…as we forgive…
They said that Near was a prodigy.
Even though he was two years younger than Mello, he started making waves from the moment he arrived at the House. All the tests said he was a genius. He did work from his own grade level as though it were nothing, and work from the higher levels with ease.
Within a month, Near was already showing signs that he would probably usurp Mello from his top spot in no time.
Matt, for the first time, grew afraid of his own best friend.
"I hate him!" Mello yelled one day, after he had watched L walk right past him to talk to Near. The blond visibly pouted and took a rather large, angry bite of his chocolate bar. Matt, who was sitting on the bed next to him, could feel the palpable rage in the air around the blond, and scooted away.
Near was a small, immaculate, and white-haired child who barely ever talked to the other children. When he did talk, it was usually in short, blunt statements that often unintentionally came across as being a little rude. Rumors had it that Near had come from a broken family, and that his parents had died very horrible deaths right in front of him. Other rumors, which also explained that Near had a strange condition called "albinism" that few of the children other than Mello and Matt understood, said that Near wasn't really an orphan at all, but that he had been abandoned by his family as a freak.
At first, Mello had tried to befriend Near. It wasn't that the child downright refused the offer, but Near hadn't exactly reacted in the most personable of manners, unsure of what to say to this strange, older child who had approached him.
"I asked if you wanted to go outside and play," said Mello, obviously getting annoyed as Near looked at him confusedly.
"I think I prefer this puzzle over your company," said Near rather bluntly, and it was as if he had hit Mello upside the head.
Near, who could comprehend a book at a tenth grade level, could not understand why the blond seemed so upset.
The albino also garnered a remarkably large amount of attention from the adults in the House, including L, because he had signs of an even stranger condition than his physical one, a psychological disorder called autism that Mello researched when he heard about it, but which didn't, the blond thought, excuse Near's behavior. Plus, as autistic children required a large amount of care, Mello was generally pushed to the side as L, Wammy, and Roger tended to Near's needs.
Though Near, himself, wanted nothing of the sort, the other children in the House were very impressed with his progress, and often gave him a lot of compliments; compliments that, until Near's arrival, had been reserved for Mello.
It wasn't long before the blond who had once been the top out of his peers was reduced to bearing the title of "Second-best", and he was understandably jealous.
The biggest blow to Mello's ego was actually due to a misunderstanding. L had come into the House to discuss Near's progress with him. Afterward, Mello, missing his idol's doting, tugged on L's shirt sleeve to get his attention. L looked down. Mello smiled up at him.
L's expression was sad, his deep-set eyes wide, dark, and expressionless. L did not smile back. He only ruffled Mello's hair absentmindedly, and walked on.
Mello's heart broke in two at that moment. To him, this was utter rejection. To him, L had brushed him off in disappointment and shame.
"I told him I would be the best, and I failed. He hates me."
In reality, L was simply tired. He rubbed a knuckle against the already bruised, sensitive skin under his eyes, and daydreamed of the true dreams that he couldn't have. He was getting close to the day when he would embark on his journey into the real world as a detective, and he had slept only a few, scattered hours that week. His meeting with Near had been short, and Near had been as unenthusiastic as he felt, although the child was so obviously brilliant. When Mello had stopped him on his way to a nap that he wasn't even sure if Wammy would let him have, L had felt vaguely affectionate toward the blond, but didn't have the energy to show it properly.
He would have to overcome being tired, next, L thought to himself as he walked out the door. It would do no good to save time by not sleeping if it made him less efficient.
Mello watched his hero go, completely ignorant of L's struggles with fatigue. Watching the door close behind the black-haired teen seemed as much of a blow as if St. Peter had closed the Pearly Gates in his face, and the burn in his eyes where the tears had started to well made him feel as if he had sunken through the clouds above and fallen into the Fires.
Near had just finished an extremely complex puzzle and needed something new to occupy his time and his hands. He dumped the puzzle pieces on the ground and stood without bothering to clean them up. As he walked into the next room, he passed by Mello, whose face was shielded by the shadow that his hair cast.
"I wish you would just disappear," said the blond darkly, still staring intently at the floor, his hands clenching into fists hard enough that his nails dug into his palms.
Near stopped and turned to Mello, his face expressionless as he blinked silently and twirled a curl of white hair around one finger.
"What are you looking at? Didn't you hear me? I hate you, and I want you to just go away and never come back."
All Near did was make a small sound in the back of his throat, continue twirling his hair, and tilt his head slightly to the side.
