The Mello Code

It had taken them nearly two hours to get home. Mello had driven them nearly into Kent before taking the coast road back towards Dorset. They had not stopped for biking leathers. Matt unlocked the kitchen door and dropped his bag onto the table, before checking on the security monitors. Nothing had happened. He flicked the heating back on and filled up the kettle. Only then was he followed in and the door thankfully shut against the December chill. "Welcome to our humble abode." Mello beamed, looking for all the world like he was enjoying himself. He possibly was. Mello had put a lot of time and effort into decorating their home and, though Matt had tried to make the appropriate responses, there was only so much enthusiasm that could be mustered over colour blends and wallpaper.



Hal seemed to be impressed though. She had been as mollified as Matt was shocked by Mello\'s invitation for her to join them, at their house, for their evening meal. Mello had been sure to spell out that no-one had ever been allowed to visit before and that this was a demonstration of how much they did trust her now. The woman wasn\'t stupid and she must have known that their extended journey here had been designed for her not to discern their location. Nevertheless, she had calmed down considerably during it. Mello, of course, had flirted outrageously with her all the way here, though Hal didn\'t appear to have consciously noticed. They had exchanged banter and teased each other, while Matt sat in the back racing through level after level of the new \'Final Fantasy\'. Now Hal was oohing and ahhhing at their home with a vigor that was delighting Mello. Matt briefly considered telling them to go and get a room, but it was also nice to see Mello not being overtly paranoid for once.



"Do you want tea or coffee?" Matt had to ask twice before anyone even heard him.



"Brew up some ground coffee, Mail." Mello responded. "There\'s some in the freezer."



"\'kay." Matt hunted through and found it. He could hear Hal gasping over the stained glass window in the hallway and Mello explaining how the tiles were original. They dated from 1851. He spooned the coffee into the filter and left it running, as he reclaimed his bag and headed for upstairs.



Mello was directing Hal into the parlour, no doubt to show her the Victorian crockery, but he paused in the doorway. "One moment, please excuse me, Hal." He dashed across and caught Matt at the foot of the stairs. One arm snaked around Matt\'s waist and a hand cupped the back of his head. Matt was bent backwards, off-balance, by the kiss that ensued. "Missed you being here, baby." Matt stared, his lips forming around the word \'what?\', then his gaze took in Hal and realised that that was for her benefit. "Please be yourself. Hal\'s never seen you when you\'re not closed down or fighting. You\'re home now, Matty, ok?"



Matt was placed back onto his feet again and frowned. "I\'m just dropping my bag back upstairs." He would have felt more comfortable about this if Mello had discussed a gameplan with him first. As it was, they were dealing with a 180 degree shift from \'no-one will ever enter our home except us\' to \'Hal\'s coming for tea\'. Matt wasn\'t quite sure what his role was supposed to be in this, other than to make the coffee. He gave Mello a significant look, one which was supposed to convey, \'what are you up to?\' But Mello just kissed him again and raced back to Hal.



It was only as Matt entered their bedroom, and felt a sigh of relief emerge from deep inside, that he realised that he had stopped thinking of Wammy\'s House as home. It surprised him a little. What threw him mostly was that it had taken so long, especially since he hadn\'t realised that he still did consider the institution in those terms. He had been back, several times, during the nearly three years since he had officially left and each occasion had left him feeling a little more divorced from its airy corridors and intense atmosphere. Even so, he had thought of the flat as home and he definitely considered this house as such. He dropped his back on the floor and decided not to linger on the point anymore. It was too confusing and too tedious to contemplate any longer. He rummaged in his bag and took out the laptop and the PSP, carrying both into his study to recharge their batteries. It did feel good to be home.



Matt listened to Mello and Hal on the stairs, the former gabbling on about lead piping and sensitive remodernisation of the plumbing. He hoped that he wasn\'t going to bring Hal upstairs. It felt invasive enough having the woman in their home as it was, without bringing her to see the rooms in which they most often lived in. It wasn\'t that Matt disliked Hal. It was an issue of personal space. He had spent his childhood and the first year out of Wammy\'s surrounded by people, that was fine, but since moving to the New Forest, he had learned about true peace. It wasn\'t the closing out of people in your presense, it was keeping them out of your presense in the first place. He turned around and quietly closed his study door.



He wasn\'t fast enough. The instant it went too, with a faint click as he guided it in, he heard Mello say loudly, "Would you excuse me one moment please, Hal? My husband is turning into a recluse again. Two seconds." Matt leapt away from the door and looked wildly around for something which would justify his shutting them out, without that seeming like a snub. With only seconds to decide, he opted for his safe, sliding to his knees in front of it, as Mello knocked and entered. "Mail, are you...?" Mello glanced behind himself, then darted to his side. He fell to his knees and rubbed Matt\'s arm. "I\'m sorry, I should have consulted you before I asked her. You aren\'t going to lock yourself in here, are you? I really would love you to hang out with us." His expression and tone pleaded more than ordered. "Us entertaining a guest, in our home, not me with a friend. Baby, she\'s our guest." He emphasised the \'our\'. "Please don\'t hide."



"I\'m not." Matt lied. "I was just going in here and could hear you bringing her up. I didn\'t want her to see inside my safe. I\'ll be out in a minute."



