Poisoned Rationality

Mello realized that he had been staring out of his study window for a long time, without really seeing a thing. Clouds passed in the middle distance and there was sunlight somewhere out there, but the forest was dark in his vision. He tapped the pen on his pad and slowly blinked. "\'Wake the serpent not, lest he knows not the way to go...\'" He muttered bleakly and reached for his chocolate.



The shriek froze him. "Mello!" A definite note of panic in Matt\'s voice, beyond his closed door. "Mello! Mello!" The blond ran, whipping open his study door and rushing to throw back the door opposite too. The first thing he saw was the blood. "Mello, get the First Aid kit." The blood covered Matt\'s hand, flowing down over the second hand, which he was using to squeeze his fingers. It dripped in black-red rivelets down his wrists. Matt sat down heavily onto a computer chair and looked like he was about to either faint or vomit.



"Let me see." Mello crossed the distance between them at a jog and pulled the hand higher into the air. "How did you do it?"



"Slipped with a Stanley Knife." Matt\'s voice was tight with shock and pain. "Have I lost my finger?"



"Unless you\'re holding it in place with your other hand, probably not. Let me see." He prised away the redhead\'s hand and peered through the globbing mess to the wound beneath. "It\'s deep, but not severed. You must have hit it with some force. It\'s going to need stitches."



"You do them." Matt swallowed, lowering his head between his knees. "Please Mell, I don\'t want to go to hospital."



"It\'s going to hurt if I do it."



"It already fucking hurts!" Matt snapped back, his voice rising from his thighs. "Mihael, just fucking do it!"



Mello raised his eyebrows and bit back a retort. His actual response came out more sharply than he had intended. "That\'s fine, Mail, whatever you want." He stamped out to find needle and thread before he could say anything worse. Quarter of an hour later, the crisis was over. Two stitches, several sterile wipes and a wrapped gauze sorted out the finger and a cigarette calmed the nerves. Mello lifted the goggles from his lover and peered into his eyes. "That explains that one. You\'re high as a kite again. What were you even trying to do?"



Matt bit his lip and pointed to his collection of games controllers. "Just going to do a patch. I was cutting the wires."



"On this?" Mello lifted the lead, frayed plastic exposing the wiring underneath. "On this that\'s still plugged in? On this that\'s still fucking live?" He yelled. "On this that would probably have electrocuted you if you\'d got far enough in without carving yourself up?" He glared at the redhead. Matt was neither flinching or looking at him. He was staring at the carpet, smoking his cigarette, with all the aspect of someone weathering a storm until it passed overhead. "I don\'t give a shit if you want to spend your life in a daze, but when it affects your thought patterns and your co-ordination to this extent, then you\'re no fucking good to me. Haven\'t you got anything to say for yourself?"



Green eyes flickered up towards him, then back to view the carpet. "So you\'re my mother now?"



"No, I\'m not your fucking mother." Mello screamed. "Right now, I\'m not sure I want to be anything to you. I think I preferred last week\'s version, where you were still bursting into tears every thirty seconds. At least I knew where your head was."



"Last week, you were ranting that I was too emotional. This week you\'re ranting that I\'m not emotional enough." Matt touched his collar, his cigarette burning between the fingers there. "Fact is, Mell, you feel too guilty about the fact I\'m fucked up in the first place, so nothing I could do is going to please you."



There was silence. Mello paced over to the window and stared out at the overgrown lavendar. The track away from their home looked so inviting. Peace on the back of a motorcycle, calming his temper on a journey to nowhere. The worst of it, he knew that Matt was right. Sometimes the redhead\'s very presense irritated the Hell out of him and simply because Mello couldn\'t stand to see what he\'d done to him. The longer he stood, the more that the tension dripped out of the atmosphere and silence could soothe his sensibilities again. "How compos mentis are you?"



"Very."



