Watari Pt 1: L\'s Heirs

Matt reacted to the ringing his mobile \'phone with a quick glance to see if Mello\'s study door was still closed. It was twenty past eight. Mello often emerged at twenty past eight, though never lingered. It was more a warning that he knew that these calls took place or, maybe, checking to see if they were. The door stayed resolutely closed tonight though. Knowing how much he hurt his lover, Matt nontheless answered the \'phone. "Roger."



"Good evening, Matt."



"How\'s Luka settling in?"



"Well enough. Thank you for your work there." There was a long pause and Matt understood that this wasn\'t going to be the usual \'are you alive? Ok, bye\' call. "It sounds like the pair of you raised Cain over there."



Matt smirked, "Yeah, a bit." He leaned against his window, his eyes fixed on the closed door seen through his open door. "Don\'t ask me how Mello coped going back to Croatia, I won\'t answer you."



"I am going to call him next. Is he in earshot?" Roger sounded very businesslike, as if it was normal for him to call Mello. As if Mello could even be guaranteed to answer the \'phone. "Should I take that silence to be \'yes\'?"



Matt recovered himself. "No, he\'s not." He lit a cigarette. "Why are you calling him?"



"Mello has been e-mailing me for most of today. I thought it might be fitting to have a verbal conversation with him to determine his intentions. If he is willing to finally step up to the plate, then I can instigate an infrastructure to..."



"Mello has always stepped up to the plate." Matt bristled. "He pursued Kira for years and nearly got killed at the end of it. How dare you imply that he\'s shirked anything?"



There was a faint trace of humour in Roger\'s voice, "Thus speaks his master\'s voice."



Matt blinked, but outwardly remained calm. His intellect span the possible meanings of his old guardian\'s words and none of them were welcome. He settled on the least incriminating. "Are you making fun of me?" There was no response. "Well, don\'t. You don\'t know how close I am to asking you not to call me every night and, to be frank, it\'s awfully unhelpful for you to..." He struggled for the word.



"Calling Mello your master is making fun of you?" Roger replied, calmly. "Are you still, ahem, submitting to him? I suspect he\'s still hitting you. I know you are still afraid of him, because..."



"Roger, please stop calling me." Matt hung up and it felt like a life-line being cut. He tucked his arm more tightly around his middle and sucked on his cigarette. Was he afraid of Mello? Matt wasn\'t sure. Deep inside, maybe, which is precisely what Mello was afraid of too, but Roger shouldn\'t be thinking like that. But there was nothing that Mello could do that Matt felt unable to counter. It irked him to think that Roger was picturing Mello as nothing more than a vicious thug. He was so much more. Matt\'s \'phone rang again in his hand and he threw it across the room, the action jolting his ribs. For the first time in weeks, tears misted his goggles and he bowed his head.



Across the corridor, Mello\'s door opened and he stood there looking across the distance. Matt took his goggles off and wiped his eyes, but the tears carried on falling. Mello had picked up the \'phone and was looking at the caller ID. He had every right to look smug, and Matt wouldn\'t have blamed him if he did, but he didn\'t. He did, however, answer the call. "Roger, this had better be good." Mello was listening, while watching Matt wanting to just die in his corner. "Let me stop you right there, Roger. I don\'t know what you\'ve said to him and I don\'t actually care. All I know is this - a few months ago he was really depressed and now he\'s not and I know that you had a large part to play in that. As long as you are calling him every night, I can\'t go insane and tie him to a bed for weeks on end. Now that is really powerfully reassuring for him, don\'t you think?"



By the window, Matt felt the words like blows. This was Mello, who had been so wronged in it all, just accepting that that was the way it was. It wasn\'t right. Not for the sake of his friend and lover, but also to see someone with such strength and presense being toppled like this. Matt pressed an arm against the stabbing pain in his ribs and let the tears fall. Roger must have known what he was saying. He\'d known them since childhood and he was a psychriatrist. They were just clever words designed to prompt Matt\'s inevitable response. Roger\'s back-handed way of saying that he was sick of the nightly calls now. It was basically abandonment. Roger washing his hands of Mail Jeevas and leaving him to whatever Fate had in mind. The Judas thought pierced that Mello could go mad again. Mello could kill them both. Suddenly that didn\'t seem like too bad an idea.



