This story had me stuck for a good while, but finally, the block has bursts, and the seventeenth chapter is full of good stuff. 3 Thanks for all of your reviews, and adds, they continue to remind me that I am not the only insane Matt Lover. (: Enjoy!
---
Hal hits the play button on the answering machine.
"I know someone is on the other end of this fuckin' phone." The voice is Mail's.
"Someone who knows what happened is there, I know it. Just fuckin' answer your goddamn phone."
Hal hits the fast forward button. The next message plays.
"Dammit!" He's gotten desperate, Hal notes. "Dammit, I know you're there! I just need to know what happened! Just tell me what killed Mello... please... just-just fucking tell me!" An angry click sounds, like he'd slammed the phone into its receiver. How like him, Hal muses, to use a pay phone.
She shakes her head at the voice pouring from the machine and grabs a notebook that is off to the side. Audrey's name is fading at the top. Hal flips open the book and checks her dates again. Two days, she records, since Audrey has left. Two days since she wandered out without a word. It would only make sense to assume that she is with him...
Clicking a short series of buttons, Hal pulls up the outside camera on her screen. She scrolls through the sidebar until she finds the feed from two days ago. Switch to camera facing the opposite side of the street, and… She rewinds through the day until she see's Mail turn the corner across from the complex. Pulling up the feed from the reversed camera angle, she see's Audrey. Always coming back for more, the two of them, Hal's internal dialogue quips. They leave together, and Hal makes a note of it.
"News?"
Near's voice is a quiet monotone from the floor. Hal grimaces at the complacence, and nods her head. "She is with him, as expected," she says out of the corner of her mouth. There is a whirling sound as a toy helicopter lifts off from the floor. It buzzes over her head. The grimace returns. She turns her chair around to face the pastel boy and leans forward with her elbows on her knees.
"So should we stop them?"
Near looks up, but not at Hal. His dark eyes are following the helicopter around the room. They seem empty; had Hal not known Near all these years, she would conclude him a mental patient, with nothing going on behind the fogged glass and pristine. No imagination there, Hal thinks. Just the nuts and bolts of how things work. Just the gears that make things move, or tick. No imagination at all, just… analysis. His dull voice breaks her from the train of thought. "They can't be doing anything so calamitous," he muses, dark eyes still following the toy around the ceiling. "His calls have stopped; perhaps he's lost interest in Mihael's death and has moved on with the assistance of the girl."
Hal shakes her head and sweeps the light fringe out of her eyes. "Somehow, I find it doubtful that he'd get over it so quickly."
Near lands the helicopter and turns to his blockade of dice. He adds a few more to the order with a frown. "But all the same, I see no reason to call her home. We will simply wait. If she wanders back, she will. Only if necessary should we act on our assumptions." Near returns to the dice without so much as a shrug.
No imagination. Just numbers.
Hal wheels her chair around to face the screens again. She checks the date once more, and then the time, and lastly, makes a note of Near's final statement to her. "Only if necessary should we act on our assumptions." There is no indication of danger in Audrey seeing the boy at the moment, Hal concludes.
And besides, she tells herself, what would the mafia possibly use a young woman for? She herself had no connection to Mello, they wouldn't… Hal makes another note.
Its gotten dark. Another day has slipped without much of any progress.
Hal heaves a quiet sigh and rubs the back of her neck without knowledge that Matt has made the same gesture after pulling his shirt over his head and discarding it in preparation for sleep. Audrey has fallen into sleep on his futon for the second night in a row, and while the girl is far too stubborn to admit when she aches from the less-than-comfortable sleeping arrangement that she's taken to making a habit of, Matt knows from experience that his dingy old futon is not good on anyone's body for more than a night. He drags on his cigarette and resolves that he will do the proper thing and give her his bed in trade for the sofa. Matt stamps the cigarette out in the ashtray on his bedside table and pushes himself up.
Her face is peaceful in her slumber. Matt crouches down to her level and reaches out to shake her awake, but he finds himself stopping short, his hands not shaking her shoulder, just… touching her. In the still quiet of the purgatory that is neither night nor morning, Matt scans Audrey's face with a sense of wondering jealousy, his eyes asking her sleeping form what it must feel like to rest so easily. The idea is almost too much. He shakes her.
"Audrey, wake up." He leans toward her and speaks gently.
"Get up and take my bed. I swear, its way more comfortable…"
She lets out one of those infantile moans at the displeasure of being awoken and bats her hand at him, as if trying to swat away a fly. Matt laughs softly at her and moves to scoop her up, having decided that she will never move on her own accord, and if she is to sleep comfortably, he's going to have to see to it. He lifts her easily enough, with one of his arms under her knees and the other around her back. Her body is warm when it is limp and languid against him, and the feeling of warmth is spreading, like a deep breathe. And he carries her easily enough, as she's marginally smaller than he, by an inch and some ten pounds at least. Even in heavy sleep, her bodyweight feels like nothing. But what isn't easy is setting her down when she's got her arms draped around his neck and her head buried sleepily into his chest.
Matt bends at the waist and sets Audrey's back to his rumpled sheets. He disentangles their limbs from one another and watches her slump back into sound, sound sleep, with a sense of something that he cannot quite put words to dragging down into the hollows of his chest. The warmth is quickly gone when there is no connection to their two bodies.
He tugs the blanket out from underneath her and covers her, wondering if that will be enough to keep the cold away from her for the night, wondering if she ever feels the same kind of lonely cold that he gets in the late, sleepless nights, when rest is over a shadowed cliff that can't be breached.
To dive off that cliff would be to crawl into bed beside her.
To crawl into bed beside her would be to have her warmth.
To have her warmth would be… too much? Not enough?
How would he ever know if he didn't try?
Matt runs his hand over his hair and rubs at his eyes. How will either of us ever know, he justifies, if one of us doesn't just… dive? And with that in mind, he looks down at Audrey, who has bunched the blankets to her chest the way a child holds a stuffed toy, and he slides back the covers.