Mello nodded. "Ok, let\'s do this. Let\'s both of us put all of our cards on the table and work out how we\'re going to get through. Because right now, I feel like walking." He was sated by the look of shock which passed across Matt\'s face, before the redhead bowed his head further. "Clean slate. Everything aired. Nothing festering inside." Mello tip-toed across to his lover\'s side and paused. "Neutral territory, our bedroom or the kitchen?" He crouched down, unable to meet Matt\'s eyes as he span the dials on his collar and unlocked it. In removing it, Mello also took off his own ring and placed it in the palm of Matt\'s hand. "Give me some time to gather my thoughts. Half an hour\'s time, in the kitchen?" There was silence from Matt, which Mello decided was an affirmative, though he couldn\'t bear even a glance up to see. He stood, but paused by the door. "Matty, I love you. I just can\'t go on with us going back and forth like this."



Not trusting himself to say another word, Mello stepped across into his own study and closed the door. He stood, shell-shocked, hardly believing himself the words that had come out of his mouth. Barely understanding whether they had started as a desire to lash out and hurt, or if it had been his heart talking after all. The collar in his hands felt cold and the room swam with the wash of welling tears. Before anything, he had to calm down. He took the seat by the window again, picking up the volume of Shelley\'s poetry that had been left there when he\'d ran out. Chocolate soothed everything but the rock which appeared to have lodged itself in his throat and the sensation that everything was falling apart. Mello\'s mind span back three days ago, when they had been in Camden and it all felt better again. Cracks papered over in the hope that they\'d go away. Right now, Mello would take the threat of Kira and the intense pressure of life or death decisions, if he could just have stepped through time back to Japan. That felt like the last time they really had been alright, him and Matt. When it had been easy.



The sight of the red car in the yard threatened to spill the tears and right now, Mello could not afford to give into them. He needed to plan what he was going to say. Ensure that it was coherently in his mind or else things would never get said and they would tumble from one disaster to the next. Mello gazed down at his book and flicked the pages away from the warning of madness inherent in \'Wake the Serpent Not.\' His gaze took in a random stanza, "\'The serpent is shut out from Paradise. The wounded deer must seek the herb no more, in which its heart-cure lies...\'" Mello blinked. Why did it all feel so significant? Like the poet could reach across nearly two centuries to be chronicling their lives. He glanced down the page. "\'I too must seldom seek again Near, happy friends, a mitigated pain...\'" It took him a blinkered moment to realise that Near only bore a capital letter, because it was the start of a sentence. But by then, Mello was choking on unshed pathos, drowned in saliva thick with melted chocolate.



Mello crossed the room to his Marian Shrine and knelt in front of it. "U ime Oca i Sina i Duha Svetoga. Amen." He crossed himself. "Slava Ocu i Sinu i Duhu Svetome. Kako bijaše na poèetku, tako i sada i vazda i u vijeke vjekova. Amen." He twisted his rosary, seeking the calm of faith. Mello had to believe that this would somehow work out alright. Schooling his mind to silence, in the quiet of their home. Finding sanctity, even where they had despoiled it. Remarkably, it came and the prickling tears receded. It was more a lifting than a true stillness of heart, but it felt like hope. "Majko Marijo, please let me keep him. 0 moj Isuse, oprosti nam naše grijehe. Let me keep my temper and find the right words to say. Sveta Marijo, give me strength and don\'t let me cry in front of him." But the threat of doing just that rose again and so Mello quickly added an \'Amen\' and stood. His gaze locked onto that of the Virgin. "Please just let me keep him."



Half an hour was nearly up and the monitors showed that Matt was already sitting at the kitchen table. He wasn\'t even playing a game. He was just sitting there with his head bowed, as if he too were praying, though Mello doubted that very much. Matt\'s fingers fiddled with something inside his hands. It could be anything. Matt was always playing with something. Mello just hoped that it was his ring because he was really missing it off his finger right now. He stared at the monitor and every instinct said to just go down and hug his Matty so close. Forget everything. Just hug him. But nothing would ever get resolved then. Shelley was wrong. Sometimes there was nothing for it but to wake the serpent.



Mello glanced down at his pad, but he had run out of time to plan. Rubbing his face, he crossed himself again and picked up his chocolate. He walked slowly across the room and out into the hush of the house. The stained glass above the staircase offered salvation and, for the time it took Mello to step down to the hallway, he could almost believe it existed for them. Then he glimpsed the bowed red head just inside the room and the stakes felt untenably high again. Mello straightened his shoulders and walked into the kitchen.



