Poisoned Rationality

Mello was sitting up against the wall, staring into space, when Matt returned from the bathroom. The redhead sank to his knees and crawled between his lover\'s legs to be cradled there. He\'d taken the pillow off and, but for the bandage around his torso, was still naked. In contrast, Mello had dressed, leather trousers and vest creaking as he moved to accommodate another body in his space. "Are you ok?"



Matt smiled and nodded. "\'Well, in fact, look at it this way, I mean, technically, our marriage is saved. This calls for a toast, so pour the champagne.\'" He snuggled in closer.



"What?" Mello blinked, startled.



Matt closed his eyes, resting his head on his lover\'s shoulder. "Nothing. Is my birthday over yet? Can we go back to bed?"



Mello cringed, "I\'m sorry it\'s been so shit."



"It hasn\'t. I\'m just knackered." Matt stroked Mello\'s scarred cheekbone. "I finally got you to have sex with me again." A huge grin broke across his face, remaining in place even when Mello narrowed his eyes at him. "Should we just ask Len if we can buy this flat?"



"You want to live in this shit-hole?" Mello sucked on a square of chocolate. "Roger knows this address." He frowned. "What do you mean, \'our marriage is saved\'? Were we in trouble?"



Matt laughed. "No." He started to sing, "\'I chime in with haven\'t you people ever heard of closing the God damned door. No, it\'s much better to face these kind of things with a sense of poisoned rationality.\'" The blankness on Mello\'s face told him that he was unfamiliar with the song. "Sorry, I came over all emo. Ignore, please. It doesn\'t actually mean anything other than I was singing in the bathroom in my head and did it out loud when I came in here."



"Right." Mello sounded uncertain. "In answer to your question, no, you have twenty minutes of birthday left. I suggest that we just sit very still and we might just survive it."



"But with more cigarettes and whisky." Matt looked wistfully out at the rest of the front room, but determined that they weren\'t just going to fly into his orbit. "I\'ll get them, you work on not looking so scared." He crawled across the carpet.



"Scared?" Mello sneered, as if unsure what the word meant.



"Yes." Matt recovered cigarettes, ashtray and lighter, depositing them beside the blond, before venturing back to bring the bottle of whisky and two glasses. "I know what it is as well, because I saw it coming a mile off." He settled back down on the floor, pouring their drink before entwining himself between his lover\'s limbs. "What does the great Mello do once Kira has been caught and Near has been owned? It\'s all you\'ve thought about since you were about ten. That\'s a decade of single-minded dedication to get over. That\'s why we\'re suddenly on about building a nest and... well, or, acting like we might as well get killed. Our lives being over and all that."



"I hadn\'t thought about it."



"Yeah, bullshit." Matt reached beside him to pull Mello\'s arm away from the knee it had been resting on and to place it around himself. "The sooner you move onto the next logical step, the better off we\'ll be. Which is, by the way, that you\'re going to be the best detective in the world, taking all the cases that the present L couldn\'t solve if he had the clues on post-it notes stuck to his teddy bear. Lawliet saved the world billions of times before Kira came along. There\'s a vacancy. So get on with it."



Mello cuddled him close. "I really fucking love you."



"I know." Matt closed his eyes. "So, the second it hits midnight, I can go back to sleep, yes?"



"Why are you so much more tired than I am?" Mello asked. "You haven\'t stopped yawning all day, except for when the adrenaline has been in your system. My guess, which I got around Sussex on our drive, is that you\'ve been on the sleeping pills again."



"This is why you\'re going to be the best detective ever."



"You act like it\'s only me in crisis. My first case is going to be sorting your head out." Mello bit off chocolate and sipped the whisky, mixing them together in his mouth. "Starting with helping you piece together why you got orphaned and why people banging on metal freaks you out. The two are probably related."



Matt went very still. "You are joking, aren\'t you?"



"No. I made a promise to you in Japan."



