And I finally have a second chapter…sorry it took so long, everyone. I've had the massive hell that is writer's block mixed with diabolical laziness…but alas! It is here!
Aka, Matt is here. Yesssss.
I don't own Death Note.
One of her greatest passions is playing the piano, and her fingers twitch to do so.
Bea does not acquire many talents; meager ones, to say the least; but she has always been a lover of the piano.
In the midst of her delirium, she looks around the dimly lit warehouse room in search of her solace, the white baby grand that sits in the parlor of her house, only to be greeted by a rushing in her ears and a stabbing pain in her wrists. Her bound has been released, leaving the wound exposed to the open blood is returning to her arms and from her broken tooth, as well as the tears behind her eyes, and since she assumes that she is alone she takes the opportunity to crumple into sobs.
"Well, hey, don't cry."
Bea snaps her head up and vaguely wonders how she did not see the auburn-haired young man sitting against the wall on the opposite side of the room, legs spread lazily and a cigarette dangling in the corner of his mouth. When she meets his eyes, in which are shielded by foolish goggles, he gives her a casual little wave and nods. "Salutations, miss," he says.
He breathes out a puff of smoke and smiles crookedly at her. Bea takes this as a sign that he, if not a good guy, at least has more heart than the other men she has come across, and she sits up straighter. "H-hi?" She sniffs. "Are you going to get me out of here?"
Much to her disappointment, he gives her a sardonic smirk and takes another puff from his cigarette before exhaling. "Sorry, babe, but that's not gonna work right now." He tilts his head back and stares up at the ceiling. "I'm just here to make sure you don't do anything stupid."
Bea feels the tears returning, and is glad that the young man is not looking at her right now. She looks dreadful when she cries. "Th-then who are you? Why can't you-"
He raises his hands defensively, cutting her off. "Whoa, whoa, miss, one question at a time!" He releases a little chuckle and flicks the ashes of his cigarette onto the cement. "The name's Matt. Now, what else do you wanna ask me?"
Bea winces at the sight of a drop of blood falling to the floor from her wrist, and before she can pull her arm away, she hears Matt suck in a pitiful breath and say, "Alright, questions later. Can't have you getting all infected on us, Mello would castrate me on the spot." He stands up with a groan and approaches her, but Bea intuitively shrinks back when he kneels in front of her. There have been far too many men taking steps towards her, pawing at her, and she is not taking chances with this one either.
Matt sighs and bows his head before looking at her again through orange plastic. "Look, there'd be no point in me hurting you, so you don't have to worry about that, alright?" His voice is softer than the young man Bea heard hours ago in the doorway, much less brash and overbearing, but she keeps her face turned away from him and bites upon her bottom lip to keep herself from crying again. Her raw wrists are throbbing, the blood is trickling horridly down her palms and fingers until licking the floor in glittering red droplets.
The young man sighs again. "If that gets infected, you'll be in a world of shit. You know what that means, miss?"
Bea shakes her head wordlessly.
Matt flicks his ashes onto the floor once more. "That means I'll be in a world of shit as well. That won't be good for either of us, alright?" He stands up , drops the used cigarette from his mouth and crushes it beneath his shoe. "Glad you get it."
Before he can walk away too far, Bea scoots forward and makes a small whimper in her throat. "Where are you-"
Matt looks over his shoulder at her, cocking one auburn eyebrow. "Hey, I'm just going to get some things for that cut of yours, not plotting some big rape episode for you, ok?"
He is not answering her questions directly, and Bea feels a swelling of desperation rising in her chest. "Tell me why I'm here!" she orders. The façade of strength that she had plastered on at the spur of the moment flees the second that she hears her voice crack. Matt is staring at her, unphased but waiting for her to speak again. She obliges. "Please. None of this makes sense. I…I just wake up here with a bunch of strangers and no one's telling me any-"
"I can't."
Bea wishes he would take those goggles off. She wants to see if there is any sympathy for her in his eyes. "C-can't? Why not? I need to know why-"
"Miss, miss," Matt addresses, holding his hands up again, "it's not like they just stole you because you were an easy catch." He runs his slender fingers through his hair and gives an ironic laugh. "But yeah, you were definitely easy."
Bea's mouth gapes open and she sucks in a breath that was stolen from her outrage. "Easy? It's not like I was ever expecting something like this to-"
She is cut short again when Matt chuckles lightly, but she keeps her eyes on him. He begins walking away again towards the doorway, one thumb linked in the belt loops of his jeans. "Yeah, that's not what your father thought."
My…father?