There was a hot chocolate waiting for him across the table from Matt. He hadn\'t noticed that on the monitor. His lover had a mug of tea and an ashtray. His cigarette travelled from the latter to his mouth. The atmosphere was unbearable. "Do you want to start or shall I?" Mello asked, taking his chair.



"I want to."



Mello breathed, trying not to show his surprise. "Ok. Shoot."



"Why are you doing your own head in?" Matt asked, suddenly looking straight at him. "You said you\'re leaving me, because we\'re in trouble again and I hear that like it\'s the last days before your breakdown again. You were convinced we were in trouble then as well. We\'re just going over the same ground."



"Because it was true then and true now. We didn\'t resolve it. I went mad."



"No, it was you being paranoid then and it\'s you being paranoid now."



"You take drugs just to be calm in my presense." Mello countered. "Head to head with Kira, you were the same laid-back, smart-ass bastard you\'ve always been. You aren\'t now, not without half a dozen chemicals in your blood stream."



"Mello..." Matt sighed, but evidently changed his mind on what he had been about to say. "It\'s like self-harm, but with your mind. You are driving yourself mad again. You were fine while you had a house to find, which you did; you were fine while you were decorating, but it\'s all done; you were amazing while we were finding Near, then an evil shit when we did, but that\'s over now. You\'re back to having nothing much to do and suddenly you\'re declaring that we\'re in trouble and I\'m fucked up. Sound familiar?"



Mello frowned and snapped, "So if I was to say to you to come upstairs, because I want to shackle you to the bed again, what would you do?"



Matt\'s gaze slid back to the table. Mello realized that the thing being twisted around Matt\'s fingers was, indeed, the ring. "I would go upstairs with you."



"What?" Mello barked. "Why? Did you secretly get off on it? Or is it because you are still doing exactly what I tell you to do right to the letter of it?"



"Both of those end up with the same result." Matt shrugged. "You said it should be cards on the table. Ok then, I don\'t get where your head is. You lost it big-time and since then you\'ve been, well, erm, Mello. You expect me to believe that one night being sedated at Wammy\'s, followed by about two days on anti-depressants and hey presto, you\'re alright again? How is that possible when I\'m really fucking struggling here."



"Oh my God!" Mello gasped. "You accidentally told the truth. You\'re struggling."



"I\'d have thought that was self-evident." Matt\'s mouth became a thin line. "Mell, you tore down every mental defence I had and you expect me to rebuild them overnight? I\'m sorry if that hurts to hear, but it\'s the truth. I know that patience is an alien concept to you, but please can you just Google it and find out what it means."



"Why haven\'t you told Roger to stop calling you every night?"



The redhead lifted his hand from under the table. There was a pen and pad in it. "This isn\'t a conversation. Look." He had been covertly taking notes. "Every question or point I make, you counter with another question of your own. I\'m answering yours, but you\'re just being vicious." He slid the pad over the table. It was practically word for word. "Mihael, let\'s start at the beginning. Why are you doing your own head in?"



Mello read through with a growing sense of unease. On paper, he sounded unreasonable and it irked him. "I\'m not." But that sounded too plithy. Mello grit his teeth. "I feel really shaky inside ninety percent of the time, but what I did to you was unforgiveable. You need me to be Mello, so I am. I\'m doing it to give you time to sort yourself out."