Mello looked up, the anger clearly showing in his damp eyes. It was not the look of an eight-and-a-half year old boy, but one filled with enough hurt and rage to fill any grown man.
Near, who did not understand emotion, could not comprehend the meaning behind that look, but it reminded him of a feral cat that had gotten into the House yard one day and that had bitten him when he had tried to touch it. From his experience with the cat, Near thought it best to simply not react to Mello as he had to the creature, and though he knew better than to approach the other boy, he could not bring himself, out of sheer curiosity at the strangeness of that look, to walk away.
Locking eyes with Near and getting no reaction out of the younger boy, Mello was infuriated. How dare he? How dare this stupid child, who had taken everything from him, just stare at him with that same, passive look?
Near learned quickly that, when it came to feral animals, it was best to leave well enough alone.
The albino was on the ground in seconds, a screaming Mello above him. "Cry! I wanna see you cry, you spoiled brat!"
"You're the one who's crying," said Near plainly.
Matt, hearing the commotion, had rushed out of his room just in time to grab Mello by the arms and stop him from really hurting the young prodigy.
Mello broke free from the grip, shoved his friend roughly out of the way, stormed into his room, and slammed the door behind him.
Matt looked down at Near, confused and hurt by what had just happened. Had his best friend, his own personal hero, and the nicest, most understanding person he had ever known just become the same as the bullies that Matt had called his friends before Mello had come along?
No, he had to make it right. Mello would listen to him. He took one last, sad glance at Near, apologized in place of the blond, and followed Mello to his room, knocking meekly on the door.
"Go away!" came the angry voice from behind the door, followed by the sound of stifled sobs.
"Mello, it's me." Matt tried to open the door, but it was locked. "Please let me in. I just wanna talk."
When there was no reply, Matt felt through his pockets, and found what he was looking for. "Mello, I'll give you chocolate. It'll make you feel better," he said, holding up the slightly melted bar that he had grabbed from an earlier kitchen escapade, and which he had meant to give to Mello anyway.
The silence was intense for a moment, until there was a light "click", and the door cracked open, one reddened eye and a shock of straight, blond hair visible behind it.
Matt held up his peace offering, and the door opened the rest of the way to let him in. Mello snatched the bar from his hand and closed the door behind him, re-locking it as he did so.
The only sound for an awkward minute was that of ripping foil. Mello plopped down on the bed beside where Matt had already sat down, and mauled the bar with his teeth.
The redhead looked at his friend. He had been seeing Mello angry a lot lately, and it worried him enough, but the slightly older boy's eyes were bloodshot and more piercing an aqua-blue than usual, tears clinging to the long lashes around them. Mello's face was streaked with moisture, and wayward strands of normally smooth and tidy hair stuck to his cheeks.
Matt had never seen Mello cry before, and to him, it seemed an unreal, impossible event.
As if reading his mind, Mello spoke, his voice harsh and cracking. "I never wanted you to see me like this."
"You wanna use my goggles?"
Mello looked at him and seemed to be trying to force a bit of an upward curve into his lips, but those lips only twitched a little, and then turned abruptly back downward.
"Nobody understands," said the blond despondently.
"I do," seemed the right thing to say back.
"I hate him. I hate him so much."
"I know."
"No you don't. You can't possibly understand."
Matt took the goggles away from his eyes, letting them sag down around his neck, and looked at his companion openly. "Mello, who do you think was the best before you came along?"
The blond's eyes widened, and a knot formed in his stomach. When it dawned on him what Matt was saying, regret pierced his chest.
When Mello said nothing, Matt began to explain. "Before I knew it was you, I was so mad at the person who had beaten me. I never talked about it, because I always thought you'd laugh at me. It made me really angry, too, that nobody ever told me who it was. I felt like I had the right to know, but L kept telling me he had to keep it a secret. He probably knew we were friends, and didn't want me to hate you."
Mello's voice was almost too quiet to hear. "Do you?"
"No. When I found out it was you, it really upset me, because I kind of felt like you betrayed me, but after a while, I started to realize that you deserved it. I saw how hard you always worked to keep your grades high, and I was glad for you."
Mello hung his head. "I'm sorry."
"It's okay. You didn't know. And, beside, now it doesn't matter anymore, not with Near here." The redhead cracked a bit of a pained smirk.
"…yeah."
Matt looked at the wall above Mello's headboard. Both rosaries hung there, untouched for some time but unmarred by dust. Matt reached up and gently pulled down the smaller, children's rosary from its spot, and held it in his hands for a moment, running his fingers over the beads and the small knot where Mello had tied it back together, before handing it to his friend.