Matt wiped his face on his hand and started to make his way across the room, but Mello came to him. A wiry arm slotted around Matt\'s back, fist clenched and muscles flexed, holding him close. Matt didn\'t have to look at his face to know that he was barely keeping his temper. "Mell..."



"I hear you." Mello snapped into the telephone in a tone which suggested that he didn\'t hear Roger at all. "That\'s not the point. The point is that you\'ve touched a nerve to the extent that he didn\'t want to talk to you. If I thought for one moment that that\'s because he feels safe and sound in our home, then I\'ll be honest, I\'d be cheering from the rooftops; but I don\'t think it\'s that." Those blue eyes raked the surface of Matt\'s face. "I know it\'s not that."



"Mell, forget it." Matt raised his arm around Mello\'s neck, his lips at his ear. "Leave it. Me and you against the world. No-one else."



Mello squeezed him and growled into the receiver. "Don\'t call. Wait for him to contact you." He hung up and rubbed Matt\'s back. "You alright?"



"Fuck him."



"It\'s none of my business what was said..."



"Stop being so fucking reasonable. He was trying to say that you hit me and I let you; and that I\'m scared of you." Matt rubbed his eyes again. "He was trying to insinuate that I was some kind of masochist, letting you sexually dominate me."



"Right." Mello cocked his head to one side, smiling faintly. "Which bit of that are we denying?"



"It ain\'t nobody\'s business but my own." Matt moaned, clinging to his lover. "I don\'t want Roger going there. You and me, Mell, that\'s all we need."



"Isn\'t it more that you don\'t want yourself to go there?" Mello asked mildly. "I\'m amazed you\'ve let him psycho-analyse you for this long, because normally you avoid that like the plague. He\'s only touched on it and you\'re in a right state. Would you let me go there?"



Matt lifted his head from Mello\'s shoulder and just looked desolate. He hadn\'t shaved for a couple of days, so his cheek, when it pressed against Mello\'s, was rough. Matt remembered that two seconds after he\'d done it. Mello hated stubble, on himself or Matt. In fact, Matt suspected that Mello hated bodily hair. He certainly shaved his chest and armpits, but the hair on his legs was so fine that it appeared to pass muster. Mello spent ages carefully shaving around his scar, even though a section under his chin might be more easily just clipped and left alone. He was in an almost permanent state of having tiny nicks and cuts in that sensitive area, just because the mottling of the skin spreading out into reasonably healthy skin kept catching on the razor. Mello had said that the only good thing about his scar was the fact that he didn\'t have to shave where the burns were deep. Matt started to pull away. "I\'ll go and shave."



"What?" Mello just frowned at him. "How did we get from you being in a state to you needing to shave?"



"I\'m ok now." Matt snapped. "I\'m just going to wash my face and have a shave."



"Alternatively, you could just come round here," Mello gently guided him around the settee, "with me and sit down." The blond sat and directed Matt down between his legs, supporting his back against his chest. Soon as they were settled, Mello wrapped his arms around him. "Are you cracking up?"



"No." Matt replied truthfully. Now he was still, his side didn\'t hurt half so much. "This is really nice. Can you reach my controller from there? It\'s the one for the Wii."



"No, I can\'t." Mello smirked, without even trying to reach it. "Have you never looked up the psychology of sado-masochism? It might surprise you." His hand stroked up and down Matt\'s chest and stomach. The other played around the collar. "Two theories. One is learned behaviour in childhood. But the really interesting one is the second theory." His lips muzzled Matt\'s ear. "The sadist is someone who fears loss of control in the rest of his, or her, life. The dispossessed, the second best, those whose life habitually spirals out of control and leaves them well out of their depth. Anything in there sound like me?" Mello smiled, pulling Matt\'s head back onto his shoulder and kissing his Adam\'s Apple. "Quite obvious, when you think about it. After all, we know that the playground bullies are often intimidated at home, so they regain control by picking on the smaller kids. This is just what can happen when the bully grows up. So, if Near had never come to Wammy\'s, I might not have been inclined to batter you."