She can only stare after him. She has no words, no declarations or demands or even whimpers. There is a blank stone slate in her mind that has been clouded over with confusion and left to suffer in ignorance. Her father would have nothing to dow with this. He would never allow her to be bounded and kicked in the head and belittled to the point where she was cowering in the corner of a cold room waiting for a large-handed man to barge in and corrupt her.
Matt does not look back at her before he leaves, and closes the door softly behind him. "You're welcome," he mutters.
It takes him an hour to return, and he returns to sobs.
Bea is clutching her wrist, alternating between both, and rocking back and forth on the floor. Christ, she is bleeding, bleeding, and the moment that Matt enters she finds herself in rage.
"It took you an hour?" she cries out, beside herself with pain. She is not one to yell, but she is one to cry, and the agonizing burning within her wounded flesh and the dry manner that Matt looks back at her with allows her to do both at once.
Matt sighs and kneels in front of her, dumping the contents of the bag onto the cement. His hair is wet, and Bea blurrily decides that he has either taken a shower or that it is raining outside. Once she inhales the pungent scent of tobacco in his clothes, she rules out the former and waits for a response.
"Hey, I had to go out to town to get this stuff for you, so you should be thanking me," he says. He keeps his eyes on the seal of the bottle of antiseptic and begins peeling it off the cap.
Her fury returns with a searing bout of pain and more drops of blood. "Thanking you?" she breathes out. "For not telling me why I'm here in the first place?"
Matt groans and removes the cap from the bottle, keeping his eyes down. "Do you want me to lose my balls here? I told you, I can't give out too much until Mello talks to you."
Bea does not recall him telling her this, and she shakes her head in protestation. "You never said that," she says weakly.
Matt looks up at her now through the orange shields of his goggles, then places the open bottle onto the floor and starts unrolling crisp white bandages. "Mello has a lot of questions for you. That he'll ask. Not me. I'm just here to make sure you don't do anything stupid."
"S-stupid? I can barely move!"
"Then consider me useless," he says casually, shrugging his thin shoulders. "But who else would be wrapping you up and making sure you don't bleed to death from your little wrists, babe?" He picks up the antiseptic again and looks at her for a moment, contemplating something that Bea cannot sense. Sighing, he places the bottle back down and mutters, "Shit." Reaching up to his goggles, he pulls them off his eyes and rests them atop his bangs, then returns to the task at hand with indifference.
A lively green, his eyes are. Bea wonders why he insists on blocking them off from the world with that unsightly orange plastic in the first place.
In fact, she realizes that he is quite handsome now that she is able to see his eyes. While the slightly red indentations below his eyes from the goggles still remain, he has a soft, amenable face that Bea finds herself sighing with relief at. While he is not giving her the answers that she needs, at least he is not peering at her with monstrous teeth bared, or lack thereof, and spitting cruel threats beneath his breath at her.
When he places his palm against her mouth holds the bottle in his other hand, Bea's thoughts of him not being threatening like the others are diminished. She tries to free herself from him and scream, but Matt merely mutters something unintelligable and says, "This stuff is going to sting like hell, so I don't want you to make a big scene and have the entire population run in to see what's going on. Chill out."
The exasperation in his voice causes Bea to blush with embarrasssment at the misunderstanding and nod. Seeing his eyes makes his words seem all the more serious, all the more human, and she attemps at bracing herself for the antiseptic to be washed over her raw flesh.
As always, she falls, flails, fails.
The agony is so intense that she releases a gutteral scream into Matt's palm, in which she is suddenly thankful for for muffling her, and kicks her legs in a wordless plea for it to end. She hears the horrid fizzing of the liquid upon her inflamed cut, her own cries, and Matt once again mumbling something under his breath. Freezing, freezing cold bubbling in the slit of her wrist and the warm ache of tears down her face; the humiliation and unawareness of the situation she has been unwillingly thrown into bring all of this to pummel down upon her until she is fighting to sit up and allow Matt to clean the remaining blood from her forearm.
"Damn, that was straight out of a horror movie," Matt says with a smirk. He screws the cap back onto the antiseptic and glances up at Bea. "Maybe you should be an actress."
Bea stares at him incredulously. "That wasn't acting," she responds shakily. There are still tears dripping down her cheeks and clinging to her chin, and she quickly wipes them away to avoid looking more foolish. She decides that Matt is the cause of her humiliation, since he had insisted on pouring what felt like hot acid onto her wounds.
Nevertheless, Matt shrugs and stretches out the roll of bandages to apply to her wrists. "Well, hey, I was just saying. That was a pretty impressive show you had going there." He looks up at her with a glimmer of mirth. "Not to say that you were faking it. That shit hurts, doesn't it?"
