It Matters

It had been five days since Mello had last appeared at their apartment, which made it all the more surprisingly that his motorcycle roared into view just as Matt driving away. They met in the middle of the road, Matt's window wound down to speak with him. This was the first time he'd stepped foot out of the front door since the hothouse incident.



"'Sup?" Matt called out. Mello frowned at him from beneath his helmet. "You got a bug on me or something? You turn up now?"



Mello took off his helmet to hear him better.

"Where are you going this time?"



Matt's gaze slipped away and he reached for his cigarettes.

"Nowhere."



Stupid answer. Mello was instantly suspicious.

"I'm coming with you." Matt grimace was enough to settle the matter. "Wait there while I put the bike away." He was gone, shrieking towards their garage before Matt could protest.



"Fuck." He pulled over, smoking nervously until Mello reappeared and slipped into the passenger seat. "You won't want to come."



"I'll be the judge of that. Drive."



With a slight shrug, Matt did as he was told. He wasn't forced to divulge their destination, because Mello never asked. In fact, the blond didn't even check if he needed weaponry or explosives, probably because he was already tooled up to the hilt. In fact, it was only as Matt took the motorway exit to Winchester, that there was even a hint of realisation that this wasn't actually an expedition to claim fees or cigarettes. There was a slight change in Mello's breathing as a thought occurred and was obviously dismissed as too unlikely.



Instead they had talked in circles about where Mello had been all of this time. The upshot of the conversation was that it was none of Matt's business, but he needn't worry about any retaliation on the part of the Scandanavian gang. It took several miles before their argument about it faded. Mello was recognising familiar streets and instantly returned to his abandoned hypothesis.

"Matt, what the fuck?"



Matt just shrugged as their car pulled up outside Wammy's Orphanage, their childhood home. He lit his tenth cigarette of the journey and stepped out of the car before Mello could grab him.

"I said you wouldn't want to come."



Mello erupted,

"I'm not setting foot in that place! Why the fuck...?" But Matt had already moved away, out of earshot. Mello leaned out of the window. "I can't believe you... I'm staying right here." He sat back, fuming, snapping off chunks of chocolate like it was a victim to be devoured.



Matt ignored him. His attention was on the keypad beside the gate. His own code was nearly two years out of date, but little facts like that didn't faze him. He remembered the pattern. His fingers did a miniature Mexican wave in the air, as if he was tapping away on an invisible keyboard. Eyes closed, Matt was performing some complex mental arithmetic, until he arrived at a six figure digit. It had to be it. He reached across and typed it in, watching with a smirk as the gates opened to admit him. Just ringing the bell would never have been this satisfying.



It was strange how this building felt to him both familiar and alien. It reached out like a cuddle, that sense of home, but sparked a deep-rooted prickling of panic and claustophobia. Matt could hear the children playing, some loud shrieking game, round the back. In his mind's eye, he traced the contours of the playground out there and the hallway behind the front door in front of him. A sudden shifting of time and place, as if he could walk in and find a younger Mello there, and Nate, Johnny, Luigi, Chrissie, all the others. He wanted, with a shuddery irrationality, if a child Matt was still in there, haunting the place, even as his elder self lived.



Matt uttered a half-laugh and opened the door. If the grounds had been a mindwarp, then the interior was worse. It felt like pressure, but Matt shrugged at the air and ignored it. He'd timed it so that the older children would be in classes. He half-suspected that he'd done that just to avoid the fact that they might not know him. Despite everything, he couldn't be a stranger here. Head buried in the high-collar of his sleeveless jacket, hands pushed deep in his pockets, Matt strode off down a corridor as if he owned the place.



A quick knock on a certain door and the voice that bade him enter sounded like a ghost. The disquietening realization dawned that this man was the closest thing to a father that Matt had had. Hopefully still had. He steadied his features, opened the door and walked right in.

"Oh hi. You did say your door was always open if I needed anything."



To his credit, Roger Ruvie didn't blink. Perfectly composed, he stood and indicated a chair, as if Matt was a child again here and this was all absolutely fine. "May I offer refreshments? Tea?" Matt nodded, sitting down and staring around him. Roger carefully filled the kettle and laid out the crockery. He looked no different. It really was like walking into yesterday. "Matt, you are always welcome here, though I do ask one small courtesy."



"Shoot."



"Excellent choice of words. I ask that you remove your weaponry and, when Mello loses patience in that car and comes storming in here, he does the same." Roger added teabags to the pot. "A house of young people, many of them traumatised by the events of their lives and all of them studying, is no place for bullets."



