Hey, all! First off, thanks muchly for all the reviews and faves for the last chapter! It's great to know that you guys are keeping up with this. :D

That being said, this chapter takes off right where the last one left off, ya perverts. -smirk-

On a not-too-unrelated note, everyone should look up Slipknot's "Snuff". Right now. Seriously. First time I heard it, I sat there with my jaw gaping at how much it fits Mello and Bea. Just do it. Deeewit.

Alrighty, guys, I don't own Death Note.

God, it's so much.

Bea doesn't know what to do with herself when Mello lets go of her. By letting go, he is merely giving her time to breathe, still crushing her to his chest and pressed to her forehead. They are sweating and spinning and everything has jumped up to an unbearable heat, and something between Bea's legs is crying out to be released; accordingly, Mello shares the same conflict, for he takes her stinging palm and presses it to the untouchable, concealed haven between his hips. "Feel," he breathes out into her neck. "God, Bea, just feel it…"

She rubs up against something hard straining within his jeans, straining within Mello, and retracts her hand, stunned and thriving off of this far too much. She tries to take a deep breath, but there is nothing to breathe in; there is only Mello. Where is her breath? Where is her dignity?

Oh, that's right. How silly of her. It's in the palm of her hand, which is being guided back to press into Mello's jeans in the shared heat of this empty room. Mello guides her face back up to his and, gripping her jaw, crushes another bruising kiss onto her trembling lips, all the while holding Bea flush against the wall and his body all at once. His hands, feverish, possessive, drop to her hips, her stomach, her breasts - he'stouchingmenoyesgod - until he is cupping her, molding her in his hands and Bea is squirming against him. She is agonized, on fire, unable to breathe against this forceful tempest, but, god, he just feels so good…

Mello yanks his entire self away from her so quickly, so suddenly, that Bea wonders if he had been there at all. Her stinging, swollen lips and stinging, swollen heart are her reminders, and she watches through glassy eyes as Mello stares at her, open-mouthed and red-faced. He takes a few shuddering breathes, exhaling sharply, only to stagger forward and stop just inches short of touching her again.

Bea leans wearily against the wall, standing on air. God, where is her breath…? Surely he hasn't stolen it, seeing as he can't even seem to find his own as he eyes her fiercely. Bea finds the wall with her palms and closes her eyes, the sight of his debauched face too much to take on unsteady feet. Go away. Touch me again. God, leave me alone. Press me to the wall.

But whatever you do, don't look at me.

"Someone's at the door," Mello whispers raggedly.

In her daze, Bea can only give a slow nod. Keep your eyes closed. Don't look at that face. That face…

"Stay in here, alright?" he says. "It won't look good if we're seen leaving this room together. I'll go out and…" His voice trails off. Bea opens her eyes a sliver and sees that he is clenching his jaw and turning away from her. "God, Bea."

Hearing him call her by "Bea" is enough to force her to snap her eyes open completely, a brick dropping into her stomach. He's still hard; she can see it with a brief glance down to his jeans, and she feels her face redden at the idea that it's because of me…?

Mello runs his fingers through his hair and gives it a little clutch before letting go, hissing through his teeth. "Just…no one can know about this. Don't even hint anything to Matt, he…he has his ways of…"

Bea scans his face, catching every shift in expression, every twitch of emotion that shouldn't be there in the first place. Mello catches her lingering eyes and sucks in a breath to speak again in a low, urgent voice. "He's a smart guy, you understand?" Mello takes a step forward. "He only needs one word to figure everything out. Everything."

Bea gives another nod. Why would she tell anyone anyway? Especially Matt, with his lazy smiles and his cigarettes and his contradicting kindness. She takes a shuddering breath and fights for another when Mello takes a sudden quick series of steps towards her until he is within inches of her face again. Something that isn't quite anger but still burns through Bea's bones is in his eyes as he narrows them and feverishly observes her face. Bea holds her breath, wanting to feel the weight of his body against hers, its heat, so much that it's making her dizzy. "E-everything," she mutters for no reason at all.

There is a tense, aching silence. Their eyes are locked with opposite expressions; Bea, bewildered and delirious, and Mello, intense and scarlet. The boy suddenly turns away, sucking in breath and clenching that pretty jaw again. "Just remember that," he says before leaving.

