All The Way Here

Mello turned from the monitors at the cry of pain across the room. There had been assorted banging and clanging coming from that direction ever since Matt had asked if it was ok if he took a break. As the Japanese policemen showed no signs of leaving their room, even appearing briefly at the window, Mello had agreed. It didn\'t take two of them to watch the bodies being taken away. He was perturbed to spot a laptop on the floor displaying a site headed, \'Common Radiator Problems\'.



"Do you actually know what you\'re doing?"



"Fixing the motherfucking radiator." Matt spat back, unseen behind a chair. "Oh arse." There was a sudden hissing sound that had Mello on his feet and rushing over. "Step back!" There was an arterial bleed on the pipe. Matt was levering with a spanner on a valve further along. The water was reduced to a faint drip. "That was scalding hot, idiot."



"Will you please stop taking it out on me?" Mello glared. "Are you burnt?"



"No." Matt peeled off his gloves and turned back to the laptop. He scrolled down and clicked a link. One hand looked very red.



"Run it under cold water." Mello tried to soften his tone. "Not directly onto, just above and let it trickle down like a stream."



"I\'m alright." Matt scrowled at a diagram on the screen in front of him. "Mello, who\'s watching those policemen if you\'re here getting in my light?"



Mello raised his eyebrows, considering any number of responses. He settled on turning around and returning to the window. Sometimes it was best just to let Matt get on with it. The streets were quietening out there. Ambulances already having taken the injured; the military having bagged up the dead. Sections were cordoned off, but not everywhere. People crawled on their hands and knees, in sidestreets, still plucking dollars from less obvious nooks.



There was no reason for Kira to be out there. Mello himself, or Near, had been the prize and there should be no indication that either of them were still in this vicinity. This did not explain why the Japanese police had not yet left. Mello flirted with the idea of going over there, pulling a gun in their faces and demanding why they remained. Why would he stay, if it was him?



"Oh! For fuck\'s sake!" Matt\'s voice rose, shortly followed by the man himself. "I\'m having a cup of tea." He barked, as if the blond was going to stop him. Mello nodded. They remained because they had left a man behind enemy lines. As long as Mogi was missing, last known sighting being this battlefield, then they would stay put. If Matt was missing in all of this, he\'d be waiting too. Or something.



"Will you put some cold water on your hand as well, please?" Mello murmered, thinking. He reached the monitors again, scanning the streets for anyone not picking up money or bodies. His hand touched something and he glanced down. It was Matt\'s goggles and it dawned on Mello suddenly that his lover had watched that whole Hell without that distance. No orange-tinted sunshine to brighten the darkness. Guiltily, he peered around to see if the swelling around his eye had gone down yet. It was hard to tell, when Matt was sitting head down over a game, his face mostly covered in red hair.



Selecting two views to fill two screens, one of the window and one of the entrance door of the building adjacent to them, Mello wandered over and sat on the arm of the chair. A leather-clad leg pressed behind Matt\'s back and he leaned down, so that red hair tickled at his nose. "Hello." Mello spoke as mildly as he could. Images of dead people kept flashing through his mind. He pushed them back. "Any stunning redheads listening to me?"



"What?" Matt replied irritably. "I\'m trying to think."



Mello glanced at the screen. It looked more like a bid to fill a little hod with as many multi-coloured bricks as possible, then to deposit them in some kind of holder, than anything he would normally associate with thinking. But then, it wasn\'t his mind doing it. "Thank you for trying to fix the radiators."



"I haven\'t finished yet." Matt glanced up and, for a moment, his face could be seen. The area was still quite swollen, but his eye was open. His hand didn\'t seem to be half as red as it had been. Mello held the goggles behind his back, concluding that they couldn\'t be worn again today. On the screen, a Japanese face was glimpsed at the window, before the net curtains were straightened again. The kettle boiled and Matt stood, leaving empty air in the space encircled by the blond.



"I\'m going out to the shop in a little while. Do you want me to bring you anything special back?"



Matt\'s green eyes stared sharply back. Suddenly Mello had all the view he needed of the black eye, which just confirmed all that he had concluded before. The redhead poured their drinks. "You always send me to the shop."



"I need the air."



"It\'s too..." Matt handed him a hot chocolate. "I\'ll go to the shop."



"You aren\'t getting the option to." Mello injected a warning into both expression and voice. "You have a radiator to fix."