"But I only agreed to that because I didn\'t think we\'d make it past Kira alive." Matt protested, reaching for his cigarettes. He shook slightly as he lit it. "Besides I\'m fine now."



"He says, while the sleeping pills, anti-depressants, painkillers, whisky, lager and nicotine course through his veins, in a body beaten to a pulp, mostly because he\'s projecting his self-harm tendencies onto the nearest lovestruck sadist." Mello smiled sweetly. "You learned how to cry in Japan."



"Ok, I\'ll book us plane tickets to Croatia. I\'ve always wanted to see the Balkans. I\'ve heard that the men there are gorgeous."



"Spain\'s warmer and it hasn\'t had a civil war in the last twenty years." Mello said firmly. "Besides I remember what happened to me. You don\'t." His hand stroked down Matt\'s bicep. "Do you?"



Matt squinted around the doorframe, at the clock on the oven. "There\'s still got to be time." He whispered. "Mello, I\'ve thought of something else I want for my birthday. You to leave this the fuck alone."



Mello frowned. He leaned to look at the oven himself, then surveyed the redhead in his arms. "Where are your goggles?"



"Fuck knows. You took them off."



"Fetch them. They\'re on the table." Mello smiled, opening his arms again and biting off chocolate. Matt looked at him curiously, then crawled out across the floor. He glanced back to catch the blond watching him and blushed. A second later, the goggles were over his eyes and he crawled back. Mello wrapped his arms around him, then took the goggles off him. "I\'ve always wanted to see what the fuss is about." Before Matt could stop him, they were over Mello\'s head and covering his eyes. "You really must be tired. \'There\'s still got to be time\', you said. You couldn\'t read the clock!" Orange-tinted blue eyes gazed at the horrorstruck face in front of him. "How long have you been short-sighted? And why would you think I didn\'t need to know that?"



Matt gulped. "It\'s not much. Just for television and games and stuff. Driving."



"You go on and on about me never telling you anything..."



"I don\'t."



"... and all the time getting even basic information out of you is like getting blood out of a stone." Mello\'s voice rose. "How come it took me until now to find out that these goggles are actually prescription? How come I didn\'t even know you are Spanish until a couple of months ago? Anything else while we\'re on the subject?"



"Mello, stop stalling. Promise me that you\'ll leave it alone." Matt took his goggles back and looked at the clock. "I have two minutes. Please."



Mello shook his head. "You think that when midnight comes, I\'ll stop wanting to give you anything in my power to give you that makes you happy? February 2nd is important too. It\'s the anniversary of you being one day old. A year and one day. Two years and a day. Twenty years and a day and fuck me, but that last one, in itself, is a miracle." He hugged the redhead closer. "Me and you, we have a chance here to actually grow old and die safely in our beds of something boring. Yes, I know the likelihood is slim, but it\'s there. But in the meantime, you are skating as close to overdose as you can get away with..."



"You\'re exaggerating."



"In my body, right now, I have three drams of whisky and a bit of caffeine from the chocolate. How many drugs are you on?" Mello\'s hands went up, as Matt pulled away from him. "I\'m not preaching! You do whatever gets you through." He watched as Matt stood painfully and walked away across the room, towards his game station. "Matty?" But his lover didn\'t switch any of the consoles on. He picked up his jeans and unhooked the chain to take his key ring behind the television, where he crouched down. Mello sat up straighter, trying to see what he was doing. He saw the white plastic of the wall aerial socket deposited on the carpet. "What are you doing?"



Matt returned, a screwdriver in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. Tearing at the sellotape wrapped around it, he extracted smaller bags. Standing over Mello, he dropped them one by one onto him. "Fifty Ecstasy pills; an ounce of base; not much crack, but enough for a couple of lines; some really dried out skunk; ketamine... oh hold on, that was MDMA, this is the crack." The redhead shrugged. "Not half the amount of drugs that I could be on. You gave up the Mafia; I kept my mind clear for you. Now give me some fucking credit."