It's no one else but Matt outside the door. His eyes are disconnected and somewhere far away, somewhere dark, and Mello furrows his brow at the sight of him, thrown off. "Hey," he says, "what's-"

"You know," Matt cuts in, his voice shaky, "normally, I understand your rules and shit, the regulations you set up for this place, but…" At this, Matt turns his head and exhales slowly through a small gap in his lips. He pulls down his goggles that sit atop his head so that they shield his eyes, a rough movement that tousles his hair and pushes it up at awkward angles. "But here's my rule, man," he continues. "When I run out of cigarettes, I go out and fucking buy some more, because I'm losing my fucking mind just sitting around trying to find something to smoke, alright?"

Mello keeps his eyes neutral as he stares at Matt. Just beyond the door that stands behind his back, there is a disheveled and flushed Beatrice Magill leaning against the wall, her eyes glassy and so easy to read to anyone who would walk in. The thought alone makes Mello step back closer to the door, ready to ward off any chance of Matt opening it.

Before he can respond, Matt continues in that tense, nearly hysterical voice.

"I'll pick up whatever else we need, but quite frankly, I don't give a shit if you say I can't leave, because, god dammit, Mel, I can't take this anymore. I fucking need my smokes, man, just like you need your chocolate, which is shit loads easier to quit than what I need, ok?"

"Fine," Mello breathes out a beat too quickly. "I'm not stopping you."

Matt seems both surprised and satisfied with this answer. While he still nods, he takes a step back and double-takes briefly. "That's…that's it? Fine?"

Bea is just behind this door. Mello is growing nervous, his fists curling. "You go get what you need, throw off whoever might be following you, and get back here when it's clear." He flicks a stray hair out of his line of vision and grits his teeth. God, Bea.

Matt stares at Mello, his lips pursed, before he suddenly says, "I thought we didn't use that room for anything."

There's something in his voice that makes Mello's stomach turn over. Before he can hesitate for too long, he says, "It was empty. Needed a moment."

Matt says nothing. He says nothing for too long.

"Why do you care?" Mello asks breezily. "I thought you had to go out and get what you need."

Matt lowers his head for a moment before taking in a humming breath. "Nothing, man," he says loftily, "I just thought it was, you know, kind of weird that I couldn't find you or Bea at the same time."

A second passes. Mello's stomach clenches and his jaw follows.

"You have any idea where she is?" Matt asks quietly. "Seeing as you're the one who thought of kidnapping her and all."

"What the fuck are you talking about, Matt?" Mello snaps, suddenly enraged. "What does the girl have to do with you needing to buy cigarettes?"

"Did I say she had anything to do with it?" Matt has grown angry quicker than Mello can ever remember him getting. In fact, his anger rivals Mello's, seeing as his voice towers over his without even seeming to try to. This fact alone only manages to mount Mello's rage to an almost numbing level, yet he remains leaning against the door when the thought of Bea's swollen lips and lidded eyes sinks its talons into his mind again.

"And even if she does have anything to do with it, why should you give a shit?" Matt demands, that perilous edge that had always belonged to Mello returning to his voice. "You can't even remember her goddamn name!"

"When the hell did I-"

Oh, shit.

He had said that. A blind attempt in appearing careless. Something with a B.

"Just leave," Mello spits out. "Jesus Christ…wasting your own fucking time-"

Matt whips around and stalks off before Mello can continue, muttering beneath his breath and jamming his fists into his back pockets. It's only when Matt turns the corner in the hall that Mello turns around to open the door.

And there she is, just as he thought she would be: pressed against the far wall and furiously, maddeningly, hatefully readable.

Matt doesn't return for three hours. He bides his time in the parking lot of the convenience store, smoking five consecutive cigarettes in the driver's seat. He opens the door and swings his legs around so that they flop out of the car, heavy and tired. Then, with a soft grimace and smoke in his lungs, he stares at the glowing mouth of the sun and wonders what it is about Beatrice Magill that's got him so damn hooked.