"We\'ll go together." Matt replied quietly.



Mello slapped down his hot chocolate and the fire flared up inside him. "Don\'t you fucking lose your nerve now you\'re in the middle of it. We\'re not going to be holding each other\'s hands in this fight." He grabbed his jacket and pulled it on, raising the hood to cover his face. "I\'m going now, because I\'m sick to death of you biting my head off and I need to have five minutes on my own."



Once the door had slammed behind him, Mello forced himself to calm down. He hated look of flinching submission his outburst had engendered in Matt\'s eyes, but until he had had chance to test the mood of the streets below, Matt was staying safely indoors. It took him ten yards before Mello realized that he had been so busy faking tantrums that he had forgotten to pick up his gun. It couldn\'t be helped.



Twilight was setting in as Mello stepped out into the tumultuous outside. After three days of being shut in a room with Matt\'s cigarette smoke, it felt good to have a lung full of clean air. He kept to the shadows, ensuring that something was always in the direct line of view between himself and the window from which the Japanese police would be watching. More people were still milling around than it had appeared when he\'d watched from above. The blond thought himself into a frightening person and allowed the persona to form around it. It was a glamour he\'d learned from actresses, when he\'d been in the Mafia, and it worked. Almost subconsciously, people gave him a wide berth, as he slipped into the building opposite.



Mello approached the younger of the two female receptionists and tilted his head, so that his long hair fell over his scar. Flashing a winsome smile, he gazed into her eyes. "Excuse me, ma\'am, I\'m meeting friends who are staying in this hotel. Can I just check if they have left or not?"



The young woman behind the counter dimpled as she smiled. Enquiring coyly as to the room number, she tapped into her computer and confirmed that they had not checked out. Mello thanked her, his gaze taking in the slightly dishevelled reception area. Without prompting, the girl gushed out her story, "You wouldn\'t believe it would you? The people after Kira were just over the road!" She rattled on and on, evidently a supporter of the mass murderer turned major celebrity. Mello kept himself non-committal, but calm. This was just a silly girl riding a global tide. It was to be expected. Suddenly she remembered herself, switching to professionalism, though the subtle signs of flirtation went on. "Did you want me to call through to Mr Aizawa?"



Mello blinked. So that was the name of one of the policemen. He shook his head and indicated with a gesture that he was leaving now. "I\'ll go to where we were meeting. It\'s good to know that I\'m not the only one who\'s late." Stepping out of the doors, he strode down to the little kiosk close by. It was closed and shuttered. "Fuck."



He momentarily debated returning empty handed. They could be up there for days and that, without chocolate or cigarettes, did not sound attractive. There was no alternative but to go further afield and find some purveyor of sweet addictions who hadn\'t been freaked out by rioting.



With the streets in this block closed to traffic, the air tasted of salt. Off somewhere to their right, Mello knew that the Hudson River lapped it\'s way tidally between them and New Jersey. On an island at its mouth stood the Statue of Liberty, now seeming, to the blond, like some kind of sick joke in a land where liberties had been so eroded in response to Kira. The great American Dream turned into nightmare; the population rolling over and playing dead the second someone stronger came along. Born in the Balkans and raised in Great Britain, Mello was not American, yet he had lived in LA long enough to glimpse that national psyche. The preoccupation with a better world and a brighter future that had always seemed so niave to a cynical European, but which nontheless was enticing. Mello found himself saddened now he walked through what seemed to him the tattered, inevitable remains. Poor Liberty. She couldn\'t have known that she tricked them, because, for all she offered, the poor, huddled masses turned out to be human after all; and of the same blood and sentiment that had caused the storied pomp in their ancient lands. Of course they flocked to Kira\'s worldview. They were too dazzled not to.



There was a man dead on the pavement. The clean up crew obviously hadn\'t ventured yet this far and Mello stared, numbing himself against the shock of this discovery, but quickly ascertaining that there was nothing that he could do. He bowed his head and muttered, "Gospodinu, imati milost na njemu; Kristu, imati milost na njemu." Then walked away.



Around the corner, it felt as if the world had come back. Like it had been tuned out and replaced with Hell, but now existed again. The traffic helped. New York made real with yellow cabs and road rage. The open shops were a life-line and Mello filled his basket with enough supplies to see them through a week at least. It may well be that they could safely leave later today, but then again, it may not. He didn\'t want to risk alerting the Japanese police to their location with unnecessary trips out of the front door.



