All The Way Here

"Good morning, you God forsaken junkie." Mello spoke from the bed once chocolate and coffee had roused him to speech. He peered up from beneath the covers, watching Matt move between the armchairs with a mug of tea in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth. "Able to think straight these days?"



"Yeah." Matt smiled, coyly. "Sorry about that." He glanced across at the blond in the bed, then settled down on the settee, sipping at his drink. "You didn't seem to mind too much though." He filled ash into the ashtray, then added, as an afterthought. "In fact, I think I got away quite lightly considering what you could have done to me last night. Wow, that was intense."



"Right. Well, I'm glad I know how to work your libido." Mello had climbed out of bed and was pulling on loose black, leather trousers. Still topless, he carried his breakfast over to an armchair and sat down. "Why have you got cigarette burn marks all up the inside of your arm?"



Matt flushed uncomfortably. "Because you can't just walk into a doctor and demand anti-depressants and sleeping pills without some kind of evidence that you need them. Even in America."



"Don't give me shit." Mello glared. "You think I haven't known you since you were three or are you mixing me up with some fucking stranger off the street?"



"I didn't spend a week watching a wall and burning myself, if that's what you mean." Matt replied, after a pause.



"Well, you obviously spent some time of it doing it." Mello's foot tapped on the table. "But ok, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. You did it in one calculated session as a strategy against a long flight. You're not intending for it to carry on, because you know that I see you naked every day and..." He fixed his gaze with a venomous threat, "I would see it."



"Yes." Matt's voice was small, barely audible.



"And we have a promise in place from last time, that I own your sorry ass and the only marks on your body should be the ones I put there myself." Mello's voice lashed. Then his poisonous facade faded and it was calm Mello who spoke next. "And we have a promise also there from the time before, when you swore on my life that you would tell me before it got that bad again."



"It was just strategy, I promise." Matt's face was shielded under a mop of red hair; his eyes unreadable beneath the orange goggles. "Nothing more."



"I'm sorry about LA." Mello whispered back. "I know it did your head in, but there really was no other way it could have been done. It gave us a lot of really valuable information. Thank you for doing it."



"You don't have to thank me. I'm in this with you." Matt reached for the Gameboy that he must have been playing as Mello slept.



"Please don't block me out, Matty." Mello stood and joined him on the settee. "I can't watch your back if you hide from me."



Matt paused in the act of switching on his game and turned with a smile of reassurance and openness. "It's not that big a deal, honestly." He took up his tea and sipped it, relaxation radiating from him. "So, what's the craic here? Who are we watching now?"



"The television." Mello emphasized his point by switching it on. A live news feed showed nothing much happening in a large, sculptured public area. "This is Japan's national obsession with all things Kira. Television channels falling over each other to prove how much more devoted to Kira they are than all of the others. Commercial companies sticking 'I love Kira' on everything they pump out. Vox pops on the streets full of people becoming more hysterical, more over the top, in an attempt to be Kira's number one fan." A curl of his lip expressed his view on the matter eloquently. "Cameras are everywhere, filming the slightest lead that major players are doing something interesting. People executed live on television for the entertainment of the masses."



"But are they following Misa Amane, Mogi and Aziwaka?"



"Mogi and Aziwake are watching her and L, then they will be reporting to Near. Hal is reporting to me." Mello smiled, part smugness, part danger. "Misa Amane is a huge star here in her own right. The cameras were in her face long before Kira came on the scene and they've not stopped now."



"I see." Matt watched an over-excited reporter engaging with the anchorman in speculation about a door. They were interviewing each other about nothing, but adding significance in a way that was mildly stirring. He found himself staring at the door, vaguely aware that it's importance in the world rested solely on the fact that someone who may or may not be the next spokesperson for Kira had entered through it half an hour before. "So we're watching television."



"For now." Mello sneered at the reporter. "There's a couple of ways that this can go. I have resources here."



"More than in LA?" Matt asked in surprise.



"It's complicated." Mello said, enigmatically, and bit off a block of chocolate. Cold calculation played out in his head and he evidently concluded that this was information that Matt needed to know. "A couple of years ago, there was a bit of business took place, which brought the Mafia and the Yazuka Triad briefly clashing on the margins of each other's operations. I won't put images of what happened next in your head, but the upshot was... how can I put this? One of their men got trapped behind enemy lines. It was down to me to decide what to do with him." Mello's eyes grew more intense, memory stabbing harshly. He saw again the young man's face, as Mello, scrolling through the man's text messages, learned his name; found too the names of a wife and child. The panic and the terror filling the room. "I let him go." Another bite of chocolate. "Last week, in LA, I called him up again and claimed the favour. The Yazuka are in crisis, but they haven't been as... dessimated... as the American Mafia. They are strong enough. We have this place to shack up in and anything else that I need."