"So there was a silver lining after all."



"Of course, it could just be a throw-back to our evolution. Animals have bitches, which they have submitting to them. You\'re my bitch." Mello grinned and was rewarded with a grin in return. "Sadism actually makes a lot of sense in terms of evolution, survival of the fittest. You overpower everyone else and you become king. It\'s a primal urge."



"One slight problem with your theory." Matt murmered. "You\'re assuming that there is such a thing as evolution. What if there is a Creator, who created the Heaven and Earth in seven days and..." He shrieked. "Ow, you fucker!"



"What doesn\'t make sense in human evolution are the masochists. It\'s like purposefully deselecting yourself from the race. You\'re trying to make yourself extinct." His arm nudged at Matt\'s over the redhead\'s ribcage. There was a hesitation, then Matt moved his arm again and let Mello be the one to hold it, despite the fact that he had just thumped the area. Matt exhaled and relaxed in his lover\'s grasp. "Why would you do that, Matty? I\'m a beast, I have teeth and claws and a long history of hurting you. You lie there, with your throat bared, and you let me have access to the part of your body that is killing you right now. I could kill you, hurt you, abuse you in any way that comes to mind and you have made yourself defenceless. And, fuck, we\'re both getting turned on by it."



"I love it when you talk dirty."



Mello coughed. "So why are you doing it? Why are you lying there, in your boxers, completely at my mercy, when I probably broke your rib yesterday?"



"Other than the sexual gratification?"



Mello laughed, bowing his head to suck at Matt\'s throat and to kiss the softness at the top of his breast-bone. "It\'s about losing control. You feel like you have too much control and there\'s no way to take a break from it. Too much responsibility, too much pressure, a constant need to be alert and to react. Masochism is one way to give it all up. It releases the stress and shoots a valve in the pressure cooker, that allows you to shoulder the burden without going insane. Incidentally, statistics show that most true masochists have an extremely high IQ level and come from a middle-class background." His hand crept down under the waistband of Matt\'s boxer shorts to the already hardened dick. "Or it could be learned behaviour in childhood, but seeing as I took your virginity when you were nineteen, I doubt that very much." His hand slowly moved along the length of his lover. "What are you keeping such control over?"



"Sorry, I stopped listening round about the \'it\'s about losing control\', what?" He stiffened, biting down a groan, as fingernails dug into him. His eyes watered and Mello kissed the tears away, even as his nails didn\'t stop causing them. "Ok! IQ, check! Middle-class background, possibly, yes, check! Childhood behaviour, erm, you\'ve always shouted at me but never groped me. Responsibility... well, there was catching Kira and rescuing orphans from burning buildings, but otherwise, not much going on. But the sex is great."



"Are you afraid of me?" Mello asked quietly.



"No, I\'m fucking turned on by you. Will you just finish what you\'ve started please?"



"I mean normally." Mello\'s nails drew back and he stroked the grooves he\'d made, but gently, too gently. "I would never intentionally hurt you like that again." He stopped, his mind drifting away. "I think I don\'t want you to be afraid of me."



"What is this thing you\'ve suddenly got about having an intellectual conversation during sex?" Matt sighed. "For fuck\'s sake, Mello! Just get on with it!"



Mello smirked, "Who\'s wearing the collar here?" He turned Matt\'s head until he could meet his gaze. "I\'ll do whatever I want with you, when I want to and if I choose to just up and get back to my revision right now, I\'ll forbid you to even touch it until I get back." He bobbed out his tongue. "Suddenly gone very quiet. Do you wank when I\'m not around?"



