dn | karma
title: karma
fandom: death note
characters: mello / matt
rating: nc-17 [ language , sex ]
word count: 4,385
notes: spoilers up to ch. 99. speculative. a slightly different style and feel. original copy here.
summary: pierced by the arrow you shot.
Wind whips through the hole in his chest, and it's searing hot, burning, it feels like it'll set his heart on fire, and he wonders if this is what Mello felt like that moment before he died. Heart attack. What a gruesome phrase.
He stands there, feeling burnt air caress the bloody holes in his body (one through the heart, one through the lung, one through the shoulder and side and--), and he waits, waits, waits. From far off, a leather-clad figure comes stalking through the inferno like some demon incarnate and stands by his side, all gold and black and charred glory.
He knows it's Mello, just knows from the burnt leather and the ashen rosary and the scarred up face just visible past the layer of scorched flesh, but he doesn't say anything, and the two of them stand there, shoulder to shoulder, and watch as the church burns. A wall collapses, and ash goes swirling up the sky and out of sight.
*
"Get off the car."
"One last smoke, and I'll get off."
"We don't have time for that."
"Yes, we do. Countdown still has five minutes left."
Silence on Mello's part, meaning Matt had won the argument. If it could have been called that.
"Hey, Mello."
"What."
"Have you ever smoked?"
The sharp snap of a chocolate bar. "No."
"Drugs?"
"No."
"And you were in the mafia for how long?"
More silence, and Matt laughed, watching a puff of ash drift down to the ground.
"I feel so fucking pumped right now. Best day of my life." Mello didn't answer (he rarely did to those pointless comments Matt made), and he continued, toeing the windshield wiper with his boot, leaving a dirty footprint on the car window and not really caring. "You know that bite you left on my shoulder? It's still there. The guys doing my autopsy are going to have a good laugh."
Mello almost smiled, and Matt decided that was almost good enough.
(See you later, buddy. G'bye. Don't come after me, okay?)
*
They walk in silence for a long time, two pairs of boots (one pair Eurotrash, the other fake leather) hitting the ground in uneven rhythm.
"Y'know, Mello, I guess Hell really isn't all that bad?"
It's a question more than a statement.
Fact: Wind going through bullet holes in lungs almost sounds like a whistle, a flute, a sickly small instrument. It's almost pretty.
*
The room smelled thickly of cigarette smoke and chocolate and sex.
It had been that way for the past twelve or so hours, because neither of them really wanted to get up and face the world just yet. Neither of them really felt like getting up and greeting Fate before it came knocking at their door. (It already hand a hand up and ready.) Fake and decaying mannequins lay scattered about the floor like corpses, and dust lay an inch thick on the old plastic molds. A scene out of a twisted fairy tale. And here were the two sacrifices for the hungry dragon.
It was almost funny.
"Mello?"
Matt hadn't added a question mark to the name in a long time. He was lying on his stomach on their bed, PSP in hand but not turned on, staring at the blank screen. When the only answer he got was soft breaths -- still slow with sleep -- he dropped the console to the floor (ka-thunk), turned to look at Mello. He looked quiet, for once. (Calm before the storm.) He'd been like that since Hal had called the night before, and Matt didn't need to ask to know
Mello didn't want to die.
Fuck it, neither did he.
"Mello."
Abandoning the question mark this time, he rested his head on the pillow, the dim lighting of the room allowing him to see without his goggles. Black eyes flickered upwards to glare at him with a look that said, what is it that you're disturbing me with? and Matt gave a small laugh.
"Hey, Mello." The name fell so easily from his lips, as natural as water, as air, as breathing. "It's okay."
"What's okay." Mello's voice was still rough with the last residues of sleep, but it only amplified the underlying anger in those two voices. (Today is the day we're going to die, today is the day we go up in flame and bullets and bang bang you're fucking dead).
"Nothing."
Matt leaned forward, pressed a kiss in the same spot he'd done before, so many months ago, when Mello was dying from third-degree burns, that one spot that hung in between scarred and clean flesh. For the past few months in LA and Japan and places in between Matt had never quite gotten over his fascination for that one spot, the one place where Mello was both human and not (a scorched demon, from hell hell hell). This time it was free of medicine, free of bandages, but it oozed sickly of impending doom and fear and (death) Fate.
He loved it.
Mello didn't smile back, because for Mello, this was everything. (Don't mess up. Don't mess up.) The final countdown until the big bomb went off, and that was still okay for Matt, because if this was everything for Mello, then this was everything for him, too. (I won't.)
