A/N: For those of you who made it this far, congrats! This was actually the first bit of this story ever written, the thing that spawned it all. Thanks again to Cat and Melissa for all their input and help for this chapter. Enjoy! Please read and review!

Disclaimer: Death Note is property of Ohba and Obata. Quote belongs to Richard Matheson

"The world's gone mad, [Robert] thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it.
The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it." - Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

Chapter 1 - The Fall

Mello awoke in the middle of the night to humid air bearing heavily down on him and muffled thumps and groans coming from down the hallway. He was slow to move, wanting to avoid the unpleasant sensation of sweaty sheets peeling away from sticky skin. Eventually though, he rolled over onto his side, felt the thick fog of heat send his head into a tail spin, waited a few moments for the room to slide back into focus.

Across the room, Matt's bed was empty.

His DS lay near the corner of his bed amidst the rumpled sheets, the screen still alight and casting a ghostly glow on the ceiling. A cheerful little melody was looping quietly over the speakers.

Down the hall, there was another groan, the sounds of something splashing, thick and heavy. Outside, the night was absolutely still.

A heavy breath caught in Mello's throat. The cold that flooded his veins brought him no comfort from the smothering heat.

'No, no, no,' he thought to himself. 'We've been so careful. We've done everything we could. It can't...not now...not Matt.'

Slowly, carefully, he rose from the bed and padded across the bedroom, jumping momentarily at the sight of his own shadow cast against the wall, gaunt and skeletal in the unearthly light shining from the empty bed. His silhouette looked starved, emaciated...dead. It danced in wild and serpentine motions before his eyes, stretching this way and that like some sort of hellish Fun House mirror.

With sharp, rapid breaths, he strode back across the room and flipped the game system over, angrily pressing the lit screen into the mattress.

The specter was gone, but now the room was plunged into darkness.

He groped along the wall towards the door, stubbing his toe painfully on the dresser along the way. He stumbled to a halt, leaning down to feel frantically at the digit, checking for broken skin.

When he was finally satisfied that his toe was uninjured, he finally passed from the bedroom to the hallway.

At the end of the hall, the bathroom door was ajar, letting a strip of bright florescent light stretch out across the wooden floor. He could make out the sound of ragged breaths and horrible retching noises.

The icy stone in the pit of his stomach turned into a sharp, stabbing pain through his entire torso. He wanted to run back to his bed, pull the sheets over his head, and wait for this horrible nightmare to be over.

But there was no waking up from this nightmare, this terrifying sight laid out before him under the painfully bright light of the bathroom ceiling lamp.

Matt clung desperately to the porcelain of the toilet with white-knuckled and sweaty hands, as if the linoleum was going to suck him into an endless abyss. His legs sprawled haphazardly beneath him, as if he hadn't had enough time to kneel properly before collapsing against the toilet. His shoulders trembled and bucked with each dry heave and his damp shirt hung off of him.

It was as if he were wasting away.

Mello realized too late that he had let out a strangled cry, clamping a hand over his mouth. Every bit of heat rushed from his body as his heart plummeted into a frigid pit of anguish.

The dry heaves finally slowed and Matt slid and lurched against the toilet, the stripes of his shirt moving like a second skin as the saturated fabric plastered itself against his shoulders with sweat. He turned towards the door, ungainly and slow, arms and legs seemingly too heavy for him to maneuver. Blood and bile hung from his bottom lip, dripping down his chin, orange and brown and red sickeningly sharp against sallow skin.

And he looked back and met Mello's gaze with half-lidded and haggard eyes.

I'm sorry, those eyes said. I'm so, so sorry.

The blond stumbled backwards, sinking down against the opposite wall, and sobbed.

Mello started sleeping on the couch after that. It was with a sense of failure that Mello finally opened up their previously untouched emergency kit gathering dust above the fridge and started wearing gloves and surgical masks around the house.

Matt slept during most of the day; Mello could barely keep him awake long enough to eat. And even when he did manage to get him to eat, the redhead rarely held it down for more than an hour. Each day, Matt's health worsened, his cheeks sunk in a little further and his ribs stuck out a bit more prominently above his abdomen. His hair turned drab and greasy, sticking together in thick clumps against his scalp.

Every day for a week, his fever kept going up and up and up. 100º F, 101.4º F, 102º F.

As Mello slowly poured water into his friend's waiting mouth each morning, afternoon, and evening, he would eye the phone sitting on the nightstand.

