Watari Pt 2: Wammy's House

Matt left his workshop and crossed the yard. The need for a cup of tea over-riding the fact that he would have to encounter Mello again. Too many unspoken words hung between them and Matt wished he could say them. Mello would listen, he knew that, but the memories lay too deep, too painful for recall. He hated the look in his lover\'s eyes, that silently pleaded for openness. It wasn\'t even about possession anymore. Mello wanted to know because he needed to know the route to those places inside Matt that had never been accessible for counselling or comfort. Blue eyes alternated between accusation and beseeching and had done for days. The fact that they hadn\'t had sex since their wedding day possibly had a lot to do with it, but that was Mello\'s fault. Matt had made it quite clear that he was available, but Mello had so far used every trick in the book to refuse to touch him beyond sappy kisses and cuddles.



Matt entered the kitchen, only now realising how cold it had been outside. Mello was there, sitting at the table, hiding something guiltily under it. Matt smelt the lingering scents of bubble bath and shampoo and looked carefully at the blond, trying to discern what he was up to. He had changed into a different black leather outfit and looked cleaner, but that was about all Matt could deduce. Mello sighed, "I was plucking my eyebrows, ok?"



Matt grinned. "Camp as fuck." He walked on, filling the kettle and setting it to boil. The awkwardness descended again and he begrudged it. "Want a hot chocolate?"



Mello nodded, cautiously bringing the tweezers above the level of the table. He paused, as if awaiting permission to continue, but then sniffed and carried on anyway. "Yes please." He focused on the mirror in front of him, pushing back again his newly washed and dried hair. Matt watched him attacking tiny hairs that were so blond and miniscule that it had never even occurred to him before now that Mello plucked them. He should have known. After all, the Slav obviously shaved his armpits and chest. His attire and hair-style were hardly masculine. "What?"



"Just pondering whether being with you means that I\'ve turned heterosexual." Matt smirked. "And I\'m monitoring the CD collection for infiltrations of Shirley Bassey and Abba."



"Fuck off." Mello pulled faces at himself in the mirror. "Just because I take pride in my appearance."



Matt pushed himself away from the worktop and sauntered to his side. "And very pretty you are too." He smiled, as he leaned down for a kiss. "I wouldn\'t have you any other way." Mello smiled back, biting his lip, and dropped the tweezers into a small bag that he\'d secreted on the chair beside him. His fingers hovered inside it and Matt caught a glimpse of all kinds of weird and wonderful items, for which he hesitated to work out the use, but it was the eyeliner that Mello brought out. Matt left him to it, returning to the worktop to prepare their mugs for the boiling water.



"I mostly wouldn\'t have you any other way either," Mello began cautiously, "except perhaps a little more forthcoming on things." With a stroke the uneasy peace was broken. Matt sighed, the distance opening up between them. If he thought for one moment that an hour\'s pain, mining that terrible seam of memory, might just lance the boil forever, then he\'d tell him. Mello already knew the story. He knew what had brought Matt to Wammy\'s House and the events that led from birth until that moment. It was the emotions that he craved; not the dispassionate telling. It had taken seventeen years to even get that far, but Mello knew that he hadn\'t even begun to breach the defences inside Matt\'s mind, whose collapse might just lead to healing. Matt appreciated this, it had been explained to him with compassion and patience; but he wished that Mello would just stop now. He wasn\'t his latest case to be solved like a puzzle or trampled underfoot in the process. He could see, like some inevitable boss fight on the horizon, this ending in a trip to Spain to search through the ruins of his past for understanding. "I just want you have have closure, Matty." Mello commented quietly, not looking up. "I want you to be able to live the rest of your life without this inside you."



"Then why is it all about Spain and not Croatia?" Matt snapped back, stirring in the cocoa mix.



"Because I\'ve come to terms with what happened to me. You never did."



"Yeah. Whatever." Matt replied, dismissively, but the echoes of fear and aching need were flooding his senses again. Every time Mello picked at the scab, Matt\'s mind\'s eye replayed scenes, emotionally and visually, with all the intensity of his photographic recall. He was three years old again, starving and neglected, being raised by a television because his father wouldn\'t even deign to look at him. He was hearing the guns and seeing corpses rotting on the floor. He could feel the sodden pain of sores and nappy rash all over his body, but coalescing in the area from his pelvis to his knees. He could smell the stench. Snapping back to the present, Matt was suddenly and desperately hungry. He opened the cupboard above his head and ate biscuits, one after the other, whilst deciding what to cook for his tea.