Night arrives swiftly. Bea hasn't moved from her corner in her holding room in over an hour; in fact, she can't even remember leaving the other empty room at all. She doesn't recall walking back down the cement corridor. She can't trace back to sitting down, curling her knees into her chest and staring straight ahead of her at the wall.

All that's there is Mello.

Her lips are burning. Her heart, burning. Her bloodstream, her tongue, her fingertips and stomach and soul, they grovel in the fire and all she can do is watch them smolder.

One of the heavy double doors opens, and Bea shoots her gaze up so quickly that she knocks the back of her head on the wall behind her. Hissing at the dull pain, she waits for Mello and, for the first time, feels sour disappointment when it's Matt that enters.

He seems to be surprised that she's here. His eyebrows disappear into his mop of auburn hair and he stands still in the doorway for a moment before clearing his throat and closing the door behind him. Bea watches, curious, as he leans against the wall opposite Bea and stares at the ground. When neither speak for an uncomfortable stretch of seconds, Bea wonders if perhaps he's ignoring her, forgot she was there, but then he speaks in a low, hollow voice that cancels out the thought immediately.

"So, uh…Mel and I got into a little skiff."

I know, I heard, she almost says, but amends it when she remembers that she was not supposed to know or hear it. "Really?" she asks, voice neutral.

Matt gives a slow nod. "Yeah. Earlier today."

"Why?" Because you wanted to leave the warehouse to go buy cigarettes. Mello and his regulations.

Matt opens his mouth to speak, but opts for shrugging and scuffing the toe of his worn out boot on the cement. "Eh, it's always something," he murmurs. "Always been like this. Guess I should be used to it by now, huh?"

Bea stays quiet at that. There's something in his voice that isn't quite on key, and it's making her increasingly nervous. She decides to stare at her socks and simply listens, face remaining as neutral as she can manage.

"You know," Matt says softly, "this is probably the last thing you want to hear right now, but…"

Bea bites her tongue. Matt goes on without prompting. "Mel, you know, kind of has a point."

A bitter chill flips over in Bea's stomach. She looks up and sees that Matt is staring at her.

"It's been kind of bothering me lately." Matt pulls at a loose thread on the hem of his shirt. "Why didn't you try to run that day we took you to your house?"

His tone is more serious than Bea has ever heard it. The lazy, noncommittal lilt to his voice has been wiped nonexistant so quickly that the impact gives Bea a jolt in her stomach, like a punch to the gut. She nearly doubles over, suddenly nauseous again. "What?" she asks.

Matt's green eyes narrow, an ugly twist to his otherwise appealing face. "I mean, yeah, we would have found you again and brought you back, but you wouldn't have known that, right?"

Bea doesn't like where this is going. In fact, she doesn't like the fact that she's even sitting down anymore and quickly stands up, facing him. Same level now, but four inches below him. It's as close as she can get. "What makes you think that-"

"Bea," Matt says in a hard, unyielding voice, "it would have been so easy, practically effortless for you to have gotten away from us. You wouldn't have even thought twice about it if you had been anyone else-"

There it is: anyone else. Bea shoots her gaze back up to Matt's with a rapidness that makes her brain knock against the back of her skull. "Anyone else?" she shouts. "That's exactly what I'm supposed to be, right, anyone else? Because then you wouldn't have to think so much to figure out why I'm not anyone else and why I'm Beatrice Magill, is that it?"

Something blank passes over Matt's eyes and he pauses in the middle of retrieving his lighter from his pocket.

"Oh, and I guess things would have made more sense if I'd just run off to the police and told them everything, huh?" Bea hisses, seeing red. "I'd tell them about how I'd been kidnapped and beat shitless and nearly raped by forty-something-year-old men, and I'd let them know exactly where this place is, and they'd come bursting through this door within the hour-"

"And would you tell them about your father, Bea?" Matt asks softly.

Bea's heart goes numb.

Don't.

"Would you tell them," Matt continues, "that Daddy worked for this place and left you drugged and forgotten in your room while he hitched his ass out of the country?"

Stop it.

"Or would you leave that little detail out?" Matt drawls. He fishes out his lighter and flicks it open, a flame cracking out. "And in your cute little crime report…you would leave out that detail of Mello."