Matt nodded. "Thank you for your honesty. If you feel like that, then I feel less inadequate. You should know that I feel better when I can help you on the rare occasions when I do see you waiver, like in Camden High Street, when we were talking about your scar." He sipped his tea. "You said it\'s unforgiveable, but what you mean is you can\'t forgive yourself. That Lady upstairs in your room forgave you being in the Mafia and all the shit you pulled there. I forgave you what you did to me as you were doing it. Please recognise Mello angst when you feel it, because there\'s nothing the rest of us can do about that, except distract or reassure you." He shrugged. "Yes, I need you to be Mello, but that\'s unavoidable really. You are Mello. If you must know, there is no perfect benchmark of Mello. They are all pretty impossible most of the time, so you might as well go with the one you are actually feeling inside at any given time. If that means you wailing on my shoulder, then that\'s fine; I\'ve got a broad shoulder. Trying to be something you aren\'t is just going to bottle up the anxiety again and we\'re going to be back to square one. As for giving me time to sort myself out, let me return to the bit where you are Mello. Particularly the bit where patience isn\'t your strong point. It was a great sentiment, but it\'s a bit like trusting your own judgement over mine on picking your character in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. You\'re going to end up with thinking I\'m customising, because you\'ve only glanced at Captain Falcon, then be halfway through losing with Link before you realise I\'m laughing at you."



Mello\'s head had been bowed, but it rose to display a frown at the last. "Did that last analogy actually make sense?"



"No, I got side-tracked." Matt grinned. "But at least it proves you\'re listening now instead of just being argumentative."



"Right." Mello sucked chocolate. "You just said more there than you\'ve said in weeks. You don\'t tell me anything."



"I never did. You\'re looking for your fantasy Matt and unfortunately there\'s only me here." He inhaled on his cigarette. "To be honest, it\'s rich coming from you, this \'don\'t tell me anything\' thing. But it\'s ok. It\'s always been one rule for you and another for me. That\'s part of your charm." He winked.



Mello glared, "You did tell me things. I might have had to shout and throw things to gain your attention, but you told me things then."



"When you say \'things\', what are we actually talking about?" Annoyance crept into Matt\'s tone, but he covered it with another sip of tea. "Actually, don\'t worry. I\'ll take the new rule: tell Mello everything; then sit through the rant when he gets irritated by me telling him everything."



Mello\'s face crumbled and he had to turn away. "You make it sound like I\'ve always been Hell to live with. Not just..." He gestured to mean their personal post-Kira apocalypse.



"Yes, you are. But that\'s all part of it. Besides, if living with you is Hell, I\'d chose it over Heaven anyday." There was a loud scrape as Matt pushed the chair back and strolled around the table. "You said it yourself, I hate to be bored." He wrapped his arms around Mello\'s head and back, pushing him into his stomach. "It\'s ok to cry, Mihael. I can be the strong one today."



Mello wanted to push back in anger. He wanted to let the rage fill him white-hot and unleashed onto the room and this ridiculous man. He wanted to be buoyed by his pride to the surface of this maelstrom of emotions. Instead, he cried like a child, clinging onto Matt\'s waist until he was exhausted by it. He knew that his face was probably puffy and covered in snot and clammy sweat and tears, and that squeezed out a coda of misery. But Matt just stroked his hair and didn\'t say a word. Mello was grateful for it, because to speak would be to acknowledge this weakness and to know that he had failed Matt again. The redhead must have sensed the lessening of the storm, because he took the chocolate from the table and held it in front of Mello\'s eyes. Mello reached for it, extracting himself from the cuddle so to wipe his face. There was a shuffle and a rip of kitchen roll. Matt handed him some tissues. "Sorry."



"Don\'t be. It\'s about bloody time." Came the nonchalent voice above his head. "You be kick-ass all you want out there, but for sanity\'s sake, fucking break in private if you need to. I\'ll never breath a word about it."



"I don\'t deserve you."



"Oh you do." Matt grinned cockily. "I exist to make your life a misery, just as penance for your Confessions. That\'s why leaving me would be a mortal sin."



"Matt, if you are trying to persuade me to stay, bringing the Bible into it isn\'t the way to go about it." Mello sniffed, sucking on chocolate. "Every time I look at you, I risk my immortal soul."



"I don\'t know. I saw this great site that took all the chapters in the King James\' Bible that people thought were anti-gay people and it..."



"I\'m a Catholic. The King James\' Bible has got nothing to do with me."



"Oh yeah." Matt sagged, dejectedly, against the sink. "Can I get you anything while I\'m up?"