Matt blushed, but his tone was steady, "I don\'t know. You haven\'t fucked off for ages. I\'ll send you a postcode when I do." Mello\'s hand returned to its expert manoeuvres, holding Matt, kissing him, until he exploded in his hand. There was a shuddering sigh and Matt\'s whole body relaxed. It was a surprise to them both that he hadn\'t been relaxed before, but the tension dropped from every muscle in his body now. "God, Mell." He whispered eventually, then it occurred to him that his lover was trapped under him and getting nothing out of this. Pain had returned after the endorphins of arousal had passed, moving an inch was not a welcome prospect. "How about you?"



"I\'m good." Mello smiled. "It\'s Sunday." He added, as if it had ever made a difference. "You look a lot more together now."



"I am." Matt squeezed his hand into Mello\'s and held it. "Thank you for standing up for me." He nearly hadn\'t said it, convinced that Mello would start ranting, but he didn\'t. He just nodded and smiled. "You deserve better than me. I rile you more often than I calm you down. I know I really pissed you off letting Roger call for so long. I sometimes think that your ideal man would be someone a lot bigger than you, who could hold you down. You sometimes go all, I don\'t know... I don\'t know what I\'m trying to say. Someone strong, not as fucking fragile as I feel today. Someone who could give you a break from being the big, all powerful Mello. You need someone who sees Mihael, not Mello. The frightened kid underneath the scary... were you a capo or a don?"



"Officially Consigliere, but Rod did what I told him, so unofficially Capo Crimine. I got called Capo Bastone once without anyone losing their head." He spoke matter-of-factly, but Matt understood that it wasn\'t a figure of speech.



"See there\'s this whole side of you that I glimpse but it\'s nothing to do with me." Matt looked across for his cigarettes, then remembered that they were over by the window. He didn\'t want to move. He spotted an unopened packet on the top of his Wii and stretched towards them. Mello held Matt\'s ribs and rocked them until the extra inches achieved nicotine. "Thanks." A lighter and ashtray were procured from the unit behind Mello and Matt lit up. "Where\'s your chocolate?"



"In my pocket."



"Ok." Matt had let his imagination wander. Occasionally the Mafia had intruded upon their lives, like flashes of a scene viewed through a revolving door. Mostly it was in the persona of Mello himself, who had always returned darker, like the stain of it had permeated his aura. It had always taken him days to uncoil again. Then there was the time when Matt had realised, not as an abstract, but as a tangible fact, that someone upsetting him could easily be killed. At first he had been flattered, then the reality had sunk in without it even happening. He sussed that he could never again just have a random argument with someone in a pub. Someone could die and it would be his fault. It might not even be out of respect for Matt himself, but because there were certain reputations to uphold. It all felt so ironic now; now that Matt himself had killed two people and seriously incapacitated others. Things like that never did go away. You never did forget their fear as you pulled the trigger. "Mihael, I\'m sorry you had to go through what you did with the Mafia."



"It\'s ok." Mello whispered, stroking Matt\'s finger beside his own.



Matt blinked. "Sorry, I\'m just going off on one." He twisted to meet Mello\'s eyes and saw the little smile. "Why are you being all calm and caring? I\'m not cracking up."



Mello\'s smile broadened. "You said it yourself, you\'re \'fucking fragile\' today. I\'ve seen you fragile, Matty, and this isn\'t it, but it\'s close enough. I know you\'re alright, but I figured a bit of TLC wouldn\'t go amiss. I\'m happy just answering the random questions and trying to work out the thoughts in between." He winked.



"What are you thinking about me?" Matt felt a stab of fear.



"That you\'re tired and hurting. That Roger\'s knocked you off your smart-arse perch and made you have to re-evaluate how safe you are with me. That I can\'t really help you work it out, because I fucked you up in the first place." He smiled to take the sting out of his words. "But nothing that a bit of sleep and painkillers won\'t sort out. You\'re a resilient bastard, so you\'ll work it out. I\'ll just sit here and play with your hair until you do."