"I just felt like saying it."
He didn't explain himself any further.
And that was almost okay.
*
"Not that bad?" Mello is perhaps the only person Matt knows who can sound incredulous and arrogant even with a scorched windpipe. "What makes you say that?"
"I have cigarettes and you have chocolate. We each have our addictions."
"And that's enough for you to say it's not bad?"
"Better than nothing."
Fact: The sound of a burnt corpse trying to laugh sounds a lot like the pages of notebook shifting, rustle rustle shift and rasp. It's almost poetic.
*
Matt sat in his car fiddling with his PSP and not really paying attention to what the hell he was doing. He even let his little soldier guy get shot twice in ten minutes. Disgraceful. But then again, he really wasn't up to it at the moment. He briefly considered turning it off, but realized that then he'd be just "bored," then, instead of "bored and distracted" and kept it on.
He looked up to scrutinize the buildings a few blocks ahead. His soldier screamed as he was shot in the shoulder. Whoops.
"Mello, you're an ass."
Words muttered around a cigarette, and Matt looked back down at the console in his hands, fingers flying over buttons.
"Telling me to wait here, you idiot, are you trying to give me an ulcer?"
He was half a street away from Mello's mafia HQ, waiting for Mello to emerge in all of his leather and trash glory so they could go high-tail it away and execute the next step in the grand scheme to capture Kira. Or, at least, that was what Matt knew. He also knew that Mello was probably hiding something from him, but if Mello had bothered to hide it, he'd bother to pretend he didn't notice anything. Besides, it wouldn't be anything too bad, right?
On-screen, Matt's soldier-guy set off a grenade.
Off-screen, Mello's mafia HQ suddenly turned into a mushroom cloud of fire.
A momentary pause, and the flickers of fire nearly blinded Matt, nearly set off his photophobic reaction, but luckily, it didn't, and he quickly shook aside the white spots in his vision. Throwing his PSP into the passenger seat, he hissed something that sounded a lot like "You shit-fucking cunt," and slammed his foot down on the gas pedal.
Six days later, Mello finally fully regained consciousness on Matt's bed, plastered with bandages and his arm in a cast, limbs heavy with painkillers and the faint traces of morphine. A thump of boots on dirty carpet, and Matt strolled in, a paper carton in one hand and chopsticks in the other.
"Good morning, sleeping beauty." Matt used the exact words and tones that he knew Mello hated, only because he was aware of the fact that Mello probably couldn't even reach up to slap him at the moment. Swallowing the mouthful he'd been chewing on, he pointed at Mello with his chopsticks, half of a grin on his face. "About time you got up. I was getting tired of living off of shitty Chinese takeout and watching you sleep. As pretty as you are, it gets boring after the first three hours." A pause while he thought. "Oh, the cast wasn't mind. Contacted some back-alley hack doctor friend of mine. He owed me one, anyway."
Leaning down, he planted a wet kiss on the side of Mello's mouth, carefully avoiding bandages and ointment that cascaded over a burnt cheek, his lips tasting of nicotine and cooking oil and cheap liquor. Mello swallowed thickly, his throat raw with the aftertaste of too much bitter medication taken in a half-conscious haze, and tried to speak, the scar tissue splashed across his face mangling his words. "Since when did you know how to use chopsticks?"
Resisting the temptation to dump the remaining half-carton of fried noodles and grease chips onto the other, Matt laughed and walked back out of the room. "Four years was a long time, Mello."
Mello was halfway back to sleep, drugs coursing through his veins, by the time Matt shouted from the kitchen, "If you ever pull off a stunt like that again, I'm just going to let you burn, you hear? You nearly gave me a heart attack."
It was almost amusing.
*
"I wonder if L's somewhere here."
Matt doesn't get an answer except for the crunch of boots on gravel. They've been walking for a long, long time, heading for nowhere and everywhere for the same time. The church is far behind them, nothing but a tiny black dot on the horizon and up ahead of them is a wide stretch of gray gray gray. No defining features, no buildings, no towers, no nothing. (Double negative. No nothing would then mean "something." Maybe they just can't see it.)
They walk in silence for a while, and even when Mello's pistol clatters to the dusty ground, they don't say anything. It fades away into the distance, first a tiny speck of metal, then a dot on the horizon, then nothing, and they keep on going.
(I'm on my way, baby. I'm on my way.)
(You came back this time.)
(You aren't supposed to be here.)
(But you came anyway.)
(I'm almost glad about that.)