Mello exhaled loudly, looking up from the bags to where Matt leaned against the settee, smoking. "I wasn\'t preaching."



Matt opened the sideboard and took out bottles of spirits, some full, most in various stages of being emptied. "There\'s alcohol too, though..." He turned, green eyes blazing furiously. "I was never a fucking alcoholic! And this is no different to hiding behind the drugs of guns, religion and power."



"Please stop." Mello rose, stepping over all of the intoxicants to reach an arm around his lover. Matt pushed back with all his strength, knocking Mello into the sideboard. Bottles clattered but nothing broke. The redhead ducked away and took up his jeans. "Don\'t get dressed. You have no idea how gorgeous you are naked."



"Is that an order?" Matt snapped back bitterly. He stood there, holding his jeans in his hands, staring at the floor.



Mello nodded, then slinked off into the hallway. He opened a cupboard door, then raised his hand and began beating on the immersion heater inside. Metallic clanging sounded through the flat and he shouted back, in Spanish, "Mail, come here." There was silence from the front room. "Mail, where are you?" He carried on banging until a strangled sob came from the other room, then he stopped. A deep breath and Mello marched up the hallway to the front room. Matt was curled up on the settee, knees drawn up, head buried behind his thighs. Mello sat on the armchair, speaking in English now. "I\'m sorry. I\'m a bastard. Let me help you. Then you can take a big stick and poke it in the black hole that was Yugoslavia." Matt rose, his face surprisingly dry, and switched on his PS3. He didn\'t look at the blond. "It was anti-Catholic militants. They blew up the Church we were in. I survived because I wasn\'t on the pew where I should have been. I broke... something..." His hand rose automatically to clutch his rosary, pain flashing through his eyes, "I was hiding in the Confessional. It shielded me from the blast. My entire family were wiped out."



Matt stared at the loading screen. "I\'m sorry."



"Yeah, but time and place, Matty." Mello shrugged. "If it hadn\'t been that, then it could have been the sanctions starving us out. The Serbs or NATO bombing us. Gas." He leaned forward. "Up to 500,000 people displaced, over 100,000 people killed. That was what I was pulled out of. The Domovinski Rat. The man who got me out it is dead. The man who inspired me, to work past it, is dead. My country is splintered into eight and still fracturing. The thing that kept me going until now is over. Which leaves just one thing in the world that I have to get me out of bed in the morning." Mello noted that, though the game was loaded, Matt hadn\'t started playing it. "And he appears to me to not care if he lives or dies. He is pushing his sanity to the edge."



Matt turned to look at him. "Did you just blame me for the Yugoslav Wars?"



Mello blinked, reviewing the words he had just spoken. "No. I don\'t think so."



"But you played the orphan card." Matt smirked. Then his voice rose, "On me! Oh poor, poor Mello. The Balkans imploded over a war that even the Slavs didn\'t understand and he got caught in the middle. Then got thrown into another sort of hothouse and, woe is me! Let\'s all..." Matt was knocked sideways, crashing into the edge of the second armchair. The controls in his hands ripped out of their socket and landed near to the balcony window.



Mello raged, "That was out of fucking order!" His fist clenched still, towering over his prone, naked lover. "That was not what I was... oh fuck you!" He stomped towards the kitchen and punched a hole into the door there. "That was not why I was telling you." He kicked the oven door, the sound metallic, ringing through the flat and, as an afterthought, kicked it again.



Ten minutes passed before there was any movement from either room. Matt emerged from where he had hidden behind the armchair and padded into the kitchen. Biting his lip, he leaned in the doorway, looking through the murky light to where Mello sat on a chair beside the window. The blond didn\'t look up, his face covered in hair and thus unreadable. Matt wandered across and sank to his knees beside him, arms reaching out to cover leather legs. His head bowing to rest in Mello\'s lap. It took a while before Mello\'s hand rose to stroke his hair, tears dripping silently into the redness.