"Yes, come here." Mello waited until Matt was beside him, then reached out for the cigarette. Matt stared at him curiously, but relinquished it. Mello brought it to his mouth and inhaled. He spluttered into a full blown coughing fit before he handed it back. "Strangely enough, my nerves do feel a little less fraught. But I think that was more to do with the adrenaline of nearly choking to death than whatever you get off them."



"Yeah." Matt snorted and fetched him a glass of water. "Is our marriage saved yet or have I just driven you to smoking?"



"Why do you take so many drugs? I sometimes can\'t see you behind them." Mello sighed. "Like I said before, it\'s not a lecture. It\'s just that I miss you when you\'re high constantly."



"Same reason you\'ve been the picture of strength and, well, I was going to say calm, but, erm, you know." He leaned up against the table. "You want me to be my usual brand of ignorant, unsociable, arrogant git, but I can\'t. So I make sure I can be." He took herbal anti-depressants and some Bach Rescue Remedy out of his pocket and placed them on the table in front of Mello. "Some of these whenever I\'m getting too anxious, plus the proper drugs you give me, plus I\'ve got an ounce of weed in my room. I nip out into the backyard every so often to have a joint. The more stoned I am, the less you watch what I\'m up to, unless I\'m slicing my finger off with a Stanley Knife. It looked like it was working."



"Stoned?" Mello\'s mouth dropped open. "I thought you had a secret stash of anti-depressants and you were this close," His thumb and finger measured a tiny slit, "from mental collapse or overdose. You\'ve been stoned! Oh for fuck\'s sake."



Matt smirked. "So I\'m off the hook?"



"No!" Mello rose from his chair like a Fury and paced away a few steps. "Ok, stoned is better than what I was imagining. In fact, with you, stoned was practically part of the package. But fuck! I... shit... no." He held the top of his head, like he was afraid it was going to explode. "Oh! God, forgive me! Matt, you have no idea what I feel like when I\'m with you. It blows up inside me like, fuck, yes, like it\'s too big to feel. Emotions, emotions, emotions, the bane of my fucking life. All hail the calm, wonderful geniuses and fuck off, Mello, always second." He reached the worktop and punched it. "I can\'t help it. I look at you and I want to rip your clothes off and I want to kiss you and I want to be with you and... shit, what am I saying?" Mello bit his lip and his ears caught up with his words. He blushed crimson, then felt angry with himself for blushing. "I know that God will forgive me, in His infinite love, but can I forgive myself? Yes, you are right. I sit there sometimes and I\'m just... it\'s like," he found the word, "contempt! I hate myself for how I feel about you. I can\'t help it though. I\'d go to Hell willingly, because I can\'t help it. But you there, you cold... you, the perfect prodigy of Wammy\'s, able to keep all of your emotions buried and me... yes, I know it\'s lust. I know I turn you on. I know I keep things interesting, so it\'s stimulating your mind too. I know all of that. But Matt! I need to know what you think about me!"



The tidal wave of feeling washed over to recede from the shore and Mello suddenly felt very stranded. He glared defiantly at Matt anyway and the redhead just stood there, against the table, his face unreadable behind the goggles and hair. Mello watched him inspect the edge of the table underneath his finger, then peer back. "Well done. That\'s probably the most incoherent question you\'ve ever asked in your life, Mell." He raised his cigarette to his mouth. "Mind if I just check if I\'ve understood it correctly? Here\'s my concise version: \'Matt, do you actually love me or are the low oxytocin levels that Roger told me about making that impossible?\'" He exhaled smoke with the faintest of smiles. Mello just felt foolish and slightly numb. He nodded. "Right, here\'s the truth of all that scaremongering then. Yes, I have got low oxytocin, secondary vasopression, but that\'s ultimately going to kick start the oxytocin anyway, so it\'s all mush. Yes, it does explain part of why I\'m an insular bastard. The rest of the explanation being that I\'m actually an insular bastard." He smirked. "But oxytocin doesn\'t just come in a handy, pocket-sized spray. It occurs naturally, when you make that connection. I said it can be manipulated, Roger said it couldn\'t. To be frank, I think my intelligence pwns his. Think, Mello, how did I do it?"