"You\'re a weird, man." Matt frowned. "You give mixed messages most of the time and if someone doesn\'t know you, it\'s all of the time. So no-one ever knows where they are with you. I can read your moods some of the time. You go from pretty, little girl to big, tough-guy, Rambo, psychopath, erm... I probably didn\'t phrase that very well. Even when we were kids, you walked around simpering and wriggling your hips, with your girly hair-do, then broke the nose of anyone who dared call you feminine. You can pull off camp really well, but it\'s like another costume in your wardrobe, erm, of personalities. You would have made a great actor."



"Can...?" Mello began, then stopped when Matt jumped. They both held his ribs. "Sorry. You forgot I was here?"



"No." He couldn\'t really explain why he\'d been startled. He half-suspected that it was because Mello might hit him for calling him camp.



"Right." Mello eased his chocolate out of his pocket and licked where it had melted around the seams. "I know you\'re thinking aloud, which is why I\'m letting you. You\'ve got some misconceptions in there though. Is it alright if I put them right before you go on?" Matt nodded, blushing. "All that perfect man stuff at the beginning. I\'m supposed to want someone stronger than myself, who can see the real me under the crap? That\'s true as far as it goes. You forgot to add in a redhead, because they are really sexy, and it would be useless if he knew a bit about computers. Ideally, they\'ve got to be called Mail. Or Matt, I\'m not bothered. I just like the names." He winked. "Secondly, call me camp again and I\'ll break your nose. The only other thing was \'wardrobe of personalities\'?" He wrinkled up his nose and laughed. "Sorry, I\'m not disputing the personalities thing, but \'wardrobe of personalities\'?"



Matt tensed. "But you are camp sometimes. Not all the time. Just sometimes."



Mello leaned across and kissed his nose. "I know."



Matt stared in shock. "You just admitted.... fuck, man!" His mouth opened.



"Breathe a word to anyone, in fact mention it again and I\'ll kill you." Mello kissed him. "Oh and I didn\'t simper and wriggle my hips at Wammy\'s."



"Much."



Mello narrowed his eyes, but didn\'t pursue it. "You aren\'t scared of me. We\'re going to be alright." He kissed him again. "Matty, which version of me do you prefer?" Matt looked up at him and saw the vunerability flash through for just a moment. The blond became very pensive when he didn\'t reply immediately.



"You know I\'m going to say all of them. That\'s not what you\'re asking." Matt frowned. "You couldn\'t stick to just one, even if I picked one. I mean that in a good way. Shit, man, you know I\'m shit with words. I just came out with \'wardrobe of personalities\'. That\'s another thing you could do with in your ideal man. A poet."



"I really do prefer the hacker."



Matt struggled up, abetted by Mello as soon as he realised that that was what he was trying to do. Finally sitting so he could better view Mello, he did just that. "God\'s honest? I see a really pretty man. Yes, I did use that word on purpose. I could have used gorgeous or good-looking, but handsome is too masculine. You are macho, but not masculine. Cute? Yeah, you could carry off cute, when you\'re smiling. You don\'t smile often enough by the way. Well you do, but it\'s usually smug. You hide your face when you laugh properly. You shouldn\'t because it lights your whole face up." Matt paused. Mello had gone very still. "I\'m going off track. Bear in mind that when I\'m describing what I\'m seeing, it might not be true in three minutes time. You might turn into one of the other Mellos on me. Right now, I\'m seeing Mihael, a cute, Catholic boy, who got thrown into an impossible situation. Even if he hadn\'t, he would have worked out by now that he\'s gay, camp and Catholic, which would have gone down a storm, I bet, in post-war Croatia. But back to the impossible situation. It was impossible, but he pulled it off at considerable cost to himself. The streets should be full of people prostrating themselves in gratitude as he passes, but instead he\'s stuck in the back of beyond, licking his wounds, still secretly wondering when God is going to get round to saving him." Mello rose, but didn\'t leave the settee. He sat back down again looking a little lost. "I also see someone who has a blind spot as far as his scars are concerned. Mihael, if I could kiss them away for you, you know that I would. If I could work out how to make a time machine, I\'d be there and take the arseholes out before you had to denotate that bomb. But I can\'t get the gravitational field working. All I can do is try and get you to see them through my eyes. You\'d wear them with pride then and you\'d know they make you look sexy as fuck. Most of all though, you\'d know that you\'re still really, really pretty."