"\'Puedes oir los tambores, Fernando?\'" Mello dropped his eye-liner back into his bag and, with a final look in the mirror, shut that too and zipped it inside the bag. Matt frowned and turned, his mind not needing to translate his native language. \'Can you hear the drums, Fernando?\', Mello had said. Matt wasn\'t quite sure what that meant, but Mello was smirking mischeviously at him. "Tenía tanto miedo, Fernando, éramos jóvenes y llenos de vida y ninguno estaba preparado para morir, y no me avergüenzo de decirque el rugir de las pistolas y los cañones casi me hizo llorar.\'"



"Is it a poem?" The redhead scoured his memory, trying to find it. \'I was so afraid, Fernando,\' Mello had said, \'we were young and full of life and none of us prepared to die, and I\'m not ashamed to say, the roar of guns and cannons almost made me cry.\' "Something by Rafael Alberti? Hemingsway?" Mello was shaking his head with a broadening grin. There was smug laughter in his beautifully outlined eyes. They sparkled inside the kohl. "Sorry, I don\'t get the reference."



"In that case, the sentiment is entirely lost on you." Mello winked, tilting his head to one side watching him. Matt could see the another attempt at that conversation forming on his lover\'s lips. He turned away, back to their drinks and the last of the biscuits before the words could be uttered. "Hmmm... maybe this one." The blond pursed his lips, but next time they opened, it was to recite another line, "Chiquitito, tell me what\'s wrong? You\'re enchained by your own sorrow, in your eyes, there is no hope for tomorrow."



Matt blinked. "Is that Abba?" He shook his head. "You\'ve finally crossed the line into..."



Mello growled back, "How I hate to see you like this, there is no way you can deny it." Mello rose from his seat, crossing to lean against the worktop next to Matt. A finger reached under the redhead\'s chin, Mello sprawling half over the surface just to meet Matt\'s eyes. His tone sounded like mockery, despite the humour in his stare. "I can see that you\'re oh so sad, so quiet." Matt pulled away his head away, bowing it so to avoid the repositioning of the finger. He slid the hot chocolate towards Mello to shut him up. "Chiquitito, tell me the truth. I\'m a shoulder you can cry on. Your best friend, I\'m the one you must rely on."



"It\'s \'Chiquitita\', not chiquitito. It means \'little girl\'." Matt muttered. "Will you just stop it please? You\'re getting on my nerves."



"But I\'m not saying it to a little girl." Mello grinned. He spoke inches from Matt\'s face. "\'You were always so sure of yourself, now I see you\'ve broken a feather. I hope we can patch it up together.\'"



Matt flashed him a warning look, but he bit back his original retort. Any mention of Spain, or the discussions that were corroding their relationship, was going to be seized upon by Mello, he knew that. He might be prancing around acting like an immature freak, but there was still a genius mind behind it. Instead Matt settled for, "I\'m married to a stereotype." He patted Mello\'s arm, before investigating whether there were any more biscuits. "I\'ll support you. I\'ll personally rip your rock CDs and upload them onto your iPod. I might even play football with you, if the situation becomes critical."



Mello bit back a laugh. His eyes swimming with enjoyment. He dashed suddenly back around the table and pulled back a chair in a bid to get into his bag as quickly as possible. He emerged triumphantly with a hair-brush and bounded up onto the table. Before Matt\'s incredulous gaze, the hairbrush was raised as a surrogate microphone and Mello was prancing across the wooden surface, shouting out the words. "\'Chiquitito, you and I know, how the heartaches come and they go," Mello\'s hand dramatically touched the left side of his own face, "and the scars they\'re leaving." Then he was pointing towards Matt, the light shining against his leather, as he stamped around with a wild abandon. "You\'ll be dancing once again and the pain will end. You will have no time for grieving." Mello met Matt\'s blank stare with a wide grin. "Chiquitito, you and I cry, but the sun is still in the sky and shining above you!"



"... The fuck?" Matt blinked. "You even know all the words."