"That's the wrong one," said Mello, though he took it anyway.
The look Matt gave him was filled with a wisdom that far preceded his age, and Mello truly appreciated Matt's intelligence for the first time, knowing that he could always count on his friend as an equal. "No it's not," Matt said, knowingly. "It's broken, like you."
With the tiny rosary still clutched in his hand, Mello threw his arms around Matt's shoulders, buried his face in the nape of the redhead's neck, and began to sob again.
Matt, at first, was unsure of what to do with his hands, and then he wrapped them around Mello's body (so thin, he thought to himself), rested his lips on blond hair, held on tight to the black cloth of Mello's shirt, and let him cry.
Only a few days later, L left the Wammy's House for good to fulfill his destiny as a detective and to return only on sporadic trips between cases. He left without ever knowing what an impact a careless act had made on the blond who had so touched his heart years before--his heart that had since grown cold and empty in his blind determination to overcome everything, including his own human weaknesses, to the point where he had foregone even his own well-being and personal hygiene.
L hoped that Wammy--no, he had to call him Watari now for safety's sake--was proud of him.
Because of the potential dangers that L would be facing outside of House walls, it had become time for him to pick an heir. He looked at both Watari and Roger, and knew without their saying who they expected him to pick. After all, Near was quite possibly the most ingenious child of his age that any of them had ever seen.
However, a part of L's heart that hadn't yet died out said that Near was cold and emotionless like L wished he wasn't becoming, while Mello had eyes full of passion and a spark that had since died out in the reflection of his own.
When L said Mello's name instead of Near's, Roger and Watari both looked at him like he had gone mad. Had L--Ryuuzaki, now--made such a clouded decision? Had he let emotion win out over pure logic?
But these men, so consumed in the idea that this mere child, in all retrospect, would be able to change the world (no matter the cost to the child), could not tell Ryuuzaki "no".
Roger knew from that moment, however, that though he could not go against Ryuuzaki's word, he would never, in his own best judgment, be able to name Mello as the heir to the now-only-a-title of L.
Though Mello had been comforted by his best friend, the loss of L from his life had changed him irreversibly, and each of his hero's too-short visits scarred him more, as L was permitted only to quickly and objectively check up on the progress of the children before he left again.
Mello's peers, in the coming years, had taken to trying to pick on him again, jumping at any sign of weakness and joking with him about how he was a "has-been" and "washed up", knowing how the fact grated on his nerves, and laughing when he would try to retaliate only to be stopped by Matt, who had become a sort of conscience to the blond, in a kind of unspoken "thank you" for Mello's having played that role during the redhead's earlier years.
Mello hardly ever prayed anymore.
Almost six years later, the children at the Wammy's House had grown from being genius children to genius teenagers.
"I so whooped you, Mello," said Matt, a controller held triumphantly in his hands, impressed by the ease with which he had gotten a K.O. against his friend's character in the fighting game they were playing.
The lanky blond beside him smacked him upside the head, and stuck out his tongue, his eyes askew in a teasing expression. "I beat you last round."
"Yeah, barely. I totally wiped the floor with your ass that time." Matt had lately taken to cussing, loving how adult and cool he thought he sounded when he did it.
"You know, I can't wait until Roger hears you say something like that, and whoops your ass for being a smart-aleck little prick."
"You're one to talk. You even had the nerve to use the f-word, in class, no doubt, when Near got one point better than you again on that math test. You were so lucky I was the only one who heard you."
Mello dropped his controller on the carpet with a thud. His eyes narrowed.
Matt knew that look, and braced himself.
Mello pounced at him, pinning him to the ground with his bony elbows and raking his knuckles across the red hair on Matt's head.
"Mellooooo! Stop!"
The blond continued his assault, moving to tickling after he felt Matt had been thoroughly noogied, knowing the redhead hated being tickled more than almost anything in the world.
Matt grabbed and clutched at Mello's hands, laughing hysterically and trying to move the expertly skilled fingers anywhere beside his abdomen. He looked up at Mello's face, and at the devious grin plastered across it.
"U…uncle!" Matt gasped between laughs. "I give up!"
Mello stopped finally, chuckling, himself, and looked down fondly at his friend. Matt looked up at him through the greenish tint of the new goggles he had gotten after the old ones had grown too small.
There was a change in the air around the two. It grew tenser, warmer, a bit stifled. The boys stared at each other, Matt still gasping for breath after the assault. Mello's grin melted off of his face, and he gulped, parted and closed his suddenly dry lips a few times, and then slowly (painfully slowly) leaned down, far enough that the longest ends of his hair curtained around Matt's head.
