Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note, so sadly, there's a good chance that none of their awkwardness ever actually happened.

A/N: Okay, I meant to get this one done sooner. I really did. (Actually, I tried to get it done ages ago, because Interstella was going away, but I failed at that :() But anyway, I managed to finish it, and it only took me three tries for the ending! (That's fairly good for me, at least with Matt and Mello.)

Chapter 14: Even in Dreams

It was getting close to the time most sane people called bedtime when Mello and I had settled down from the…incident with the closet, and the subsequent dragging of boxes out of the closet, and the fruitless hunt for the cat after that. But after we'd collapsed on the couch to watch a rerun of House, M.D. before we both keeled over from the insanity of it all, I remembered something. I'd been on a rescue mission earlier, and I'd completely forgotten the poor victim I was rescuing!

"Matt," Mello asked as I got off the couch, "what are you doing now?"

I was already halfway under the couch before I answered. "I'm rescuing Nigel!"

"You're what?"

"I'm rescuing Nigel." I could see her, right where I'd dropped her when Mello had fallen on me before.

"Who is - ?" Mello began as I reemerged from under the couch, holding up Nigel proudly. He stared at the laptop, then at me. "No, Matt, you are not naming anything else! No!"

"She was named a long time before you got here," I informed him, sitting back down, brushing some dust off Nigel, then turning her on. "Hey, she still works!"

Mello looked about ready to blow a fuse. "It is not a she, it is an it! It is not a person!"

"Mello, I hope you know that you lost your high ground on this issue when you told me about Zeb." I waited while Nigel booted up. God, I'd forgotten how slow she was.

I didn't see that Mello was glaring at me until he punched me in the arm, which made me look up. "What?" I asked. "I'm just pointing out that you're being a bit hypocritical."

"Just because I called it Zeb did not mean that I thought of it as a person. Unlike you, I am capable of recognizing that inanimate objects do not have genders or personalities."

"Did you know that when people lie, as a general rule they don't use contractions?" I asked as I typed in my password. "Not that I'm implying anything."

I could tell Mello was getting annoyed. "Just because you have a distorted view of reality doesn't mean I do."

"Says the man who was seeing things in my ceiling this afternoon and is probably still high from pain medication." I wasn't really paying attention to the argument, as I'd found the files on various students that I'd downloaded off the server at Wammy's before I'd left. There were no pictures, of course, since I'd downloaded the files long after the start of Kira's "reign".

"Matt!" Mello said loudly, probably for the third or fourth time. "What are you doing?"

"Looking at old files."

"Old files on…?" he prompted, scooting over to look over my shoulder. "…You have the student files from Wammy's House?"

"Yeah. They're out of date, though."

"Obviously. Why do you have them?"

I shrugged and closed the laptop. "I downloaded them before I left in case I needed them. They were really kind of useless."

He yawned. "I'm not surprised."

I shoved some papers off the coffee table and set Nigel down carefully. "You should go to bed."

"Says the man who I've only seen sleep once in the last week," Mello mocked. "As far as I know, you haven't slept since I forced you to."

"And you can't make that argument, given the number of times I've had to force you to go to sleep more times than you've had to force me."

That took a bit of wind out of his sails. "I'll go to sleep if you do," he proposed.

"Deal."

"And I mean actually putting pajamas on and sleeping, not just laying down and staring at the ceiling," Mello clarified.

"Got it."

* * *

It was pitch black in the living room when I woke up. I was shivering because my blanket had slipped onto the floor while I was asleep, and my goggles were digging into the side of my skull. But that wasn't why I was awake. For a moment I wasn't sure what had woken me up; then I heard the bedsprings squeak in protest as Mello moved again in his sleep, and I realized that the sound must've woken me. That was worrisome, because I could sleep through all sorts of noises, and to wake me up, he must've been moving a lot just a minute or so ago.

I pulled my goggles down around my neck and rolled over to look at the clock. 1:27 AM. Of course, I hadn't bothered to check the time before I'd gone to sleep, so that didn't tell me anything.

The bedsprings creaked again, and I rolled off the couch, nearly tripped over the blanket on the floor, then padded into the bedroom. It was so dark in there that I could barely make out Mello's outline against the bed. He seemed to have kicked most of the blankets off onto the floor, and he was whimpering and mumbling incoherently every few moments. It didn't take a genius to realize that he was having one hell of a bad dream. I could remember him having a few nightmares back at Wammy's, but usually he'd wake up on his own as soon as I realized he was having one. But it didn't seem like that would happen this time.

Ignoring the little voice in my mind telling me that I might be about to do something genuinely stupid, I crouched beside the bed. "Mello?" He didn't wake up. If anything, he seemed more distressed. Even more concerned now, I shook his arm, trying to pull him out of the nightmare. "Mello!"

I wasn't sure how it happened, or even what happened. One moment I was crouched down with one hand on Mello's arm; the next, my knees had slammed into the floor, Mello had the collar of my shirt in a death grip, and there was cold, hard metal against my temple. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was a gun Mello was holding to my head.

For a long, long moment, neither of us moved. I didn't even breathe; I just stared wide-eyed at the dim silhouette of Mello's face. "Matt?" he finally said, sounding shaken.

I swallowed. "Yeah."

For another few seconds, he didn't move. Then he let go of my shirt, and I heard the gun fall onto the nightstand. "Never do that again!" he said…not angrily. I couldn't quite place how he sounded.

"I won't." I tried to get my voice to stop shaking. I had thought I was prepared for anything Mello might throw at me, but damn. "That's not loaded, is it?"

"It is."

That scared me. "Why the hell are you sleeping with a loaded gun?"

Mello didn't respond. The bedsprings creaked, then the headboard, and I could see a dim Mello-shaped outline leaning against it, his knees pulled up to his chest.

Still trembling a little bit from the adrenaline, I climbed onto the bed and sat down next to him. A few seconds later, without saying a word, Mello put his head on my shoulder. I could feel him shaking at least as much as I was. I put my arm around him, careful of the burn.

"…I'm sorry."

"It's okay."