He knew he should call a doctor, that soup and cold cloths could only go so far.

Were there even any doctors to go to anymore? If he called to get a hold of a doctor, they'd notify the police, who would send the CDC straight to their door. And they would haul Matt away, strapped to a gurney, probably quarantine him in some lab as he slowly suffered and died.

And then they would burn the corpse. They burned all the corpses. It was the law now, had been since they day they started enforcing curfews in towns with quarantined districts.

And even with all of that enforcement, he thought with a frustration that burned red hot in his belly, it still spread, there were still people out there, living but not, waiting in the shadows. He knew there were. He could hear them, the distant groans and inhuman shrieks in the night. Their numbers were few, according to vague and rather sketchy news reports, but a few could easily become hundreds, thousands...

Mello shuddered and rubbed lightly at Matt's throat to help him swallow, feeling the heat of his fever through the rubber gloves.

"There you go, drink up" he murmured, mostly to himself with a compassion and tenderness that he couldn't feel, voice too soft and soothing to hold any real meaning in it.

Just before he left, Matt's eyes opened just a crack, looked up in silent thanks, blinked once, twice, and then closed again. Each day they were less and less brown and more and more...nothing. Not quite grey, not quite black, not quite any color at all. It was the color of dwindling sanity, diminishing resolution, a rapidly approaching end.

Nothing.

No memories, no passion, no fight.

Then, the day came when the color in Matt's eyes dulled so far, there was not even a flicker of recognition in them. When Mello leaned over to brush the moist and matted hair out of his eyes, he would stare up in fear and confusion at the strange face above him, the alien being with the round, protruding mouth and cold, rubbery hands. He would open and close his mouth soundlessly, as if he were calling for help, chapped and cracked lips parting and pressing uselessly together, hands fisting feebly in the sheets.

That was the point that Mello forgot what it was he was doing, why he was doing it. It was no longer Matt sleeping in that bed. It was just a phantom of the past, a frail image of something he couldn't seem to recall. The days of normalcy were nothing more than a dream, hovering just out of reach whenever he hung on the border between sleeping and waking.

Because he didn't do anything even remotely resembling sleep those days. Instead, he would lay awake at night, staring up at the living room ceiling, listening to Matt's labored breaths and wet-sounding coughs. The rhythm of those strained, inhales and the unproductive hacking cough slowly lulled him into a fitful quasi-slumber, a sleep that never really came completely over him, where he would lie in darkness, mind still painfully aware of the reality waiting on the other side of his eyelids.

It was the stillness that would rouse him, the sound of absolute quiet, of Matt sound asleep.

Asleep, or...

Mello reached under his pillow, feeling the cool metal of the handgun he kept there. He gripped the weapon tightly, ready, waiting.

When a thump and scuffling started coming from behind the bedroom door, Mello had no time to grab his handgun to defend himself. He was in the kitchen when the bone-chilling noises began, staring down at wilting lettuce and moldy carrots (it was all they had left in the emergency rations they received that week).

Even so, he thought it was safer this way, at high noon, where he could see clearly what it was he was up against.

The door handle rattled for a few moments before the door slowly creaked open. Mello clutched the kitchen knife resting beside the cutting board. It would be messier than he ever wanted, and he would probably end up soaked in blood from it, but...

If there was even a glimmer of humanity left in those eyes, then he knew, deep down, Matt would understand.

One heavy step, then two, sounded from behind him. He wheeled around, the sharp movement stiff and sudden.

Matt leaned against the doorframe across the apartment, head bowed, shoulders hunched. His body shook with the efforts of his breath, knees bent in at awkward angles.

Slowly, deceptively slow, his head rose and his eyes met Mello's, shaded by a matted fringe of auburn hair, sunken against pale skin. They burned with a hungry aggression, a deep desperation that had his hands clenching the wood beneath his palms, eager to makes his way across the room on his weak and wobbling limbs.

"Matt," Mello said, voice low and quiet. Threatening and authoritative at the same time. "Matt, it's me, it's Mello."

The redhead's weight shifted forward, as if he were about to topple over, but then his leg came out, foot planting itself on the floor in an awkward step. His ankles were frail enough to snap like twigs beneath his unsteady weight.

"Matt-!"