As he shopped, he listened, taking in silently the buzz of excitement concerning the events several blocks away. The consensus, everywhere he went, was that the unnamed Near was the villain of the piece. Kira, the wronged anti-hero. He heard a ten-year-old begging his mother for a Kira t-shirt and, looking up, spotted them lining a shelf near to the counter. Biting down hard on the inside of his lip, Mello didn\'t merely pick his chocolate bars out, but picked up the whole box and carried it to the counter. When he learned that the American storekeeper had never even heard of Matt\'s British brand of cigarettes, Mello just bought a multi-pack of everything he had. Walking out with 500 cigarettes and 59 bars of chocolate, he figured they might just survive another hour.



Opening the door to the studio, the first thing that Mello noticed was the heat. The saturated floorboards in front of one radiator had dried to a mere dampness. He strode across to where Matt sat by the monitors and enveloped him in a hug. "You fucking genius."



Despite himself, Matt smirked his delight, still concentrating on the game in his hands. "Nothing\'s happened."



"One of them is called Aizawa." Mello grinned. "Saves us calling them the Japanese all the time." He piled the multi-packs of cigarettes on the desk in front of Matt, then added three lighters and a box of teabags. "I\'ve decided that we will stay here for as long as they are here. Near hasn\'t re-established contact, but he\'s still got the third man. We have these two. I wonder how many more Kira has left?"



"You shopped then. Thanks." Matt\'s eyes finally left the tower of tobacco in front of him and noticed the bags that Mello had abandoned at his feet. He shut down the game and moved to put everything away. "Is it bad out there?"



"It\'s not pretty." Mello sat down on the armchair, munching on chocolate and using the sight of the redhead to wash away the scenes from his head. "Near hasn\'t called."



"Mello." Matt stood with a bottle of washing up liquid in his hand. "No, erm..." He slotted the bottle into a cupboard, while the blond waited for him to speak. "You covered Near\'s back earlier. When he was escaping. Ok, I know that\'s because if anyone is going to beat him, you\'re buggered if it\'s going to be anyone but you, but, erm..." He took out a lettuce and looked at it like he\'d never seen one before. "I\'m glad you did that."



"Why?"



"Dunno." Matt shrugged. "Maybe you just look really sexy when you\'re doing the kill baddies and save the damsel in distress routine." He was still holding the lettuce, searching around for somewhere to put it. "Well, Near, not a damsel, but you know what I mean. Does this have to be refridgerated?"



Mello laughed. "I can\'t believe that a mind that can master radiator plumbing by searching Google for an hour can end up so befuzzled by a salad." He pointed with the chocolate. "You\'ll know it as the green stuff in a burger."



"That\'s gherkin." Matt hid a half-smile under his fringe. "We\'re going to be here for a while then?"



"Possibly." Mello sank into staring into space, chocolate travelling automatically to his mouth at regular intervals, and his eyes hardening. Matt noticed and quietly finished packing away their groceries, pausing at the last with the tub of cocoa butter. He understood. Taking off his gloves, Matt washed his hands, then pulled a computer chair behind Mello\'s armchair. Without saying a word, he reached over and smoothed back the blond hair. "Sorry, got lost in thought."



"It\'s ok, beautiful, carry on." Matt kissed his forehead. His fingers emerged with a blob of cocoa butter and gently began applying it to his lover\'s left temple. Mello watched him, but he didn\'t shift his own gaze from the burn scars and kept a little smile on his face. Cool ointment soothed the perpetual itchiness from forehead to neck. Mello closed his eyes. "So, me and you stuck in a room together for maybe days? Weeks? Whatever will we think of to do?" Mello\'s eyes snapped open, but Matt was intent on easing cocoa butter into the most ravaged spot of his shoulder. "You\'re going to have to take your top off." The redhead pointed a blob of cocoa butter at the collar of the jacket. He grinned. "God! I so love my job."



Mello smiled. "Matt, thank you." He lifted a hand to touch his lover\'s. "I\'m sorry I got scarred."



"Why? Just makes you even sexier." Matt shrugged. "Bad ass and kick ass. Now stop stalling and get your kit off."



"I swear you keep me sane." Mello shed his jacket and unzipped his leather vest. "Thank you."