Mello blinked. "Can\'t you just answer the question?"



"Not this time. I say \'yes, I love you\' and you are pacified for five minutes. You solve the puzzle and you\'re pacified for life." He threw the pad across the table, the pen following. Mello caught the latter and his hand stopped the inertia of the paper. "Come on, you fucking genius, work it out!"



"A simple yes or no..."



"No." Matt\'s hands came down on the table. "Show me why you are number one. Work it out. I\'ll even feed you the information, but you draw your little circles. Own me, like you did Near."



"This isn\'t about..."



"Mello! Stop farting about." Matt reached across and placed the ring inches above the pad. "This is what you\'re playing for. Stakes high enough for you?" Mello\'s breath caught and he faced the challenge in his lover\'s eyes. "First circle. You want my levels to rise right now. What do you do?"



"I find that spray that inexplicably went missing."



"It\'s in my pocket."



"Right." Mello made a note. "That gives me three minutes of you loved up, gushing flowery shit."



Matt laughed. "Ok, that\'s fair comment. Second circle. You want to raise your own oxytocin levels, what do you do?"



Mello sat down and bit off chocolate. It tasted comforting in his mouth; little bursts of caffeine and sugar sharpening his mind. "For my own pride, I\'m going to say fuck your arse off, but the reality is probably more like think about you." He wrote \'fuck Matt\' and circled it.



"Nice one. Right, two little islands on your paper. Never the twain can meet, except... think, Mell, what else was written in those notes? It made you go all smug and Roger told you off."



"You met me and your oxytocin levels were higher." Mello paused, until Matt reached over to tap the paper. He wrote it down, but these diagrams were just notes. Mello sat back, ideas floating, connections being made. He didn\'t need to close his eyes to imagine it. His mind\'s eye was placing facts and figures in a circle around his head; it sometimes felt like he could just reach up and pluck them from the air. His head turned slightly to gaze at the representation of the spray, lightening flashed through his brain to connect with the fact that he had raised the levels without it once. "Ok, it\'s possible for your levels to rise without the spray."



"Yes. How?"



"With me." Mello\'s eyes narrowed. "But it was a temporary blip. Roger said that they didn\'t stay raised."



"How often did Roger test? What were the circumstances? Come on, Mello, this is basic research methodology! What are the influences on your primary sources? Is there a declared bias on your secondary source? Can these results be reproduced over and over again in laboratory conditions? Cross-contamination? What was in the mix?"



"Ok! I get the message!" Mello felt the heat rising within. "I don\'t know! I wasn\'t there."



"No, Mello. You weren\'t." Matt leaned over and prodded the pad closer towards him. "Fourth circle? Mello wasn\'t there."



"What?" Mello experienced the rushing adrenaline of all the facts aligning in his head. "Matty, you had better not lie. When were you tested?"



Matt walked around the table and gripped the rosary around Mello\'s neck. "I swear on what this means to you, on your soul, in front of your maker, I\'m not lying. I was tested practically every week at first. Then it dropped off. He must have reached his conclusions. I do remember being tested twice in one week and it was the same week we started sharing a room. The second time it was really inconvenient, because we were mid-row. You had just deleted one of my games and I was really regretting agreeing to share a room with you. You were trying to bully me and I was just livid. I wanted to kill you, literally. Then, in the middle of it, I got called to Roger\'s office and had another test. I didn\'t know then, but yes, I reckon my oxytocin levels were pretty low at that moment. He only tested again when I was seventeen and guess what? You had left three years before that. Sorry, we missed a circle. What reduces oxytocin levels?"



"It\'s ok, I\'ve worked it out." Mello felt the anxiety draining away. "It was naturally manipulated. Roger measured a constant, when there wasn\'t one. I was around tampering with the primary source. I was the cross-contamination."



"Which means?" Matt took the pen off him and added the lines linking the circles. "Big finale conclusion."



"I\'m like a drug to you." Mello smirked. "I raise your oxytocin levels just by being around you, unless I\'m breaking your games or leaving you."



"In layman\'s terms, that means?"



"You love me."



