My Own Way

It hurt like Hell. It hurt like nothing Mello had felt before in his life and there was no way to switch it off. The Ibuprofen took the edge off it, but that was all. It hurt down to the bones. There was no way in which he could sit or lie or stand to make it hurt less. He wanted to scream or lash out or anything just to get out of his skin and stop feeling this hurting. But he didn't. He sat there with a laptop balanced on his lap and tried not to throw it across the room, because Matt was in the kitchen messing with water and solutions and so he could not show a weakness. To cry now, more than he had, would be to surrender control to the redhead.



Mello closed his good eye, which watered almost as badly as the covered one. At least he hoped that was watering and not the leaking fluids over it, because if it wasn't then his tear ducts were damaged and he might lose his sight. He was so damaged. He had seen himself in the mirror while Matt was out and it was all over. His face! That visage which had haunted a hundred wet dreams out in the city; the baby, blue eyes that had seduced and manipulated with a gaze, it was all over. He looked like the Phantom of the Opera. It had melted his face! Suddenly it wasn't even about looks anymore, it was the sheer horror of the fact that half of his face no longer existed, but for an oozing, torn and charred mess. He would have been better off dead. He couldn't live like this. It wasn't, any longer, a case of life fast, die young and have a good looking corpse. He'd lived. He would have to live like this. He would have to face himself in the mirror, looking like this. How did someone live like that?



"1978, diptheria and chlorea solution." Matt spoke randomly, as he crossed the floor. "The most important medical advance of the 20th century." He held out a glass with a milky liquid at the bottom of it. "Water, sugar and salt. It's not proper rehydrating salt, but it's still salt."



Mello opened his eye to see. "In lieu of the drip? Clever boy." He reached for the solution. It was going to taste like shit. He placed the glass on the floor and stared again at his laptop. Matt hadn't walked away again. Mello glanced up at the redhead. "What?"



"You'll need some every hour. I don't know the quantities. I know it saves lives all over the Third World, where there are no drips to give them, but I don't know if it's a pint or a teaspoon." Matt told him, with his perfect skin over his perfect face. He reached down and picked the glass back up again, holding it out to Mello. "You need to drink some now."



Mello took the glass again and it was all he could do not to smash it against the wall. But Matty was trying. The redhead was really trying to save Mello's life. He wasn't sitting down playing a game somewhere, ignoring the world. He was scouring the internet for hydration remedies. The attention felt good. Undeserved, but good. It was keeping Mello together, because he could not crack under this while Matt was moving around so calmly. He sipped the solution and it tasted like shit. He mixed it with a bit of chocolate and it still tasted like shit. But Matt was still standing there and he was watching behind his goggles, only taking the glass when it was empty, scuttling off back into the kitchen. A glass of plain water followed. Mello took it and placed it on the floor. Matt went away.



"We have to get out of here you know." Mello had practiced the words in his head. They came out steadily now, quietly spoken, but firm.



"You need to rest."



Mello yelled, "Matt! Just...!" It tore a new wave of agony through his face and the blond creased under it, trying to tense his facial muscles under the raging, seering, scraping pain. He gripped the laptop with both gloved hands so hard that it was a wonder that the casing held. He panted so not to scream anymore. Screaming hurt too much. Suddenly he had a flash of a face that he thought he had forgotten. It was as precious as it was humiliating. He was nearly twenty years old and he was mentally keening for his mother. He swallowed and reached for the water, dropping the laptop to the carpet. "Matt. Pack things."



The redhead was somehow just behind the settee again. Never exactly full of colour, his face was deathly white now as he nodded and moved across to the wall of computers. Wordlessly, he began disconnecting them and Mello watched him. Just like Wammy's House, the two of them together. Just like going back to square one. Mello might as well have been fourteen again, walking out of those gates to start his personal quest. The clawing struggle of the intervening years had been for nothing. He had been so close, so ridiculously close! But now there was no Death Note, no power base, no army and resources at his deposal. He had information, but no way of using it. He could have been L before Christmas. He had had it that near; just a hair's breath away. It wasn't fair. The years that no-one would ever know, which had nearly broken him and had damned his immortal soul, they were really all for nothing? It wasn't fair.



Mello choked back a Judas sob, causing Matt to look at him. It wasn't fair either that the one person who might just, maybe, perhaps, make this at least bearable, was missing by four years. A man looked back at him with the same green eyes, the same red hair, but it wasn't Mail. It was a cold adult in his shape. If he was thirteen then Mello might not feel so bad about wandering over the room and opening his arms, safe in the knowledge that even if his friend thought it weird, there would be no judgement. A quick hug and he could leave to lick his wounds with a renewed determination. He had hugged this new Matt in the bathroom and the man had stood there, lost behind a wall, where Mello couldn't touch him. It wasn't fair.



"I need my 'phone." Mello pointed and Matt rushed it over to him. He sipped the water and clawed the cushion beneath, as he read a number from the laptop and tapped it into his 'phone-pad. "All the great families are falling, Matt. We need to leave the country." Mello focused. If nothing else, he could escort Matt out of this catastrophe and return him to where he'd been found; let him get on with his life and hopefully have a good one. Mello decided that he would like that. Knowing that Matt was having a good life. It would comfort something inside, as he walked away again and tried to salvage something from the wreckage of his own. "The killings haven't spread to Europe. I'm taking you back to England."



"You need to rest." Matt whispered.



"Matt, just do as you're told. Please."



Matt turned away, unscrewing plugs and wrapping cables. "Mello, can I get you anything?"



Mello ignored him. There was nothing he could have to make this alright again. He could have been L within weeks. He could have solved this case and taken the code, right from under the nose of the person who had so consistently beaten him throughout their childhood. Near could have gone to Hell. Mello could have shown him the way. He'd teetered on the edge of it often enough. A connection was being made, the 'phone ringing against his ear. "Procter, we need a flight." Mello could hear the shock in the pilot's voice. He must have assumed Mello dead with all the rest. "One last flight and we'll call it quits on your debts. We go tonight." A few feet away, Mello watched Matt frown on the verge of vetoing it. Mello glared at him, the best he could. Matt just didn't get it. Yes, Mello could die, but he was damned if he was going to do it without getting the redhead to safety first. This was a Mafia owned apartment they were in, in a country where the families were being purged in a kind of moralistic genocide. He would get Matt out of the killing fields and if that made him a martyr, then right now that could only be evidence of the Lord's mercy. It really, really hurt.



The deal struck, Mello lay back on his side and closed his eye again. Heat still seemed to radiate out from him. The apartment itself like a furnace. Matt manhandled carrying cases and monitors, stacking them near to the door. He dashed across the floor, back into the kitchen. There was the squirting of water several times over; the tinkling of spoons on glass. All without a word. Mello blocked him out, holding instead, in his mind's eye, a vision of the younger Matt. The happier, more open Matt. The one who didn't need to be hit or intoxicated with lust in order to be on Mello's side. The Matt who Mello would have given anything to have take his hand now and let him cry on his shoulder. "I miss you, Mail."



In the kitchen behind him, there was a pausing in the decanting of liquid into pop bottles. Mello could feel him looking at him. He heard a cigarette being lit and then the bottles were being filled again. Very softly, barely heard, came the reply. "Mello, I'm still here." Mello almost believed it.