Another step, the younger man loped and weaved forward, step by slow step, clumsy, drunkenly. Mello's voice caught and stuck somewhere low in his throat. A deep noise rumbled in Matt's chest, came out of his mouth like a wheeze, grating, like nails on a chalkboard.

The hairs on the back of Mello's neck stood up on end. His fingers closed ever tighter around the knife on the counter behind him.

Matt was so close, so close, Mello could smell the blood and vomit on his breath, could see the pinpricks of moisture beading on his forehead, could hear the almost mechanical croaking of his lungs in his chest. The redhead was so near to him, it would take nothing more than reaching out with that bony arm...

And that's exactly what happened. Matt's arm shot out, fast, but fast enough for Mello to track.

But his resolve still failed him.

The hand around the kitchen knife spasmed at the look in Matt's eyes, fingers jerked and dropped it onto the countertop with a broken noise of surprise. Now Matt had him, helpless, in his grasp.

For a moment, he considered pleading, trying to tap into the human that must be somewhere deep inside the gamer's mind. The next moment, he considered screaming, as loud and as long as he could. Someone had to come, someone must still be alive outside of their apartment, though they hadn't heard a single word from anyone for days.

And Matt gripped Mello's shoulders, fingers pressing mercilessly into flesh, and yanked him forward.

Their foreheads knocked painfully together and everything suddenly went still.

Mello froze, rooted in place, waiting for Matt to duck his head and rip out his esophagus, to sink his teeth into his skull and slurp out his brains, to...to...

Matt was smiling at him. Weak and feeble, but a smile, nonetheless. There was light in his eyes.

The forehead pressed against his was pleasantly warm, drastically cooler than the unbearable heat it had been yesterday evening.

It took a few moments for this fact to register in Mello's mind, after his eyes stopped stealing glances at the kitchen knife only a few feet away, after he realized that Matt wasn't making any movements at all.

The fever had broken.

"I'm really thirsty," the redhead said hoarsely, throat sticky and parched.

Mello broke down for a second time, crying tears of joy into Matt's hair as he dragged the younger man into a tight hug and refused to let go for a long, long time.

"Do you think we should?"

Mello looked up from his plate of food, gazing across the couch at Matt, who was looking expectantly back. "Should we what?"

Matt shrugged, as if the answer were of no real consequence to him. He picked up one of his cornmeal cakes on his fork. "Evacuate, like everyone else." He stretched across the length of the couch and deposited the cake onto Mello's plate (which, he noticed despite all of Mello's insistence otherwise, had slightly less food on it). "From what the landlady told us today, there's only about three or four other rooms with people in 'em. That family next door, the elderly couple above us, and that guy who lives downstairs."

On the television, Kiyomi Takada was going through the daily emergency response and preparation segment, who to call if you notice anyone with suspicious symptoms, how to handle your child's accidental cuts and scrapes, and as an added bonus, an announcement that the weekly rations were going to become biweekly due to food shortages and the price of gasoline taking a slight jump to seven dollars a gallon.

Mello gave Matt a reproaching look, taking the cornmeal cake and replacing it next to the redhead's rather scrawny looking soybeans. "Stop that, you've got to gain back that weight. I don't care what you do or don't like to eat."

Matt made a disgusted face. "It's like being a bloody vegan," he griped, drawing his legs up onto the couch to sit cross legged. "I've never wanted a fucking hamburger so badly in my life." He suddenly perked up and turned his body towards the older man beside him, shoving a forkful of instant potatoes into his mouth. "You know," he began, slightly garbled around the mouthful of potatoes. "That guy on the first floor said he knows a guy who runs the rations route who could smuggle some meat into our delivery."

"No," Mello said flatly. His tone left no room for negotiation.

Matt groaned, staring down at his food as if those dry potatoes had just broken his heart. "Then, let's just move already! I promise I'm all better now. I hear they've still got restaurants open in New York, that people are still allowed to walk around freely on the streets during the day."

Mello's fingers slowly tightened around his fork. He stabbed savagely at his limp lettuce. "Yes, and two weeks ago, you could have said the same for LA. We've got food, water, and electricity. It's not like we can really afford to be picky these days."

These days. He hated the way that sounded, as if things were never going to get any better or worse.

He knew what New York really was. It was a sort of soothing propaganda, a way to make the rest of the country to wait patiently while the government figured out who the fuck to blame for all of this.