Bea doesn't think she's ever felt so sick in her life. The mentioning of Mello's name mixed with its context forces her to swallow back a wave of nausea and lean against the wall behind her, glowering at the passive face of Matt.

"Face it, Bea," Matt says casually, "it's not this place that's changed you. It's not me. It's not yourself, or the war you've been thrown into, or the sign of the times or even your dear old daddy. It's Mello."

Blood settles like iron in Bea's veins. For the first time in many days, the wounds on her wrists begin to sting again, and images of Matt bandaging their sad states melt into memory. But then images of Mello, fire-eyed and catching his breath and clenching his pretty jaw override it, bringing back a sickness of a very different name. She feels herself go dizzy before she sucks in a breath and turns away from Matt's jade eyes.

There are footsteps outside the door, many of them, and Bea hears Mello's voice passing by until it fades out down the hall. She closes her eyes at the falling sensation deep in her stomach, but hears Matt suddenly exhale sharply and speak.

"Jesus," he mutters, just within earshot. His footsteps are thundering and angry as he makes his way to the door. "It's always Mello."

"Get up."

Nine o'clock in the morning, cold, angry. Mello's bottom lip curls in upon hearing the cold, foreign voice so early on a Sunday, but nevertheless, he rolls over in his bed and looks up at whoever has roused him.

It's that stranger again. Mello has only ever seen the man roaming aimlessly through the bright halls of the orphanage every now and then, always weaving in and out of the light without having to speak to anyone. He's the polar opposite of light; dark, unbrushed hair hangs crudely over his eyes, which are about as bright and cheery as lumps of coal, and a face so washed out and pale that Mello wonders if it's the light of morning that's to blame.

"Who are y-"

"Get up."

Again with that monotonous demand. Mello already loathes him. "Fine, fine," he snaps sleepily, "just back off a little, god…"

The man stays where he is, slouched over and looking at Mello with a faint look of lethargy mingling with diluted interest, but for the most part, his gaze is unreadable and detached. Mello gets out of bed and faces him with a defiant smirk. The man simply stares at him for a tense moment before muttering thoughtfully, "They were very correct about you, weren't they."

Mello, however uncertain as to what he means by this, is offended. "What's that supposed to mean?"

The young man seems to come out of a daze and sharpens his gaze. "You're angry without even knowing why I'm here," he says quietly. "Is there a reason for that?"

Mello puffs himself up to rival the man's slumped height, but falls about four inches short and makes up for it with a hard grimace. "You try being woken up by someone you don't even know!" he accuses.

"Which is why I avoid that risk and simply stay awake."

Mello glares up at the stranger before huffing out a breath and muttering, "Well, what are you here for then?"

The man tilts his head to the side for a moment, staring round-eyed up at the ceiling, before looking back down at Mello. "To put this as briefly as possible, Mello-"

"Wait, how do you know my-"

"- I must ask that you refrain from, as I have been informed-" He takes out a small piece of paper from his jeans' pocket and reads it aloud in a bored, droning voice. "- 'attempting to stuff Near, six years old, into one of the playroom toyboxes on November the fourth, five o'clock in the afternoon.'"

Mello watches in incredulity as the man unceremoniously crumples up the paper and replaces it in his pocket without so much as another glance at it. His tired, disconnected gaze lands back on Mello, who stares up at him with such enraged embarrassment that he can scarcely see straight. The man fails to notice and goes on with, "While I'm well aware of your dislike towards Near, Watari is not allowing me to simply shrug this occasion off and blame it on competitive tension." At this, he gives a small sigh, still staring tiredly at Mello. "I would appreciate it if you make this simple and nod your head or what have you so that we can both go back to what we were doing, if that's not too much of a problem."

And for reasons completely lost to Mello, he does just that; he nods, stunned out of his breath, and watches the man turn quietly on his heel and slink out of his room, closing the door with a soft click behind him. All without ever having raised his voice. Unbelievable.

He listens to the stranger's padding footsteps until they die out before flinging himself back into bed and glaring at the wall until lunchtime.

Once the memory is dusted off and polished, it doesn't leave him. Mello sits in the empty room where he had pressed Bea to the wall and nearly, nearly given in to something ugly, nauseous and spinning.

