you saw cinnamon and rosemary and pepper? Why the hell would I suddenly put fucking paint thinner in the middle of those?"

…I had to admit, I couldn't find a reason. "Why do you need so many spices?" I asked, edging past him to shove the bottle of turpentine under the sink to make friends with the box of SOS pads and the dish soap.

"Because so far you've fed me nothing but canned soup and microwaved pizza, both of which are utterly disgusting. If I have to eat chicken soup, I'm going to eat good chicken soup, with spices, without all the MSG and preservatives."

Apparently the Mafia was involved in not only organized crime, but those campaigns to eat healthy!

As if he'd read my mind and decided to prove me wrong about the Mafia support of good nutrition, Mello grabbed a half-eaten bar of chocolate off the counter and snapped off a chunk, giving me a glare just daring me to ask him about cooking.

Maybe Mello just…wanted to cook. Or he was so sick of eating my food that he truly could not stomach any more of it. Or he was in enough pain that he'd lost his tenuous grip on sanity and spiraled down to a level where cooking seemed perfectly normal to him.

Option three seemed most likely.

At any rate, I decided to watch my back – in his present state, I was seriously considering the possibility that I might find myself eating turpentine along with chicken soup.