Matt had stopped eating, looking enraged. "That's your reason? You want to stay here because it's tolerable?" His fork clattered against his plate as he put it down forcefully on the coffee table. "Fucking hell, Mello, I don't want to have to tolerate anything! I want to live!"

The handle of the fork began to bend under the pressure of Mello's grip. "We can't even afford the gas. We'd have nothing left for a place to stay. If even one person in New York became infected, we'd have no shelter and no money. What you're suggesting is suicide."

"And this isn't?!" Matt was on his feet, gesturing sharply at the tightly sealed window. Outside, the sun still pierced through a thin covering of smoky wisps of clouds, though abandoned buildings and empty windows stayed covered by shadows. "More than half of this place is shut down! It's dead! There's nothing here! Who knows if there will even been food delivered next month! And what if they quarantine us too?! What then?!"

The shattering of ceramic punctuated the last of Matt's shouts as Mello threw his plate down in a rage. It lay in pieces with his food on the floor.

"I almost fucking lost you, Matt!" he bellowed, face flooded with red. "Do you know how hard it is to tell yourself you might have to fucking kill your best friend and still try to keep hope?! Every single fucking day I had to be ready for that! If I woke up one morning and you were-!" His voice suddenly cracked and his eyes went wide with the images that came, unbidden, into his mind. Images of a fate that they had so narrowly avoided. "If you were...if you were..." He just couldn't say it. Even the thought was too much for him to bear. He began to shake uncontrollably, staring down at his hands clenched into fists against his thighs.

"Oh fuck," Matt breathed. "Oh, fuck, Mello, I didn't-" He took a step forward, hands stretched outwards uneasily. "I didn't mean to...I'm sorry."

He reached out and pulled the blond into his arms. Mello clung to him, dragged them both to their knees on the hard wood floor, shook with frustration and anger and fear, but not a single sound escaped him, not a single tear was shed. The only sobbing came from the apartment next door, where a woman quietly tried to soothe her frightened child.

After he had finally stopped shaking, Mello pulled at the front of Matt's shirt, twisted his hands in the material, his head bowed against the younger man's sternum. "Don't you dare do that to me again," he snapped angrily. "Don't you ever make me that fucking scared about you."

There was no room for those weaknesses anymore. Only the strong survived, only the strong maintained their humanity.

Kiyomi Takada found herself promoted to a national news station on the east coast a few days later. She was heralded as a brilliant journalist, with an uncanny ability to sniff out a story quicker than anyone else. On her first day on the job, she wished her former coworkers good luck in continuing to bring up-to-date and accurate reporting to the people remaining in the Los Angeles area.

Shortly after that, it became clear that luck would not be with them.

As Matt and Mello sat and watched their morning updates, the new anchor began to grow pale, the rhythm of her speech became awkward and halting, her hands trembled around the papers on the news desk in front of her.

"I-it is reported that this month th-the price of gas will...will be..." She trailed off, sweating under the bright studio lights

Then, without warning, she vomited all down her front and collapsed heavily onto the desk.

The cameras turned off and they never came back on.

Things seemed to go downhill from there and Mello sometimes found himself wishing he had listened to Matt.

The power was the next thing to go, the emergency generator kicking in automatically shortly afterwards, providing lighting only to the hallway outside the apartment door and a weak stream of air to come through the vents.

The phoneline was dead, so calling the landlady was impossible, cellphone service had all but disappeared, and Mello wouldn't even let him near the front door anymore.

Words were only spoken in whispers from that point on. Their eyes always seemed cast towards the floor, too afraid to look up and see the world around them crumbling to the ground.

The world, however, would not allow them to remain ignorant forever.

When the little girl next door started crying loudly in the middle of the night, Mello thought she had simply woken up from a nightmare. But then he heard her mother's voice as well, praying frantically under her breath.

"Oh, God, please," came the distraught voice through the wall. "Please, save us. Have mercy, Lord!"

There was a dragging noise as well, the sound of hands scratching at wood and frustrated growls.

Mello's heart jolted in his chest, as if he had just been electrocuted, and he shot up in bed. Matt was standing beside the bedroom door, pressed to the wall, shotgun in hand. His eyes were wide in fear, mouth pressed into a grim line.

Mello opened his mouth to ask what was happening, but Matt pressed a finger to his own lips, the gesture sharply ordering him to keep quiet. The blond grabbed his handgun from the nightstand, the other hand clutching at his rosary as the whispered prayers became frenzied pleas.