Matt was sitting very still. He hardly recognized Mello when he wore the expression that he wore now. "You've been in Japan just over 24 hours and you've already joined the Triads?"



"No." Mello snapped and suddenly seemed much more himself. His words bore emphasis, as if this was vitally important for Matt to understand. "I did not join them. I don't know if I could have, not being Japanese, but right now, perhaps I could. But I didn't join them."



"Yet they spoke to you." Matt was finally realizing precisely how central Mello had been in the Mafia. The knowledge drained through him like icy water in his veins. "They gave you the time of day."



"They agreed to provisions and..." He faltered, "something else." A mug was pushed under Matt's nose. "I'll have hot chocolate."



Matt took it, grateful for the opportunity to think. The tiny kitchen was at least away from the blond's presense, though it reached like something solid through the plasterboard. Mello had been Mafia. Mello had been Mafia. There was a flash of memory. Mello raging about something once, looking at Matt as if he was something found on the bottom of his shoe. 'It isn't like the fucking Godfather, Matt.' He'd snapped, before storming out. Sometimes Matt saw snatches of what it was like, memories trailing like poison behind his lover's eyes. Until now, he had never let that knowledge lodge so completely in his mind.



He returned to the living area. "You just walked into a Triad base and they just gave you weapons and a car."



"Yes." Mello's eyes steeled. He looked slightly supercilious, as if there was nothing that he was thinking that Matt was ever going to be old enough to understand.



"Just like that?"



A slight, single shoulder shrug, and the blond watched him with eyebrows arched. He was transformed into a different Mello, something alien and predatory. Something which caused Matt to just want to flee, but instead to stand there trying to see his lover behind that mask. The blond's arms were wide against the back of the armchair, his feet up on the table, yet it felt as though he could spring at a moment's notice and you had better not be there when he landed. "I guess that news like me got around."



"Right." Matt was surprised to note that he'd backed away. Just a step, but enough to accentuate the distance. He had seen this before, he realised. He'd seen it in the nightclub, weeks ago, just before the whole place had been shot down. "I'll get the hot chocolate."



Matt had taken two steps away, out of sight, into the kitchen, when a creak sounded from the settee. He turned and gasped to find Mello right behind him. But it was his Mello, still a crazy, dangerous timebomb, but somehow... tamer. His lover took him in his arms and looked right into his eyes, "Matt, I didn't join them." He smiled, stony calm, even as his eyes beseeched understanding.



"You must have been a pwnage Mafioso." Matt smiled back. "Don't do that again?"



"Do what?" Mello grinned coquettishly and sauntered back into the other room. When Matt returned with their drinks, it was to find him reading papers and looking for all the world like the studious Wammy child he'd first known.



"What was the second thing you asked them to do?" Matt set the drinks on the table and debated sitting back down next to him.



"Have you ever heard of the actress, Maria Andretti?" Mello asked, still reading the document in his hand. When Matt indicated that he had, the blond went on. "I met her several times. She was connected with them. One day I might have lost my temper a bit and she saw it. She came over to me and said she could teach me to have them eating out of her hand. She called it her glamour."



"What's this got to do with the price of cheese?" Matt sat on an armchair, contriving to look as though his hand locking over his DS controls was a complete accident. It had just been there.



"You think yourself into a role until you are that person. Then you project it outwards." He lowered the papers. "Which Mello do you want to see, Matt?"



"Dunno, they are all arseholes."



Mello laughed aloud. "I do love you."



Matt met his gaze and smiled. "Maybe you haven't seen every Matt yet."



"No doubt I haven't. We were a long time apart." He leaned over to touch Matt's knee, then to half-stand to kiss him. "You'd changed when we met back up."



"Well, so had you."





"It wasn't a criticism." Mello sat back again. He looked back, oozing sexuality until Matt blushed. "Let me tell you again about glamours, because you fall for them every time."





"I know about pretending to be something you're not."





"You're missing the point. You don't. You just become more of what you can be." His eyes narrowed suddenly. "What do you mean pretending to be something you're not?"





Matt smirked. "You've been places. I've been places. We learned our craft. Hell, even fucking Near must have been places. We don't win by pretending we're all like we were four... five years ago."





"Near?" Mello glared, but he was listening.




"Bloke's commanding half the legal authorities in the world, you telling me he hasn't adapted to feeling the pressure? You have. You make a false move and you're dead. He makes a false move and he's dead. I make a false move and I have to respawn and start again." Matt shrugged. "Yeah, I got away really lightly thinking about it."





"Yeah." Mello picked up the remote control and flicked through the channels. They were all showing the same sort of hysterical non-news. "And it falls to me to work out how to keep you alive when the baddies aren't javascript."