"Yes, Mihael, I fucking love you." Matt wrote it in the centre of the page, drawing lines from each circle into it. As an afterthought, he added a loveheart and laughed. "Chemically measured, Wammy ranked and proved with flawless logic. Sorry I don\'t make a big song and dance over it, but we\'re back to the bit where I\'m an ignorant git. I never said I was perfect." He pointed to the ring. "You won that back."



Mello watched him. Sometimes it helped to imagine that Matt was stupid. It salved the paranoia and staved off having to wonder if there were any hidden agendas. Mello could sink back into believing that his back was being watched, but all control over events and Fate was down to his own careful planning. Sometimes, like now and back in that hotel room with Near, it was a thrill to not only acknowledge, but to enjoy witnessing a genius mind weaving all the pieces together into a coherent whole. It was pride in his lover, but it was reflection too. If Matt could be that good and Mello could beat him, then the implications for Mello\'s self-worth were breathtaking. Balm for an inferiority complex that was never to be recognised as part of his own psyche, even as it infected everything.



Then sometimes, there was an echo, a ping of a thought against a conclusion buried so deep that Mello couldn\'t tell if it was truth, paranoia or part of that same sense of not being good enough. It skirted the edges of his emotions, barely registered and never analysed, but triggering each of them at different times. What if his rival had never been Near, but this beautiful man looking back at him? What if Matt was so intelligent that his smokescreens masked darker truths? What if he had so transcended the rankings that he could orchestrate everything unnoticed, unacknowledged, never caring if he was either? The glorious game not being the interest engendered in outsmarting the criminals, but another level above that, outsmarting everyone. Where better to place yourself for that than behind the brightest light of all, the mobile inferno that was Mello?



"Matty."



Matt smiled at him. "I was beginning to wonder if you needed me to go down on one knee." He picked up the ring and laughing, sank to his knee anyway. "Before I make a fool of myself, was that strange look on your face you working up to dumping me?"



Mello stared. Matt was so lovely. So complicatedly uncomplicated that it was almost Zen. "Help me unpick this, Matt. January 26th, we went out on a suicide mission and somehow survived it. We did that because giving Near a fighting chance to bring down Kira seemed like the only option. We\'d run out of time. A few more days, perhaps, we could have put my main plan into action, but Near made his move. Was that the right thing to do?"



"It was the only thing to do." Matt shuffled forward to rest his arms on Mello\'s thighs. The touch of him fissoned like electricity. "We can\'t beat ourselves up with hindsight, because we could only act on the information that we had at the time. Hell, yeah, we were nearly killed, but shit happens. We did what we had to at the time."



"I never told you what the reasoning behind my plan was. I just gave you instructions and sent you out onto the front line."



"Yeah, but I worked it out." Matt frowned. "I\'m not that thick. Besides, I do trust your plans, Mello. They might sometimes be a bit desperate, but they are generally effective."



"Ok, January 28th, we stepped into a warehouse and backed up Near. I could have taken over that show, but I didn\'t. I\'ll be honest with you, I let the power of the situation get to me and I missed Raito Yagami\'s move. You didn\'t. In fact, I seem to remember being blindsided by Kira\'s attacking me for my Catholicism. You kept a clear head."



"Are you fucking joking?" Matt laughed. "While we\'re being honest, I was shitting myself the whole time. The only reason I could keep the overview is because you and Near held the front line and drew the fire. Like, for example, crap about your religion. You were Jesus, I was more your St Paul grabbing five minutes of fame holding onto your coattails."



Irritation and fear flashed at the blasphemous analogy, but Mello dampened it down within. This was angst and not what Matt had meant. He had just been finding a language to communicate in. This far in, Mello knew that he had to keep calm, take in even the tiniest nuances of information, analyse and conclude. He might never have the courage to pursue it again. "But of everyone in there, you were the most perfectly positioned to win."



"How are you making that out?"



"You could see everyone and react."



"Yes. I was the soldier. You and Near were the generals. Me shooting Kira didn\'t win the day, it was your groundwork and Near\'s inane pedantry. What I was doing didn\'t take intelligence. Any goon trained with a gun could have done it. I was just the back-up."