This had happened a couple of times before, and it was always a rather awkward affair, and Matt knew that it was no longer the tickling that was forcing his heart to beat as fast as it was. They were close enough that Matt could see the flecks of dark and light in Mello's blue irises and that Mello could see Matt's eyes through the goggles.
The blond's breathing had become as labored as the redhead's had been moments before. His fingernails scratched at the carpet around Matt's shoulders. Matt reached up and felt, apprehensively, at the soft cloth of Mello's shirt and marveled at the way it hugged at the boy's lithe chest underneath.
"Mello," sighed Matt breathlessly.
"Matt," mouthed the other back.
They grew barely a millimeter closer, paused, and then it seemed that a spark of recognition at what they were doing or were about to do crossed between them, and Mello backed up off of his friend like he had been struck. Matt laid in the same spot for a very long time, and both boys looked around nervously, before the younger spoke.
"You know, everyone really will think we're gay or something if we keep doing stuff like that."
"Uhm…yeah."
An awkward laugh between them; an exasperated, unison sigh.
They picked up their respective controllers, chose their respective characters, and played a round without a word.
"I beat you," said Mello blankly.
"Uh-huh."
"You wanna stop now?"
"…err…that may be a good idea."
"Dinner?"
"Dinner sounds great."
Each of the times that it seemed Mello and Matt were growing closer, it always seemed more like a small rift had formed between them. For days, the two had trouble looking at each other. They had trouble speaking to each other. They spent less time in each others' rooms, and more locked away in their own.
The other children always seemed to notice this, and it made for more opportunities for the old bullies to come back in full force, including Brad, who relished in the times when Matt was by himself, away from the blond who had broken his nose.
"Hey, Ken. Barbie giving you the cold shoulder?"
Matt flicked the older teen off.
"Oh, so he has an attitude! Hey, you got the balls to back that up, Matt?"
"Seriously, Brad." Matt thought back to Mello, and how Brad feared him. There had been one word that the redhead hadn't dared to actually say, that he had only heard Mello or the older kids use. "Just fuck off," he hissed, feeling tough.
Brad and his group of fellow bullies didn't bother Matt after that, but being alone against the older boys made him miss his friend and wish that things didn't keep getting so uncomfortable between them.
When Mello wasn't around, Matt not only felt alone, but weak and afraid. He had grown accustomed, over time, to being always second to his friend, like Mello was to Near. Unlike the blond, however, he no longer held any animosity whatsoever toward the boy directly ahead of him, but instead had become rather dependent on the fact that Mello's status was still better than his fractured own. Where playing video games had always been a favorite pastime of the redhead, it had become more and more apparent over time that it was also a crutch. The characters in the games were strong, fast, cool, and usually had abilities that a young boy of only thirteen could only dream of.
Matt, when he was away from Mello, often got it into his head that he wanted, more than anything, to stop being himself and be more like his current favorite game character.
Since he wasn't about to play the fighting game without anyone to play it with, Matt had taken up what he thought was an exceedingly awesome mission-based espionage game. This resulted in what was now a rather sneaky redhead roaming the kitchen. Kitchen raids had always been one of Matt's specialties, and this gave him a chance to test out his new moves, most of which consisted of flattening himself against walls and cabinets and rolling around on the floor in a manner that would have looked rather geeky to any outsider.
"You look rather…geeky," said a voice from above, accompanied by a strange munching noise.
Matt made an odd sound resembling "REET", and could imagine a large sign of surprise appearing above his head. He had been discovered!
Where was a box when you needed one?
"It's just me, you git," came the voice again, and Mello jumped down from his perch on one of the kitchen counters. He held out his hand, a silver-wrapped bar in it. "Chocolate?"
Matt's muscles relaxed, and he waved the offering off, digging through the fridge and grabbing himself a soda instead. "We're past the awkward stage, then?"
"I guess. Seems the world won't let us stay away from each other, eh?"
Matt frowned. "That sounds like something out of one of those cheesy romance movies Roger was watching the other night when he thought we were all asleep."
Mello scratched his head, the last of one chocolate bar hanging out of his mouth. "Okay, so not the best thing to say to get past the awkward, huh?"
"Probably not."
"We're still friends, though, right?"
Matt leaned against the refrigerator and smiled. "Yeah."
The blond held out a hand, a smirk etched on his face. "Shake on it?"