Feeling foolish, Matt noticed the monitors, recording various parts of the house and grounds, as well as the street outside. That hadn't been installed eighteen months ago. In fact, the more he mused, the more he was really glad about that. He and Mello would have got into so much more trouble. With a bemused grin, he took the gun from the back of his trouser waistband and placed it on the table. Roger took it delicately and placed it in a drawer of his desk.



"You'll er... probably..." Matt rubbed his head, trapping great tufts of red hair between his fingers and holding them there. "That is, Mello probably won't... want to." He nodded towards the desk. "Give up the... if he has anything... I mean."



"Quite." Roger turned to survery the screens. "If what you need to tell me isn't for young Mihael's ears, then I estimate that you have five minutes at most to tell me."



"I'd say more like two." Matt stared at the same tree out of the same window that he always stared at. "Took me a couple of minutes to get in."



"No, it took you thirty seconds to bypass the security gate and one minute, 48 seconds to stop moping around the porch." The kettle was boiling, so Roger poured water into the teapot.



"In that case, he'll be in any second now."



"You're stalling, It Matters. Is the problem related to Mello?"



"I didn't agree to It Matters. I mean, I know it's not weird on the Beyond Birthday scale of freaking weirdness, but it's still a sh... rubbish name. Can I change it?" They both watched Mello step out of the car, slam shut the door and stomp towards the gate. "No, the problem isn't Mello."



"Then presuming you are not back in a bid to this time take your final examinations," Roger's disapproval was pursed in the set of his mouth, "thus letting us properly place you amongst our alumni, am I right in my belief that this is not a social call?"



"Thirty seconds, you said?" Matt was staring across at the screens, an endless source of fascination now. "Only it's taken Mello nearly a minute and a quarter. Pwned!"



Roger brought the tray to the coffee table. His eyebrows were firmly raised,

"Should I be disturbed, do you think, at how easily our security here is breached? Or proud that it's Wammy boys that are the ones who can do so?"



"I'm depressed and I can't sleep. Can you write me a prescription for some anti-depressants and some sleeping pills, please?" Matt's eyes never left the screen, as he watched Mello standing in the hallway. This was different. The adult Mello didn't fit here and the child that he had been just wouldn't superimpose itself over the top of him, even in imagination. He looked so hot. "I have to sort it..." He finally caught Roger watching him, appraising him. "... out." Roger's vision was taking in all of the marks on Matt's face, forming conclusions. "Like... get back to normal..."



"You don't crumple under pressure, Matt. In fact, of all the youngsters who have passed through my doors, you were the most steadfast of them all. Why would...?"



"That's kinda... sort of the point." Matt watched Mello climbing the stairs. He was going to see their old rooms! Suddenly Matt wanted to be out there seeing too. "Erm..." With a vague sense of distracting Roger's attention so that Mello wasn't caught doing something he should't be doing, Matt reached for his cup of tea and plunged ahead. "It might be a delayed reaction."



"I recall that we tested you extensively for ADHD, but there was never a hint of depressive tendencies." Roger waved towards the monitors. "He won't get further than the top of the stairs. Please don't concern yourself. Why do you think you are depressed?"



"You tested me for ADHD?"



"We determined that you were simply just excitable, fidgetty, disorganised and had a tendency to become very distracted. Why do you think you are depressed?"



"Because I accidentally blew someone's head off and bits of their brain went into my mouth and..." Matt watched Mello on a different screen. He'd paused at the top of the stairs, then seemed to change his mind. Another lightning mood change and he was stamping back down the stairs. "What? Oh yeah!" Matt reached for his cigarettes and had one in his mouth before remembering where he was. He just held it in his gloved hand, as if that's what he intended to do all along. "Freaked out in the shower... like crying, loads and... if Mello hadn't slapped me, I... like screaming... really bad."



No-one could make a polite knock on a door sound so impatient as Mello could. Matt waited for him to just barge in, but he didn't. He turned his attention to Roger instead, to see what he was going to do, but Roger was just staring at him. The elderly gentlemen snapped from his reverie and called out, faintly,

"Come on in, Mello."



Belying his good behaviour of the moment before, Mello threw the door open wide. He stood there, two steps over the threshold and one hand gripping the door. His whole stance was so at odds with his location. It just blazed sex and violence, pretty and deadly. His gaze grazed over Roger and settled upon Matt; his tone was curt,

"Roger... Matt are we done here?"