Mello stopped dancing and gazed down from the table-top. "I\'m trying to make you laugh. I\'m trying to shock some reaction out of you. You keep mentioning me and fucking Abba in the same breath, so I\'m quoting Abba to you. Now I\'ve finally got your attention! Yes! It worked." He crouched down, pointing the hairbrush at his husband. "And so I have more ammunition. I want a promise out of you that you\'re at least going to try or else I\'m going to stand up here and do it again. Right?"



Matt stared, incredulous. "You\'re threatening me with Abba."



"Yes."



"That\'s so fucked up."



"No more fucked up than the rest of our relationship." Mello leapt down off the table. His arms encircled the redhead. "Baby, you are absolutely knackered. You\'ve got all these things going around your head that you\'re not sharing with me. That\'s great, well, it\'s annoying, but it would be ok if you were doing alright in there, but you\'re not. You\'re bursting into tears at the tiniest bit of provocation. Matty, you\'ve never been a cry-baby. Never."



"I\'m sorry." Matt raised his arms to squeeze out of the embrace. Mello let him go. "I\'ll try, ok. Not now, because I have things to do. But later. We\'ll chat later."



Mello nodded, watching him with a critical look on his face. The blond was just one layer away from snapping in frustration, Matt could see it, but he just wanted to get out of there. Back to his tools, where it was safe and quiet. "That\'s fine. That\'s all I want."



Matt sighed, but paused halfway towards the backdoor. "You do look pretty, Mello."



"Thank you." Mello flashed a smile, but there was still a scathing edge in his stare. "We\'ll talk later for definite?"



"Yes." Matt opened the backdoor and the air outside seemed to penetrate right down to his bones. He walked with a heavy gait back to his workshop and leaned against the worktable there. He felt drained to the point of just wanting to sit on the floor and never get up again. He yawned and took up the motherboard he was soldering, peering at it with bleary eyes. A glance at the clock told him it was only mid-afternoon. The job wasn\'t even urgent, he just wanted time to think and Mello tended to leave him alone in here.



Matt\'s mind flew over the points of contention, that he had to raise and find solutions for before anyone would take him seriously. He had a year\'s worth of files filled with ideas, but such things were easy to dismiss on paper. He needed to speak to them all, face to face, his peers and the staff too. For that, he needed something with the power to excite their minds and touch their hearts. He had to convince Near to give up certain responsibilities. He had to weave a safety net, for past, present and future children, out of wisps of pipe dreams. It suddenly felt very hopeless. Matt himself was convinced by the validity of his ideas, yet a part of him shrank from them too. Too many years of being told that he could be L conspired against his sensibilities. The entire Watari system was geared to produce a conveyor belt of replica Ls and, though Matt could think of many ways of tinkering with that for better results, it would dilute the very reason for Wammy\'s House.



The purpose of Wammy\'s House, that was the sticking point. Matt would be ecstatic at the notion that the children could choose to deselect themselves from the chance to become the new L. Each child could become anything that they wished to be, with genius and education underpinning their wide open futures. But if that was to be, then what could justify the money being spent on them? The point of Wammy\'s House was to create detectives. If the point disappeared, then could he persuade them to keep the institution open? Did he want to keep the institution open? Matt put the soldering iron down and sighed, lighting a cigarette instead. His mind hurt.



"Back to basics, Mail." He whispered to himself, hearing again, in his mind\'s eyes, all those Deduction classes, where they\'d slam into brick walls without conclusions. The refrain repeated over and over again, go back to basics and see what you\'re missing. Matt picked up his tea and sipped it. The only basic fact he could think about was Roger manoeuvring him into place, and Near setting him up to become Watari. Playing with his life, like he was a marionette, and would never control his own strings. The most rebellious of all his generation, yet he could still be coralled into the pen with all the rest. Matt brought back his fist and punched the worktable as hard as he could. Tea spilled everywhere from the mug in his other hand and the slight stinging pain, on the knuckles beneath his glove, solved nothing.



Matt had two days before he had to be in Wammy\'s House. An e-mail had gone out on the Watari Network, but no-one had confirmed their attendance at the meeting. Only Mello. But Matt was sure that Mello\'s presense would owe more to the fact that they were a couple, rather than the blond being there in his own right as alumni. Nerves stabbed at the thought that they would be facing an empty room; they hit worse at the notion that the others would come. Whatever happened, he would have to be ready.