*
Matt had no idea what time it was, but he did know that it was way too early for him to be awake, let alone at the door with a nice shiny pistol pointed at his stomach. Said pistol was clutched in the meaty hand of a man clad in a business suit and sunglasses. His buddy wasn't dressed any better, though his fedora was a little better than the sunglasses. Leave it to them to portray thugs in such a stereotypical image.
"Hands above your head."
Matt complied sleepily, and briefly entertained the possibility of calling for help. Then remembered that he lived in the buttcrack of Who-Gives-A-Shit, Nowhere, Los Angeles, and no one would care. This was only confirmed when his neighbor came out into the hallway, took one look at him and his "guests", then made all haste for the stairway.
'Bastard, I'm cutting your internet off tonight.'
An idle threat made out of boredom as Matt's tried to figure out why these people were knocking at his door before the sun even rose. It had been a good three months since he'd left that mafia group he'd been running around with, and they'd parted on good terms. Well, if a virus-infected network and thirty thousand dollars worth of E stolen from the warehouses could be considered "good terms".
"Take him to the car."
"Knock him out first."
"No, the boss said to bring him back alive."
"So? Knock him out, we don't need trouble," Sunglasses said, antsily.
"No, I'm not carrying a deadweight all the way to the car," Fedora said, angrily.
"Hey, why don't both of you go fuck your own mothers?" Matt said, amiably.
Half an hour later, he regained consciousness sitting in the back of what he assumed was their car, a blindfold around his head and handcuffs around his wrists. His goggles had been pulled down to around his neck, and his hands had been wrenched back. Not quite the most comfortable position. Plus, he was pretty sure that there was a nice bruise blooming across the side of his head from where he'd been pistol-whipped. Oh, goody.
"Hey--"
"Shut up."
"Okay."
They traveled in silence for a few minutes before Matt grew tired of listening to nothing but the hum of the engine, and decided to try again.
"Hey."
This time he was answered, not by a grumpy "shut up," but by the screech of car brakes, and he was promptly catapulted forward. It took him a moment of grumbling and a few choice swear words to keep his temper under control as he peeled his face from the back of the front seat. The driver sounded amused.
"We're getting off."
"So I've gathered."
"Don't you try to act smart."
He want to say, "But I don't even need to try, I just do," but resisted the temptation.
The two guys in charge of him were anything but gentle, and they gripped his arms much too hard for his own comfort. But then again, the pistol they had pressed to his side quelled any complaints he would have made. (Getting a matching bruise for the other side of his face wasn't really an appealing option.)
It was maybe a ten-minute walk, but it felt longer because Matt hated being blind.
When he did get his sight back -- they slipped the blindfold off without warning, and he automatically reached up to slide his goggles back on, the cheap fluorescent lights hurting his eyes something awful and leaving Technicolor spots in his vision -- he was greeted to the a centerfold shot of "Mafia Wetdreams." Gold and black and leather and stained silver. A sneer that was all contempt and arrogance and chocolate.
"Take the handcuffs off. He won't be stupid enough to do anything."
A voice that said, 'you know what to do.' And Matt responded by pretending he didn't know the man sprawled out on the couch before him, pretended that he didn't know this guy who had dared to waltz out of his life some four years ago without a single word, pretended that he didn't feel glad about seeing this magnificent bastard again, and just gave a sort of a half-snort.
"Great. What am I here for?"
Mello only smiled, and had Matt dragged off to a private side room for a private briefing. "Private," Mello hissed at the bodyguard-thug-muscle-men-people, and they gave each other shifty glances as their boss reached to slam the door shut. Matt grinned and gave them a one-finger salute from behind the closed door.
It turned out that Mello had needed a hacker, and Matt just happened to be available and infamous among the cheap back alley gangs of LA. It also happened to be that there were rumors that Mello was gayer than a male hooker, and soon enough Matt found himself free to roam about the mafia HQs as long as he responded to the title of "Mello's fucktoy." Mello calmly explained that he'd prefer Matt's uses to stay secret, so that if the mafia ever went down, nobody would bother to bump off Matt as well; people rarely cared about prostitutes.
"That's fine, but do I need to live up to that title?" Matt quipped dryly, only be answered with a sharp retort of "We'll see if you're up to it."