Bea squirms when he gently places the edge of the bandage onto her arm, but goes still to allow him to begin wrapping it. "I wasn't screaming for no reason. It hurt."
Matt chuckles for reasons unknown. He has a nice laugh; soft, carefree, calming. "The screaming didn't give that away," he jibes. Rolling the gauze around her left wrist, he flicks his dark fringe out of his bottle green eyes and furrows his brow in concentration. There is a wordless string between them for a minute as he aids her before he speaks again. "But, yeah, you know Mello's going to have to talk to you soon."
Bea winces when the bandage reaches a raw spot. "Who's he?"
Matt turns his eyes onto hers for a second before clearing his throat, turning back to his work. "He just needs to get some things clear with you. You'll find out when you guys talk." He says this too casually, too smooth for it to be genuine.
"Get things clear with me?" she repeats in agitation. "I don't understand why I-"
"It's not exactly you, babe," Matt says beneath his breath. "It's - yeah, well, you'll figure it out later. Mello's the guy you have to talk to. I'm just his nicotine-addicted secondary."
Bea feels a fresh surge of impatience and a sting of pain where Matt presses the bandage. "I won't tell him that you told me."
It is a childish phrase, one in which she should have dropped years ago, but the situation calls for any method of gaining information. In Bea's mind of only sixteen years, she feels that even the most desperate attempt is better than submission.
"No can do, little miss," Matt says with a shake of his head. Bea ignores the fact that he is clearly condescending her, for it is something that she has grown used to. She sighs and waits for him to seal the bandage on her left wrist with a strip of medical tape. When he takes her right hand to begin wrapping it, she turns her eyes away from him and feels the tears returning. She inwardly scolds herself for not being able to go five minutes without crying like an unripe fool, that in which she has the great potential to be.
"Look," Matt says softly, "I can at least tell you that you're not here to be raped or cut up or any of that shit. I mean, yeah, you're a little cut up, but-"
"They took off my skirt last night," Bea mutters bitterly. "The door opened and they stopped, but they were going t-"
"Mello wouldn't have let them," Matt interjects quickly. "Mello thinks ahead when he wants to. He wouldn't have been able to talk to you if you were all traumatized and beaten up, right?" He aids her right wrist carefully, his eyes on the bandage and not on her watering russet eyes. "Hey, might be a pretty selfish reason, but at least it keeps you a little safer."
Bea feels a wave of nausea when she glances down at her gash that Matt is tending to. She focuses on the dark roots of the young man's hair to distract herself. "How old is he?" she asks warily.
"Nineteen," Matt says after a beat.
Bea sits up straigher at his response. "Really?"
"Wasn't lying."
When her right wrist is securely wrapped, Matt releases it and digs through the pocket of his jeans. He retracts with a cigarette and fishes out his lighter. "I wouldn't underestimate him if I were you. He's a pretty smart guy, you see. If he wasn't, it wouldn't have been so easy to find you."
The nausea returns to her stomach. "What?"
The flame of Matt's lighter licks the end of his fresh cigarette and takes a welcoming puff. Exhaling, he shakes his head. "Shit, I've already told you too much. Forget about that."
"Forget?" Bea asks in disbelief. "He's the one who brought me here?"
Matt gives her an irritated groan and flicks his ashes onto the floor. "No," he says, "and that's all I can tell you now. Sorry, babe."
Bea turns away from him sharply and bites upon her bottom lip. Her breathing is becoming heavier with impatience, but she refuses to cry in front of him again. She is a stupid child for thinking that she has the influence to drag answers out of this young man, and she bites harder onto her lip at the thought.
She hears him speak, but does not give him the liberty of acknowledging him. "You're gonna make me feel bad about this, aren't y-"
"Matt."
The second voice is sharp, cold, searing, and Bea comes to the chilling realization that she recognizes this voice. It belongs to the same young man that had been at the doorway, causing the other men to scatter and go on high alert at his questioning.
And now, he is standing at that same doorway that Bea cannot look over to, that she cannot bring herself to face. She knows he is there, waiting to ask her questions that she will not be able to answer.
She knows that this must be him. Mello.
Matt looks back at her after having surveyed the doorway and gives her a cryptic look, one that she cannot tell whether it is a smirk or a grimace. "Well, I'll leave this to you," he says beneath his breath, standing up and taking another deep puff of his cigarette. He gives her a slight nod as he exhales a billow of smoke and walks away.
Still, Bea cannot look.
The first question that Mello asks after a long, silent minute is enough to force her to look up at him.
"Where is your father?"