He has every reason to believe, even nearly ten years later, that the young man with the dead eyes and bored, detached words had been someone he had been fighting to be. It had been a most rare occasion of speaking to the cryptic stranger face to face, but Mello has wracked his brain for a reason besides the one that has been staring him down in his mind, in his thoughts, in the mirror.

He has every reason to believe that that man had been the L he had been fighting to be.

The L he had lost to Near, who Mello had attempted at hiding away in a toybox for the rest of his bigheaded, arrogant life so that he could someday have those same dead eyes and bored, detached words as well. But in order to become L -

"I'm afraid L is dead."

"D-dead…? But…but how?"

- he had to be number one.

He had looked that dark-haired, slouched man in the eye and puffed himself up to look like someone big and unbeatable, while the man had known all along that Mello was second in line, the bastard child to a stringy harlot of a mother, the enemy of Near and the enemy of the world. L had known long before his death that Mello had never been good enough. He had known with a single glance at the ghost of a child at the top of the top that Mello wasn't going to cut it.

"Which one of us did L pick, me or Near?"

"He…he hadn't chosen yet. And now that he's gone, I'm afraid he won't be able to."

"Yes, he had," Mello hisses against his fist. "He always fucking knew it…"

It's taken Mello nearly ten years to figure out who that tired-eyed man had been, and he's never been more disgusted with himself in his life.

The sight of Matt or Mello eludes Bea the rest of the night. Upon sitting in her holding room for hours on end and chewing at her nails down to the quick, she realizes that not only has the icy burning in her heart intensified, but a new emotion has gripped her hard around the neck.

Desperation.

Its sticky embrace is inches away from suffocation. Bea claws at her neck with gnarled nails, squeezing her eyes shut until kaleidoscopes detonate behind her eyelids, trying with everything she has to rid herself of the deathly hold the feeling has over her, only to end up fruitless and squirming on the cement floor like a worm.

I need him.

She needs his hands and lips and eyes and his fucking entirety, all hot and alive and breathing down her neck. God, she needs him in this hard, grey room so that she can try to hate him, turn cold, and then let him burn her pretty.

She can feel herself freezing over.

Where's the fire at, Mello? Why'd you take the fire with you…?

Footsteps. Outside the door.

Why won't you come and burn me pretty?

He comes to her in the night, after Mello is sure she's drifted off to a sleep deep enough to stay in the unaware. He can't have her knowing he's here any more than he can have himself here at all, but the dark can erase everything if he wants it to.

The girl is crumpled up like a forgotten paper doll in the corner of the room; it's freezing in here, absurdly so, chilling the corners of Mello's tight grimace. The bright stab of light from the hall tilts across Bea's face when Mello pushes the door another inch, leaving it open just enough to see her.

He takes a step forward, but the crude clack of his boot sends a bolt of panic through his stomach at the thought of Bea waking up. You can't see me. I don't want you to see me. Cursing inwardly, he bends down, unlaces both boots, and sets them quietly on the floor before approaching her on bare feet. The cement, Christ, it's practically ice, but Mello opts for gritting his teeth and ignoring it as he softly walks on.

He's walking into his own destruction, and the girl on the floor is oblivious.

When Mello's toes are within four inches of Bea's upturned palm, he stops. Something's not right. Something's not as it seems. Years and years of distrusting everything moving and everything immobile, Mello knows that nothing is ever as it looks on the outside. Perhaps she's feigning sleep. Perhaps she's playing dead. Perhaps this is all one finely tweaked ruse to land him on his ass and send Bea flying out the door into the freedom that waits within the indigo midnight.

Then, he almost laughs. She can't hurt me.

And then, in the same cold second, he almost frowns. And I can't hurt her.

As Mello stares at that slant of light arching along Bea's jaw, another thought: Looks like we're even.

This thought alone, shivering and solid as it is, jars Mello to an extent to that causes him to stumble a half-step backwards, lips agape and blood racing. Looks like we're even. The girl's got him. In ways more than one. The girl's got him even. And she doesn't even fucking know it. In fact, she's sleeping on it, here, in an overwhelmingly cold warehouse in the middle of a war, a war that she's unknowingly crashed into, that Mello has sent her crashing into, and he wants to tear her to pieces and kiss her hard on the mouth and shake her up, up, up, for the sheer and unescapable fact that she's got him good.