Mello nodded. "Right. Just one thing that I\'m wondering about it now then."



"Go on, because so far it sounds like you\'re crediting me with being a major player and that\'s a great boost to my self-esteem."



"I hate Near\'s guts. I would happily have shot him in that hotel room, before you did your martyr routine. Why on earth would I cover his arse in Japan?" He raised a hand to stroke Matt\'s hair. The scent and feel of it faintly stimulating. "I think back to some of our conversations in Japan and do you know what? There\'s a trail of comments, ideas... cross-contamination of the primary source. You foresaw it the moment we were in the country. You knew that we would eventually have to co-operate, me and Near, and you engineered it so it could happen. You slowly worked on me until I would allow it to happen and think it was my idea in the first place."



Matt flushed slightly. "In Japan?"



"Yes."



"Ok, new circle. Who covered Near\'s arse with a rifle, from a window in New York, when he was escaping through the riot?" Matt smiled. Mello found a chink of light brightening the murk of his theory. "You underestimate yourself Mello. Underneath all the Mafia crap, you\'ve got a heart of gold and a strong sense of justice. You hate Near, so yeah, it\'s a headfuck that you might actually put aside all that emotion to do the best thing in the circumstances and work with him. Yes, I admit to nudging you in that direction in Japan, but you\'d already done that in New York." The redhead shrugged. "Blame me if it helps you sleep at night."



Mello turned the logic over in his head. There was nothing awry, nothing that provided evidence for his theory that Matt was far more strategically complicit in the capture of Kira than any of them knew. The next question made him want to scream inside, his stomach twisting into knots, but Mello asked it anyway. "It Matters, if you had taken your final exams and hadn\'t continually hacked the Wammy House computers, would you have been number one?"



Matt sighed. He took off his goggles and met Mello\'s gaze, steadily, honestly, "Mello, if it would make it better for you, I will go there tomorrow and ask Roger if I can take the exams. I guarantee you, unless there\'s some major parallel universe activity kicking in, I will come third. I came third consistently. I was third in the hidden layers of the mainframe data. I was third on the overt rankings. The only time in my life I came first, it was because you\'d got paranoid and swopped our papers. Call me niave, but the evidence suggests that I\'d end up third." His eyes beseeched belief. "I reckon if you cut me open you\'d find it written right through the middle of me, like a stick of rock, \'third in Wammy\'s\'."



Mello believed him. Moreover, a weight was lifted because this time it seemed like the belief didn\'t rest on the fact that Mello wanted it to be true. "Matty, fetch your collar please."



Green eyes closed in relief and a beatific smile transformed his features beneath them. He rose unsteadily and took the metal circlet from the centre of the table. Falling back onto his knees, he held it in one hand with the ring in the other. "Thank you." Matt breathed. Mello smiled back. He took the collar and the stirrings that engendered rose from his groin. Sex was all Mello was thinking as he locked it around his lover\'s neck and scrambled the code. "Mihael, I love you." The ring was being proffered between finger and thumb. Mello swallowed as he removed his glove and felt its beloved weight on his finger again. "Thank you."



Mello drank in the sight of him. The cyberpunk goggles on top of messy red hair; his stoned eyes, dilated so that black predominated, ringed with the deepest emerald; the blush; the smile; and the collar. Already damned a thousand times over, Mello could do nothing else but kiss him and to melt into that kiss. If this world could be alright; if it could have lightness to balance the cruelty of its dark; then the way to find and claim that was through surrendering to that kiss and all it implied. The last glimmer of logical mind fired out the knowledge that they had had a long, bitter and harsh journey all the way here, to this point and this moment in time. But none of that mattered anymore. Mello could see a future and it held possibilities that dazzled him; and when, at the end of it, he had to face St Peter in the final judgement, he would argue the toss on the inevitable conclusion with all his brilliance, \'I know what I did, but I have faith and I have love and it matters more to me than my immortal soul.\' "Matty?"



Matt leaned back, eyes rolling and a long-suffering expression appearing on his face, "Yes?"



"Let\'s go to bed."



"Ok."