The two clasped hands. Always they would drift apart, always they would drift back together, and the cycle, though an unnerving one, was consistent, and the unerring certainty with which it continued was a small comfort to them both.
They had made a sort of unspoken promise, Mello and Matt, that if something were to happen--something terrible that would rip them from each other more brutally than awkward moments in their rooms--that the pattern would continue on, unchanging as it had always been. They had made this promise without each other's consent--Matt in telling himself over and over again that he would never grow estranged or lost from his best friend, no matter what; Mello in praying when he had given up praying otherwise that they would always be able to find each other--and with it they had drawn the shackles upon each other for life, binding and brutal but with the small comfort of being imprisoned with a friend. In this way, Mello and Matt had also signed a contract where they owed each other their lives: I steal your life to enrich mine, and in return I give you me.
The steel of their shackles and the blood with which they'd signed their names would be tested; in a cleaver, an eraser they called Kira. Kira was a serial killer, some unknown man who had begun to kill criminals, somehow and inexplicably, with heart attacks and without ever visibly laying hands on them. It was a mystery, how he did it, why he did it…was it really wrong to kill the scum of the earth who seemed, at first glance, deserving of death? Was he a man, really, or some maniac God figure gone astray?
Questions on Justice plagued the House. Just as the outside world had begun quickly to split in two, with half of it on Kira's side and half of it against him, so did the children and teens of Wammy's begin to argue amongst themselves on whether Kira was really doing the right thing or not. Even when word came to them that L, their leader and their savior, was against him, still they were split.
It is unclear which side Mello would have picked had L not risen against Kira, as he had chosen to keep quiet and watch from the sidelines, with Matt, as fighting broke their home in two. As soon as it became clear what side L was on, however, Mello had jumped full-force into the fray, dragging his friend along with him, as though that were the last deciding factor he had needed; as though Matt had no choice on the matter, because L was, after all, always right anyway.
"There is no justice in what Kira is doing!" Mello ranted one night, pacing around Matt's room. "He is murdering for his own personal gain, to bring himself fame! He's judging people without fairness, he will stop at nothing to meet his goals! He proved that when he killed the man that L sent out as a decoy! He proved that when he killed the FBI agents that tailed him!"
"I know, Mello," said Matt again, like he had said the past three times this had happened. "I agree with you. As you'd say, you're preaching to the choir."
This was not altogether true. Matt did, like Mello, revere L above almost all others (save for, the redhead realized with a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach, Mello himself), but he was also not as blinded by that reverence as his friend, and could see, even in Mello's rantings, that there was something wrong with L's methods, too. Hadn't he put a man before Kira, to die in his place? He had asked that question once to Mello, who reasoned that the man had been a death row inmate. Matt hadn't said anything, not wanting a fight, but had thought to himself that this man, this Lind L. Taylor who had been so expendable, had been treated as no more human than the criminals that Kira was killing, himself.
It was a tricky situation, for though he did not agree with everything L had done, Matt did not agree with Kira, either. He thought him self-centered and arrogant for having taken the task unto himself to judge others, completely ignoring the systems of justice already in place.
He didn't know what to think, but reasoned with himself that it was because he was third in line. Mello was sure, so sure that L was right and Kira was wrong. Near, though Mello would not believe it if the fact slapped him in the face, was giving off the same answers when asked, all the same reasons as the blond who was always just one step behind him.
Matt was third, he reasoned, because he could not see the elusive thing that made them so certain. He was so uncertain, he reasoned, because he was third.
Matt was, however, sure of one thing: That some force he did not understand and that he would not even begin to understand until years later made it so that he could never fully disagree with Mello, so that even as the blond became increasingly more obsessed in L's righteousness and Kira's evil, and grew meaner--cruel even--against those who disagreed, Matt stopped Mello less and less, and smiled and laughed and rooted more and more each time the blond would show a child his own version of justice.
But where Mello could have grown himself an army of supporters, the simple fact that Near had the same ideas as him, but was an enemy nonetheless, drew Mello into deluding himself, even at the young age of fourteen, that everyone was against him except for Matt and L.
Genius children, as it turns out, are exceptional at logic. They are also, as a result, exceptional at mangling it beyond recognition, to where even the most faulty of reasoning seems true to the less keen observer.
Matt was one of the rather more keen observers, but he, himself, was a genius, and it was easy to twist his own thoughts so that even the most frighteningly vicious of his arguments with himself seemed reasonable.