After a few seconds, calm returns. It steps back in with uncertain feet and eventually plants itself in Mello's brain. No, he thinks, shaking his head in the dark, she's done nothing. It's not like she's planned this. She doesn't have the mentality for it. She couldn't do anything to me if she tried.

But there's that hesitation as he tries to take another step forward.

Then why am I -

Mello grits his teeth and stops the thought short. Can't be having thoughts like that. Not here. Not in the dark, barefoot and spying on the girl's dreams, flushed in that single shard of light. He can see the soft white of her palm, strands of burnt honey hair fanning over her neck and face, covering her eyelids but leaving her lips exposed; a mockery of the both of them, Mello's sure. Leave the lips bare. Remind him of what he's done and what she let him do.

With a stifled groan, Mello kneels down before Bea and listens to her breath. It's quiet and too rhythmic for Mello to feel entirely at ease, but she's completely still on the hard floor and Mello can't help but furrow his brow in unexplained exasperation.

You don't have the mind for it, Bea. The mind to sabotage me.

And yet he wants to believe it fully. He wants that second of hesitation, that single glitch in time, to be clean sweeped from his mental list of things about this girl that he doesn't understand.

It's just not there. You're too clean, too spiteless.

Mello leans in, his hair falling over his eyes, and feels her breath on his face. His stomach tightens.

You don't hate me enough, Bea. Enough to make this alright.

He reaches out, keen to touch that simplicity that's curled up on the floor before him. His hand ghosts over the curve of her jaw, fingers tense and still, floating just above her skin. He could break this girl right now if he wanted to. He could tear those invisible butterfly wings from the middle of her back and leave her flightless forever. If he wanted to.

He really could.

Just…curl himself around her spine and watch her lose her wings. Maybe tack them on to his own back, see what it's like to soar instead of fall flat at every attempt. It would be so easy. It would be so effortlessly available, what with the butterfly sprawled out tragically on the cement floor, completely unaware and completely, completely helpless within these walls.

If he wanted to.

If I wanted to.

His fingertips graze her lips in a moment of weakness. You're too much. They linger, they touch, they burn. Shit. Mello jerks his arm back as if burned by the pink of her mouth and glares down at Bea, marking the exact moment that she opens her eyes.

Any other time, she would have slept through it. But Mello knows that nothing is ever as it appears, and that the girl had been awake the whole time. From the second he walked through the gap in the door, she was awake, waiting for him, setting up her trap, caging him within his own distortions and demons all finely tuned and crafted just for her.

Yet he says nothing. Even as she stares up at him with blank doe-like eyes, her face a solemn portrait in that singular stab of light, he says nothing. Just stares, and just waits.

"Where were you?" Bea whispers after a long silence.

Mello turns his eyes away from hers, choosing instead to glare at her pale collarbone. "Does it matter?"

"Does it?"

A pause. Mello sighs out through gritted teeth. "Look, I'm really not in the mood for your reverse psychology, alright?" he warns.

Bea sits up and rests her back against the wall. She still somehow manages to remain in the light, Mello in the vacant dark. "Thought you knew me inside-out, Mello," she says simply.

Mello snaps his attention back to her face. Completely unphased, unafraid; how does she do it? "What?"

"You say you're not in the mood for my 'reverse psychology', yet you open yourself up to it completely by asking me questions I can't answer."

Bea's bottom lip is tucked beneath her teeth. When she releases it, it will be a tempting shade of red, slightly swollen from the marks of her teeth. A memory stirs. Mello pretends not to notice nor care. "I think," he says noncommitally, "that's your own problem."

"Problems," Bea repeats. She lets out a little laugh, a high, unsteady sound cutting through the air. "Yeah, I seem to have a lot of those anymore."

"What are you-"

"Especially when you're around," Bea continues, severing Mello's words and mindset. She stares at him curiously as his jaw tightens, his lips press tightly together. "You seem to bring out of the worst of them. The scariest ones. The ones that keep me from sleeping, like right now."

"Stop it."