(Mello fucked him into the mattress three nights later, and they even had sex in some of the most bizarre places ever --
1. bathroom stall at McDonalds, where they'd gone just for the chocolate shakes anyway
2. back alley of Los Angeles, where a black cat jumped on Mello back as he bent over Matt's form pressed into the wall, and scared the hell out of both of them
3. in the middle of a Best Buy where they broke in one night for Matt to steal a few laptops and ended up knocking over a display case of iBooks
4. you don't want to know the rest
-- and he didn't really care any more that the other mafia guys were giving him odd and sometime threatening looks because hey, I bet none of you guys knew that Mello has a little freckle just left of his asscrack. It's almost cute.
I missed you, buddy. Four fucking years.
I missed you.)
*
"Matt."
It's rare that Mello's the one to initiate a conversation, so Matt looks over at the Mello, head cocked to the side. Words hit the air, bitter and heavy, like smoke, like dark chocolate, like garbage and vomit and pure black regret.
"I'm--"
Mello was fourteen when he left the orphanage, meaning Matt was thirteen the morning he woke up to find a note next to his pillow.
It said "I'm." And that was it.
The rest of the writing had been too smudged to read, and the ink came away in sticky black stains when he touched the jagged smears. They had seemed so angry.
("I'm." You're what, Mello? You're what? Leaving? Never coming back? Mello, you bastard, what are you trying to tell me? You're--
*
"--sorry."
And the word is enough to smash the breath out of Matt's punctured lungs.
Sorry. Two syllables that Mello would never say. (Is that what you wanted to say all those years ago, Mello? Was that why those smeared-out words looked so unnatural, so hesitant, so angry?) Mello looks the same, now, as those jagged black gashes on the thin slip of paper did back then. Empty and blank, yet trying to mean something.
But Matt doesn't say that, doesn't mention the fact that he kept that meaningless little note until the paper wore away and turned to just so much ragged pulp and he finally had to throw it out. Doesn't say that he spent four fucking years waiting for some form of contact, any form of contact, and that that trip to the mafia HQ had been the trip of his life -- better than alcohol, better than sex, than drugs, than air, than oxygen. Doesn't say that all that time they were staying in shitty little apartments in LA and Tokyo and places in between, bogged down with a dozen surveillance cameras (we can't mess up, Matt, do you understand? We can't mess up) and trying to drown out their impending doom (we're going to die, aren't we, Mello?) with bouts of sex -- hot, desperate, needy -- he didn't really care if he ended up dead or in jail or on the death row, because
"It's okay."
Even with his combat boots, he's a little shorter than Mello, and the blond hair tickles his nose as he wraps narrow arms around tense shoulders (sorry, I'm going to be leaving bloodstains on your vest, hope you don't mine) and tentatively draws in the warmth.
Mello doesn't respond, doesn't say anything, doesn't do anything, and Matt takes that as the signal to bury his face in the small space at the Mello's neck, breathing in the scent of burnt flesh and nuzzling a charred rosary. Mello still smells like chocolate, even after all that fire and ash, and Matt presses a small kiss to the side of his mouth, at that spot where the scars end and smooth skin begins. He knows he tastes like blood and cigarette, and it's a morbid cocktail -- skin charred to a crisp still hot beneath his lips -- but it doesn't matter any more, and he smiles into the kiss, whispered words swallowing up the silence.
"It's okay."
Ash drifts up to the sky and
out
of
sight.
Then
there's
a boy crossing the street, pretty and blond, and you know his name is Mihael -- Mihael, Mihael, be careful, watch where you go -- and he just looks so goddamned happy it shouldn't be forgiven. He has a dog, too, some red-brown dappled mongrel with a black spot around its eyes, and it's called Mail, and it's just there, tagging along after Mihael, tail wagging, and--
They're all lies, lies made to deceive the heart, and even if it's true, you know, just know that Mail will get hit by a car -- die bleeding his guts out onto the filthy asphalt, bits of flesh littering the ground -- and Mihael will probably be raped and killed and end up on one of those news features -- "Gruesome murder case, ten-year-old's body found decapitated and rotting in basement" -- and that will be the end, the grand finale.
But maybe, maybe -- Mihael, Mail, did you ever believe in God? -- it's okay to believe those lies for a moment, maybe it's okay to deny the truth and drink in these falsehoods, even for a split second, because maybe, maybe they could have done better if they were born a little different.
Ignosce mihi, Pater, peccavi.
But that's all a lie, too.
--actually, never mind.
They were born as trash, lived in filth and died a glorious death, like two little sewer rats. Worthless, unappreciated, but more than enough to bring down a god to its knees with squalor and blood. They never believed in that "god" that people looked to and prayed to, they walked their own goddamn pace and cast aside the cross (silver burnt and covered in ash, rosary beads charred and melting).
(--and that's okay.)