Matt had flushed, under wild imaginings that his conscience guiltily categorised as inappropriate for this room and half of the company. He was inordinately relieved, then fascinated, as Roger took over.

"Mello, please do come on in and close the door. Matthew was in the process of telling me what you pair have been up to."



A look of pure horror crossed Mello's features. He rarely blushed and never this crimson. The colour spread to Matt too, who sank further down into his jacket, until there was nothing of his face to see between it, the hair and his goggles. He hissed,

"Not that, you ar... idiot."



Realising his faux pas did not improve Mello's mood, yet he appeared uncharacteristically paralysed. Anywhere else, he would have started shouting and probably punching something by now. In fact, in this place, a handful of years ago, he would have done the same. For now, he contented himself with swinging shut the door with just enough force that it just stopped short of being slammed, then striding across the room to stare out of the window. Sarcasm dripped from his tone,

"Do carry on, Matt."



There was a creak as Roger rose from his chair and retrieved a mug from the vicinity of the kettle. This he carried across to the window and placed it on the sill. He didn't flinch any more at the sight of Mello's burn scar than he had at Matt's bruises, though Mello shuffled a step further away. Roger smiled and indicated the mug, "I prepared hot chocolate for you. It should have cooled enough to drink now." Then he simply walked away back to Matt and the comfortable chairs.



Gruffly, Mello muttered,

"Right."



Matt was watching in fascination. Had Roger always understood and manipulated them like this? He had remembered him as being some bumbling, half-idiot old man, there as the foil to a million escapades, to be fooled in each new victory. When did he become so damned aware? Then he recalled something,

"Mello, you've got to put your guns in the drawer. Kids..."



"Fuck off."



"Mmkay." Matt shifted his attention to Roger, wondering what he would do next. This new Roger was far more interesting than the old one.



Roger took a sip of his tea.

"Mr Jeevas, if you could kindly refer to the matter as I did and desist from your usual brand of social alchemy, I would be very grateful."



"Eh?"



Mello actually giggled from the corner. "He said, stop fucking trouble-making and wait for him to ask me nicely. Shit-stirrer." Matt's eyes widened and his head emerged from his collar in absolute shock, as Mello pulled out both guns and deposited them in a drawer. Matt did, however, note that his lover then sat defiantly in Roger's chair, closer than either of them to the weapons and also contriving to make it seem like he owned this office. Matt and Roger, they were just guests. "So, why are we here?"



"Thank you, Mello." Roger shifted his own position, so to create a circle wherein he could view them both. "I should have mentioned before, it really is quite wonderful to see you both again."



"Very cosy." Mello replied.



Matt hurriedly interjected,

"So, can I have them?" He blinked behind the goggles. "Please."



Roger's fingertips met to form an arch.

"Frankly, I would rather we discussed it at length before taking that course of action." He noted Matt's shrug. "I have a proposal. We are in need of someone to tutor some of the children in advanced computer programming. How about you move back in here for a month or two, until...?" He broke off as Mello spurted hot chocolate all over the desk and Matt stood up, shuffling off towards his friend and his gun. "Was it the tutelage or the moving back in?"



"Both!" said Mello. Matt shrugged again, leaning on the wall behind Mello. An unlit cigarette was rolled from finger to finger. Watching them together, Roger started mentally assembling pieces of the psychological jigsaw. A picture was clearly emerging, especially when a highly amused Mello asked, "What are we negotiating for anyway?"



Shifting his gaze to the window again, Matt mumbled,

"Anti-depressants and sleeping pills."



"We're here for drugs?" Mello rolled his eyes. "For fuck's sake, I could have got you them. You don't need them. I'm back now."



"I thought they might help."



"Well they won't." Mello slurped his hot chocolate. "I told you that you have a junkie personality." A dismissive twitch of the shoulders. "So he won't give them to you and you're not having them anyway. Can we go now?"



Roger poured himself a second cup of tea.

"This shift from extrovert to introvert, particularly around Mello... dare I say, submission? And the depression too. Did this manifest before or after you, ah-hem, shot a man's head off?"



Matt didn't need to turn to know how Mello was looking at him. He just stayed right where he was, staring out of the window. He waited until the exchange of words started again between his maybe father-substitute and the only person he would kill and be killed for; then he pulled his Gameboy Micro from his pocket and lost himself in 'Knockout Kings'. They didn't need him to decide what would happen to him next.