Mello had become the bully and the tormentor he'd once hated to kids who disagreed and to kids who agreed with Near (Weren't they the same children, then, that agreed with Mello? Surely, no.), and Matt his only-too-willing accomplice. But it was all for justice, wasn't it? Wasn't that what everything was about? Wasn't justice why they were there at the House in the first place, to uphold it in L's stead?
Yes, they knew, but what they couldn't see was that they were there because Wammy had put everything into L, into Ryuuzaki: His life's work, his trust, his own blood and sweat that kept the boy awake at night with the nightmares they caused him. L was the Justice of Quillsh Wammy.
But L, one day, would die.
That was all of their purpose, nothing more. Not their Justice, but Wammy's.
Justice was sustenance, and it was poison, passed on like a plague from man to child, to unsuspecting child.
When L left for the very last time, he left behind not only ghosts of Justice in his wake, but another, small connection with those who cared for him. It was a code--a hacker's password, to be precise--remotely connected to a small timer mechanism located in L's headquarters in Japan. The timer was a simple countdown from 24 hours to zero, one that L would reset at the same time each day, at almost precisely 12 hours through.
In this case, it was the third in line who was the first to find the clue, and Matt didn't know, at first, what he was looking at on the screen in front of him; only that he'd been trying to figure out this strange string of numbers he had found in the deepest confines of the House network's security that had seemed more like a game than anything.
When he'd deciphered it, hours after Mello had given up on his stopping to come out to play, it had been a secret message, reading "The life of the best is no more or no less than the cycling of a clock, and when that cycle ends, the bells will toll." At the moment that message had been uncovered and typed into the space below the original code, the screen blanked out and switched to nothing but the timer on an empty void.
Matt had a feeling he knew what it had meant, but doubt caused him to call on Mello for reassurance that it wasn't true. But when the blond saw the timer--Matt's scrap paper with the code message scrawled on it lying next to the monitor--he backed up in horror. Seeing this timer was like watching the machines hooked up to a loved one in a hospital: Nothing but cold, empty, digital light to say if he's alive or dead; nothing but a cycle telling if his heart's still beating.
Mello refused to look at it any longer, preferring faith in his hero over this too-real, too definite numeric communication as his reassurance.
Matt couldn't look away.
For days, the redhead watched it almost nonstop, until he figured out the pattern. After that, at the same time each evening, Matt would come in, type in the code message, and watch the timer to make sure it reset at twelve hours and that L was still alive.
One day, the pattern broke, and Matt's mind began to reel.
"You can't be seeing this. He never forgets."
Eleven, and your heart skipped a beat.
Ten, and please just let him have forgotten, just this once, to reset it.
Nine, and Mello's wondering, worried, why you've gone back to staring at the screen again like you used to, when he knows you haven't done that in months.
Eight, and you can't tell him. You can't, because it'll break his heart.
Seven, and you're still in denial, somehow.
Six, and it's unlikely he would have forgotten for this long.
Five, and hope is starting to lose its grip.
Four, and breathe, you're dreaming. Pinch your cheeks, but the pain is really there.
Three, and you're starting to wish you had the faith that Mello did.
Two, and you're praying, regardless.
One, and you feel that you would puke, if you could feel your body anymore…if you had eaten anything to puke up.
Forty-five minutes…
Thirty minutes…
Fifteen minutes…
Zero, and you sneak away to pack and leave the House before you have to hear Mello's screams…so that he won't hear yours and know.
Matt had spared him for a time, but the blond's blissful ignorance was fleeting.
Mello hated Kira from the beginning, not because he had killed (Mello had done this, himself, he thought bitterly, images of his parents flashing through his mind), but because he had tried to take the place of God…his God.
However, when Mello found out that L had been killed at Kira's hands, it was as if his world had shattered. This man, this Kira, had taken away not only his God, but his idol, his friend, his brother, too.
And though the thought horrified him terribly, Mello, who had killed only in his own mind, wanted suddenly to snap the neck of the man they called Kira like he had snapped a chain so long ago, sending the murderer's head clashing like a prayer bead to the floor.
Roger said--lied--that L had never picked an heir. L, the only person that had ever come close to filling the void that had been left in Mello's heart when he was six, had never confirmed if he had more loved him or the boy who made him doubt if he was loved at all.
The dull ache of simply not knowing was worse than the sharp dread that had filled his mind when he thought of how it would feel if L had picked Near instead of him.
Roger wanted them to work together, but Mello, for no reason other than pure jealousy and fear, would have rather given up L's phantom affections than share them, and he stormed away to a whirlwind of clothing and banshee-agonized wails in his room, and then into the cold, still air of night.