Mello tried to speak, but he couldn\'t. A hand rose to cover the scars on his face and his eyes filled with tears. Matt reached out to pull him close, but the tears didn\'t fall. He simply looked shell-shocked. Eventually, he rasped out, "I thought you were shit with words."



"Don\'t have any more grafts, Mihael. They aren\'t needed." Matt kissed his head. "And seeing as you aren\'t hiding your face from Kira anymore, why don\'t you cut your hair so we can see that pretty face again?"



"Because I can\'t stand to see it!" Now he cried, deep, wracking sobs torn from the heart of him. His words were gasped out. "I can\'t stand to look in the mirror and see what I became. Matty, I look so... I can\'t..."



"So pretty." Matt interjected calmly.



"I look like..." Mello wept, his head in his hands, with Matt stroking the nape of his neck. "I hate it!"



"You\'re beautiful, Mihael." Despite the screaming of his ribs, Matt kissed the edges of the scarring along the back of his neck, where he knew there was no nerve damage. "It\'s nowhere near as bad as you see it. You\'re beautiful."



"You just," He sobbed out, "say that because..."



"I say it because it\'s true." Matt slipped off the settee, ignoring his ribs. He knelt and caught Mello\'s face between his hands. "Look at me. No, look right at me. You are beautiful."



"I\'m not! I... look at my ear!"



"This ear?" Matt lifted his hand to kiss it. "It\'s a beautiful ear. Anything else?"



"My cheek! It\'s..."



"Beautiful." Matt kissed the area just under his eye, which had needed so much ointment. "Mihael, these are deep, but they are second-degree nontheless. They are going to eventually heal, the doctor told you that. I can see a huge difference in just under a year. If it was possible to have photographs, I would show you. I know it\'s painful and itchy, but I\'ll always be around to rub the cocoa butter in and enjoy every second of it, because it means to get to rub things over your body. "



"My chest." Mello whimpered, but the sobs were receding.



"Ah yes." Matt touched the zip of Mello\'s leather vest. "May I?" Mello nodded miserably. The zip came down and Matt pulled the sleeve down over Mello\'s arm, revealing the scars on his body. His gaze took in the muscles, deeply toned on his slim arms even when his biceps weren\'t flexed; the slender waist and the small chest. "These scars which are also fading?" He leaned forward, gritting his teeth against the wave of stabbing pain, and sucked Mello\'s right nipple. "You\'ve got a gorgeous body... no, you really have got a gorgeous body." He peered up to find Mello attempting a smile. "Mihael, you\'re fucking gorgeous, all of you. Really fucking gorgeous. I live in amazement that I got to have you."



Mello held out his arms and received Matt in them, cuddling, rocking, calming. "Thank you." Mello whispered at last. "Aren\'t we a pair of emo drama queens tonight?" He sniffed. "I didn\'t know you saw me so well."



"You ok, now?"



"Yes. You?"



"Yeah." Matt grinned. "You know what, Mell? Fuck \'em. That\'s what I say. Fuck \'em. Let\'s live fast, stop analysing every breath we take, do whatever the Hell we want and stop worrying about what we\'re supposed to be doing. Fuck Roger. Fuck the MayDay Line. Fuck mirrors. Fuck... oh! Just fuck everything. Let\'s go and break every fucking mould there is. Say amen."



"Amen."



"Nice one." Matt ran his hand down Mello\'s chest. "Now let\'s get back to how stunningly pretty Mihael Keehl is and then work up to fucking me."