Mello\'s gaze drank in the sight of him. "You\'re so gorgeous, guapo. I have missed you being here."



"How have you missed me? You\'ve spent most of the time I\'ve been away camped inside Winchester Cathedral talking to me via messenger and text messages." Matt was nontheless touched. He wondered if he should be ashamed of himself. Mello was transparently and blatantly flirting with him and yet he was responding to it precisely as Mello would have him do. "You made me get binoculars so I could see you blow me a goodnight kiss. That\'s hardly being apart."



"It felt apart to me." Mello stroked his arm, already rising. "See you downstairs in a minute?"



"Mell, Mell." Matt beckoned him back down. "What the fuck are you up to anyway? I mean, I\'m assuming that there\'s some great strategy here, but I can\'t even see what the intention is, let alone how you\'re getting there."



"Strategy?" Mello frowned, shaking his head. "There\'s no strategy." He was on his feet again and halfway back to the door.



"Ok." Matt blinked. "But what\'s my role in this non-strategy, spur of the moment with no end game thing that you\'re not at all playing?"



Mello grinned. "Just be yourself, guapo. Be sweet, charming and funny, highly intelligent and cute, with hilarious one-liners, as opposed to silent, aloof arsehole. Be yourself."



Mello left and Matt frowned into his wake. Then he rocked up onto his feet and jogged to the door, which Mello had left open behind him. The blond had just reached the top of the staircase. "Who you got me mixed up with? I\'m Matt. The one with the goggles."



"Yeah, that\'s the one." Mello called back. "Precisely the one I was thinking about." He smirked. "Hal, do you want to come up? I\'ll show you where the bathroom is, as the downstairs toilet is freezing and full of spiders. You\'ll much prefer this one up here. Then there\'s my library and study." Matt ducked quickly back into his own study and lit a cigarette. It felt so good to be smoking indoors again. He quickly darted around the room, tidying up as best he could. It amounted to collecting things into piles, filling the bin with empty cans and cigarette butts and kicking a bundle of cables back underneath his desk. He heard Mello and Hal leave his husband\'s study and tensed. Any second now they would be in his own and Mello was bound to criticise the mess. They didn\'t. Matt listened to the tour being taken into the library, then, a couple of minutes later, their footsteps and chatter receded down the landing.



"I just love that window!" Hal exclaimed from the bannister and Matt was inordinarily touched by the fact that Mello had not brought her into this study. The redhead opened his door and peeped out. Mello was a short distance ahead, closing their bedroom door, so that she wouldn\'t see in there either, while Hal bent over the balustrades peering down to the mosaic tiles below. Mello was looking back at her with a broad smile on his face. "I just love how the light catches the stained glass. The wooden panels are to die for."



"I\'m pleased with it." Mello assured her. "The feature was one of the first things that attracted me to the property."



Matt realised suddenly that there was no strategy. This really was Mello clinging to a friendship, extending his trust so obviously that Hal could not fail to get the message. His husband was moving with charm and feline grace, but Matt could see the anxiety in the way that Mello\'s gaze was everywhere at once. He knew that he had been spotted in the doorway watching them, though Mello did not alert Hal to his presense. Matt glanced back into his study, then stepped out holding the door open. "What to see my pigsty? I\'ll warn you in advance it\'s a mess. It\'s the only room I don\'t have a perfectionist picking up after me in."



They both looked back at him. Hal nodded, looking surprised. He wondered if she had discerned how uncomfortable he felt about her presense and her distance had therefore been polite. "I would love to see your room, Matt." She stepped away from the bannister and Mello followed, beaming at him, until he was close enough to clasp a hand around the redhead\'s arm. Matt led the way back in. "Wow! A lot of electrical equipment."



Mello\'s arm snaked around Matt\'s back and he nodded towards the huge screen. "He\'s wired that up so that all of his games consoles are constantly attached. He created the box that they all run through himself. I told him that he should patent it. As you can see, he\'s got twice as many monitors as I have and, trust me, they aren\'t all for show. Unlike me, he can technically watch every security camera, as well as be on the internet and receive calls from Watari simultaneously. I used the extra space for my reading area. Everything you see here has been wired up by Matty and he built 90% of the equipment from scratch. This is what the inner den of a computer genius looks like."



"You must take in a lot of information at the same time." Hal commented. "That\'s something that I\'ve seen in both yourself, Mello, and Near. I didn\'t realise until now that Matt does it too. It\'s awesome."



"Yes, it is." Mello agreed. "I was going to show you the servants\' quarters." He laughed. "Not that we\'ve got servants." He squeezed Matt\'s shoulder and led Hal back out again. Matt breathed a sigh of relief. That had been quite pleasant. "Matty?" Mello called back. "You haven\'t forgotten about the coffee, have you?"



Matt gazed around his study, trying to imagine how it looked from an outsider\'s perspective. He guessed that there were a lot of screens, most of them switched off, as he hadn\'t been in here for days. He decided that, before Hal left, he would entice her back in here while everything was powered up, so she could see it as it usually was. He bit his lip, then smiled. He supposed that she might be quite impressed with him too then. He stubbed out his cigarette and went to pour their coffee.