Matty

Mello had received quite a spanking after the stunt he pulled that night.

Leaving home during study hour and endangering his life against a fire-breathing dragon—

It wasn’t the spanking that infuriated him, however, but the clear implication that this was something beyond his capacity, while here to his side sat a boy one year his younger who managed that very feat.

“You’re so dead,”

Mello informed him while the two were sent to their bath, Mello without dinner and Matt with prospects of dinner to come, if he had helped make it.

But, nevertheless, they quietly helped each other disrobe, Mello quite astounded by just how filthy the other boy was.

“Is that from the dragon,”

He asked quietly, eyes trailing not only the dirt all along his skin but also the bruises and cuts, and Matt nodded, but he didn’t seem all that proud of it, really.

After they had stepped into the tub and rinsed each other, Mello had discovered that Matt had red hair, and that he somehow had managed to defeat a beast ten times his size without any serious injuries.

Really, Mello wanted to hate him more than he did, but there was something about this kid that he couldn’t quite hate so much, and this was unusual, because at hatred Mello was really quite adept.

And no,

You didn’t do it for pride—

No, he did it—

Because he was bored.

That was the answer he gave to the headmaster, and that was the answer he gave to Mello, too—

Matt had slain a dragon—with a set of stolen darts—because he was bored.

“Just what kind of crazy idiot are you,” Mello whispered to Matt when they lay to sleep, side by side late that night.

And, grinning that same charming, sheepish grin he showed Mello when first they met, Matt pulled a small package from the inside of his gown—

Something he hid away for Mello at dinner—

A bar of chocolate fudge.

Mello’s face brightened all at once as his gaze met Matt’s in silent understanding.

Just the kind of crazy idiot, perhaps, who might become his friend.

* * *

Matt was different.

All around there fluttered the heart of accomplishment, a genuine love for wizardry and the written word, fueled not merely by the thirst for competition and acknowledgement but, above all else, by a solid and real passion for challenge.

But not for Matt.

Introverted and content, Matt did things not for the grand opportunity to achieve or discover or advance, but because – and if – they entertained him. He was different; but he wasn’t in the way.

Matt’s mother was killed in the plague. His father, he never met him, but his mother, like everyone’s mother, was killed in the plague. To Matt, really, it was all the same, because he had very little recollection of either one of them, and it wasn’t like with Mello, with Mello who was filled with bitter feelings about his parents who were taken from him, or how he was put at the care of a priest, and how he, too, was expected to become a priest.

“It seems nice,”

Matt had mumbled from above the book he was reading, “priests grow gardens.”

“You can have your stupid garden.”

“Yeah?”

It was like a bad joke, for someone like Mello to be raised with priesthood in mind, but nobody knew that when he was so young, and he did everything in his power to show his will as a mage, instead.

And Matt – he hardly thought about what he’d like to learn. He learned whatever they felt like teaching him, and everyone liked him for that. He also seemed to show about the same amount of enthusiasm toward everything – and this wasn’t very much.

There was a little bastard known as Near, a curious, asthmatic boy whose sole reason for existing seemed to be aggravating Mello. Cerebral and stern, Near was granted access to the library at the young age of six, a full year before Mello, and, under supervision, even to books of and about wizardry.

Matt could tell, and really, was mildly amused by, Mello’s obvious, murderous rage in response to this. Clearly, there had been some mistake. Certainly, it’s Near who was destined to live among the Brotherhood, and not Mello.

“You could grow herbs in your garden,”

Matt would smirk, because inciting Mello’s rage was really quite the enjoyable form of recreation, and so was the fist fight that followed, and so was tormenting Near after that.

They did wicked things to Near.

They snuck in at night and lined the inside of his clothes with porridge, they cornered him and beat him up, they even went so far as to tie him naked to the trunk of a tree and leave him outside for hours, until, furious and red in the face, Roger would later find him there, aggravated and coughing and miserable, and then again Matt and Mello were in trouble.

But there was no helping the boy. No matter what they did to him, no matter how far they tormented and humiliated him, he nevertheless somehow managed to surpass them and everyone else in every conceivable regard.

But, even if making Near miserable hardly reversed Master Wammy’s determination to train Near as a mage, it should, Mello reasoned, at the very least, question his determination to train Mello as a priest.

They could get into the library now, they were allowed, but under supervision, and not to the books they certainly would use to attempt all manner of mischief.

Matt liked books, and he liked the library, and, unlike Mello, he didn’t mind terribly being supervised, he didn’t even mind falling asleep at the library while supervised, nor the reprimand that followed, and certainly it didn’t stop him from doing it again.

“We could maybe look while Near is reading them,” he suggested to Mello one day in the bath, “we could pretend to be studying next to him.”

“No one’s gonna fall for that.”

Matt thought for a moment, slowly sinking under the water.

Under the water, his mouth stretched into a wicked grin.

“We could help him study when he’s ill.”

“What are you on about. Near isn’t ill.”

“Not yet,”

came the reply, and slowly, Mello began to smile back.

“No, not yet.”

“Priests should know their way around garden herbs, what would you suggest?”

No sooner did the words leave Matt’s lips than he was immediately attacked, a barrage of hands and arms and teeth that left the room covered entirely with puddles of water inches deep and would land them both in trouble—again.

To be continued...