Bea tilts her head, all soft eyes and hard words. "Why did you come here? In the dark, not even turning on the light-"

"I didn't want to wake you up," Mello growls, going back to glaring at her collarbone. He's lying and they both know it, but he'll be damned if he gives her any other reasons besides the basics.

"You knew I was awake."

"And how are you so sure of that?"

Bea's lips gape open for a suspended blink of time, and Mello just wants to grab her by the hair and ball her up and throw her against the wall, bounce her around the ceiling like a spring, then uncoil her and make her see how much of a distraction she's becoming. All the while, wearing her wings as a sign that they're even, but not by much.

"Because this isn't you, Mello," Bea finally whispers. "You wouldn't come in here late at night just to watch some girl in the dark when you could be out doing something more important." She takes a moment to inhale, exhale softly through the gap in her lips. Mello watches it the whole time. "Something that could bring you closer to…to whatever you're trying to get. Whatever my-"

Bea stops short, breathes in, then goes on. "Whatever my father seems to know so much about."

Mello's eyes narrow minutely, just enough to bring her face into focus. And, for more reasons bleak and unknown, he lets her go on.

"No," Bea whispers, "that's not Mello, right? Mello doesn't watch girls in their sleep because…"

Mello waits. He waits with mock patience on his knees and palms. What doesn't Mello do? Why doesn't he do it? Tell him, Bea. He dares you.

Bea's eyes freeze over, and she does just that.

"Because I would think that Mello would prefer his girls awake."

The scale is tipped. Bea, ahead by one. Mello, dragging behind.

God, he's so sick of this.

In the space of a single breath, Mello grabs her by the shoulders and pushes her down onto her back, flattened out beneath him like a bookmark between dirty pages. In the bitter shadows, his lips find hers, which are open and moist and god, he might just snap from them. He might finally split open, right down the middle, bleed out onto the cement not like a martyr, but like a fool dressed in a killer's clothing that had given in to temptation and crumbled for it. He's marking the numbers on his grave as he grips Bea's hair, kissing away her breath, stealing her life force from an all too willing mouth. He's imagining the narrow black coffin and the cross in the ground when he yanks her head to the side and lays hot, greedy lips on her cold neck, bruising and sucking; he feels the vibrations beneath the skin firsthand when Bea mewls and gasps below.

Before either know it, their hips are grinding and rolling like experts, like they know what they're doing, like one isn't a shut-in captive with sad eyes and the other isn't an orphaned conspirator that's been denied victory since his birth. Bea is lithe and tiny and breakable beneath him; her lips are trembling and warm and bruisable when he claims them again, paying too much attention to the thrashing of his heart and the pressure of Bea's breasts pressed against his chest than what could possibly be going down the hall, what Takimura might be hiding, how much Matt knows-

And then Bea touches his cheek, and Mello freezes completely.

It's a light grazing of her fingertips spanning from his cheekbone down to his jaw, her lips parted hungrily for him, and for a moment she not only stops kissing him, but stops breathing, stops showing any other sign of life besides her inescapable heat. Mello holds himself up with trembling arms, eyes squeezed shut, mouth gaping and frozen atop hers, and for a split second, he thinks that this is it. This is what death truly feels like; not fire or agony or pleadings or ice, but the cool lips of this girl and the searching silk of her touch.

And something about that makes it all the more deadly. The sheer depravity of what they're doing appeals to the side of Mello that demands attention, every single web of it, from the girl that's currently draining him of all restraint, order, and common sense. He could pull away from her right now, cut out that white shiver of light bleeding through the door and walk out completely, let his men do what they want with her and focus on why he's here and what he's trying to do. He could get back to his roots of hatred for Near, hatred for Kira, desperation for L, desperation for himself, and Beatrice Magill would be nothing more than a tremor in the wind.

But part of Mello is leaning towards neglect, and Bea's lips are a little too virginal to last.

Do forgive Matt, guys. I love him. I wouldn't make him an asshole for too long.

I love throwing in some L in there. Do expect some more of him throughout this fic, if you guys don't mind. -blush-

And for those that are following Through Glass, do not fear! The next chapter will be out soon, I promise you.

Remember, "Snuff" by Slipknot! Do it do it do it!