"Please, no!" the woman begged, voiced laced with the sound of splintering wood. "Charles, please! It's me, it's your wife!" A violent snap and then screaming, high-pitched and terrified.

Thinking he'd be sick, Mello was torn between vigilance and pressing his pillow over his head to block out the noise.

And then...

"Daddy, don't! Stop! It hurts!"

Mello threw up into his mouth, pressing his hand to his lips and forcing himself to swallow it down. The shock of it all finally seemed to overload his system, stuffing cotton into his ears and closing out the little girl's shrieks. Across the room, he saw Matt's shoulders shaking with quiet sobs, face twisted in anguish, teeth biting viciously into his lower lip to hold back any noises threatening to escape.

As he slowly came down from the adrenaline spike, sound gradually petered back into Mello's ears. He couldn't tell how long it had been, how much time had passed since the girl had finally stopped making noise, but there wasn't much time to think about it. The scratching noise was now at their front door. Scratching became rattling, rattling became banging. It may have been dead, but it still had the brain of a human, a human that learned from trial and error. And somehow, somehow it managed to rip the doorknob off and snap the chain lock as it barged into the apartment. Mello heard the heavy thunk and the metallic clinking of broken links hitting the floor.

His ears, all he could rely on were his ears. He was groping blindly as he fought down the panic threatening to overtake him, scrambling quietly towards the bedroom door where Matt motioned to be ready to back him up.

The blond almost insisted that he should be the one to take the lead, but it really didn't seem like the appropriate moment to have that argument.

Not when there was the sound of uneven footfalls outside their door, a disconcerting rhythm of dragging and snarling as it sniffed out the two men hiding close by.

Matt tensed, finger ready on the trigger as he slowly raised the gun. Mello followed suit. It was right outside the door. They couldn't afford to hesitate.

And that handful of milliseconds seemed to hang between them, suspended by bated breaths and bleak realizations. Between heartbeats, a mutual understanding passed between the two of them, that one false step could spell death.

Matt moved.

He flung the door open with a sharp kick. There was a loud crack as it hit something solid on the other side and, without waiting even a moment, the redhead jumped into the hall and fired.

There was a split-second delay as Mello's mind tried to rapidly register what was happening, but it still wasn't enough to prevent him from pausing as he realized that the apartment was eerily quiet.

He blinked rapidly, trying to tell his feet to move, that he was supposed to be backup. But...

He couldn't even hear anything breathing.

"M...Matt?" he hazarded in a whisper.

No response.

"Matt?" he called, just a little louder, though he could barely hear himself over the sound of blood roaring in his ears. He edged closer to the door, which had slowly swung back until it rest slightly ajar.

Oh, God...had he...was he dead?

Say something, you bastard! I told you not to do this to me again!

No response. He jumped as he heard a floorboard creak.

The door swung open.

Mello leapt back with a shout, swiftly lifting his arm to aim at the doorway.

"Calm down, it's okay! It's me!"

Matt stood in the doorway, shirt and face splattered with blood, dark and thick against his sun-deprived flesh. His arms were raised slightly in surrender, shotgun still in his grasp.

"Holy fuck, you could at least give me some warning!" Mello snapped in an angry breath. He panted as if he had just run a thousand miles, heart throbbing between his ribs.

"He didn't even touch me. Got him in the back of the head." Matt swallowed. "Could you...could you just get this fucking shirt off me?"

Mello grabbed the emergency kit and hurriedly put on a pair of rubber gloves before peeling Matt's shirt off and using antibacterial wipes and gel to clean his face and the remnants of blood that had seeped through the fabric.

"Shit," the redhead gasped, shaking under his friend's hands. "Shit, shit, shit. I...I just shot him. I wasn't even fucking thinking about it. He was someone's father for Christ's sake!"

"You did what you had to," Mello responded as he scrubbed at a streak of blood on Matt's goggles, though he didn't sound very convincing. "They're not human."

He couldn't even manage to convince himself of that.

"We've got to burn him," Matt said as he pulled a clean shirt over his head. "We can't stay here anymore. We have to torch the whole building."

For the first time, Mello seemed to agree, already busy pulling down the rest of their firearms from the top closet shelf (souvenirs of his Mafia days) and his only remaining box of chocolate bars as Matt pocketed the packs of cigarettes hidden under his mattress. The emergency supplies, their remaining rations, ammunition, firearms, chocolate, and games were packed into a large duffel bag. Matt's main laptop was grabbed as an afterthought.

They pulled out the bottles of canola oil from the kitchen cupboards and doused the man's body with it. Matt turned away at one point and gagged as he hunched by the wall, sticking his hand out to support himself, unable to continue. Even Mello found himself trying his hardest to avoid the man's eyes as they stared up at him. His eyes drifted somewhere between feral and tame. They were the eyes of a dead man, and yet those dilated pupils reminded Mello far too much of roadkill festering in the sun, wide and unseeing.

After they were finished, they made their way out of the apartment and into the hall, guns raised and ready. Above their heads, the emergency generator was beginning to show some wear, lights flickering and creating a horrifying sort of strobe effect in the narrow corridor. The door of the next apartment down creaked back and forth on it's hinges. A bloody handprint was streaked across the front. Large drops of red and disturbing little chunks created a path leading back to their feet.

They went upstairs first. The lighting was even worse up there, creating large patches of shadows that made the dusty apartment doors appear as if they were slowly drifting open.

The elderly couple had starved to death, though it was so easy to believe they were simply sleeping when the two found them together in their bed. They rummaged through the kitchen and bathroom and found toilet bowl cleaner and more cooking oil. Matt respectfully drew up the sheets over the couple's heads before they poured the stuff around their bed and through the rest of the apartment.

On the first floor, the heavy locks on all the entrances to the building were still intact. Nothing had gotten in or out through there.

The landlady and the only other remaining tenant were also dead. Both of them had a light frothing of blood on their lips, so Mello shot both of them once through the temple. They took what remained of the unopened food and water (and a bottle of brandy they found in the man's fridge) in their rooms and shoved it into the duffel bag.

Mello could only manage to find drain cleaner in the landlady's apartment. The fumes made him dizzy as he poured it over the old woman, disgusted by the huge angry splotches it left on the corpse.

And then, as he tilted the container back, something sailed up at him and splashed against his face.

He screamed raggedly as a searing pain erupted across the left half of his face, but immediately cut himself off, hissing and snarling through gritted teeth instead. The pain dripped, dripped a little lower, halfway down his cheek as he stumbled towards the apartment door, sight completely useless in his left eye.

Matt came faster than Mello expected. He was actually aiming to shoot at the blond before he realized what was going on. He lowered Mello to the floor out in the hall, cradling the back of his head with his hand, and flushed his skin and face with the bottled water, until his hair was sopping wet. He moaned quietly as Matt applied a gauze bandage, hands twitching with the urge to clutch at his face.

Matt tried not to let it show, but he began to feel horribly cornered. Without Mello's eyes, he was left without backup. He was essentially on his own.

"Come on," he urged, as firmly as possible. "You've got to get up. We have to leave now."

Matt helped Mello to his feet and slung the duffel bag over his shoulder. Even with his reduced depth perception, Mello didn't need much help, though Matt felt his attention hopelessly torn between his friend and his own surroundings.

He never imagined that the place he had once called home would turn on him, so suddenly and so violently.

Outside, the street was deserted. Cars sat empty on the side of the road. One lone streetlight remained lit.

Somewhere, far off, a screeching echoed through the night.

Mello was breathing heavily beside him, fingers prodding at his face around the bandage.

Matt opened the brandy, dumped some of the alcohol onto the ground, and, ripping half of his own shirt sleeve off, stuffed the striped fabric into neck of the bottle.

As he pulled his lighter out of his pocket, he wondered if the people inside that building had known how it would end, if they knew they were slowly wasting away. He wondered how that woman managed to comfort her child as her father slowly died, and then suddenly rose up again with murder and bloodlust in his gaze.

"Mello..." he said softly, lighting the fabric with tears in the corners of his eyes. "Say a prayer or something..."

But Mello stayed silent and Matt had to force himself to chuck the bottle through the window of their old home, to watch as the flames climbed and flickered in the window and devoured the traces of their old life.

They did not stay to watch. Others were going to come soon, drawn by the flames, just like moths.

Just like mindless insects.

So the two of them abandoned the empty comfort of the firelight and pushed forward into the darkness. In the stifling uneasiness, Mello took Matt's hand and squeezed it tightly. Only then did Matt allow himself to cry.

Secretly, Mello began to wonder if there really was a God.