The Mello Code

Mello paused by the door of his study to enjoy the sight. Matt was lying, topless, on the carpet. His back was a riot of welts and bruises, swelling crimson in parts, but so gorgeous. His fingers stroked the mousepad on the laptop on the floor, working through Mello\'s documents. Mello grinned. He had planned on just crouching beside his husband, but instead he strode across and straddled him, sitting down on Matt\'s backside. The redhead glanced back and they exchanged smiles. "I\'ve mixed the arnica and anti-septic together, so it should ease as well as heal."



Matt chuckled. "Thanks."



"Thoughts so far?"



"Brilliant deductions, as always, Mell, but there\'s no way you can prove the operations that you\'ve linked to the Mafia."



Mello started applying the paste from his tub onto Matt\'s back. "Yes, I can. I set them up."



Matt nodded. "So I gathered. I meant that you couldn\'t prove it without incriminating yourself." He brought up a page of encircled words. "All this that you\'ve linked to criminal gangs, that\'s come from the police and court reports, yes?"



"Yes." Mello lifted Matt\'s hair and collar, but there were no marks underneath, other than the endemic redness caused by Mello pulling too often on the metal band. "Plus one or two educated guesses, but I can back it all up with evidence. No wild leaps of faith."



"I wouldn\'t expect otherwise, angel." He pulled up a third page. "And these are the ones which can\'t easily be assigned to either the Mafia or random criminal gangs?"



Mello kissed Matt\'s shoulder. "Go back to the previous page." He waited until the redhead did so. "So far I\'ve identified eleven distinct gangs. It\'s not organised widely and the quality is hit and miss. There are prehaps three gangs which have potential, but I should imagine that our friends in the district will be either looking to assimilate or annihilate them. They are growing too strong. Otherwise, you\'re looking at decidedly kitchen sink operations. As for supply and demand, a huge shift has been made towards home-grown or drugs that can be sourced within the States." He shrugged. "No massive deduction there. The investigators there had already worked that one out. I could probably point out where the huge centres are though, a few precision arrests and whole cities would be dry again."



"Why isn\'t the Mafia swamping this again?"



"My guess is internal war. Too many countries have sent their people over there; too many families competing for their share of the pie. The New Commission is clearly not strong enough to regulate it, however confident Rio used to be in it. They\'re cancelling each other out, fucking fools." Mello picked up his chocolate, carefully holding the wrapper so not to smear it in anti-septic. "You wouldn\'t have had this level of stupidity in my day."



"Hark you. Criminal mastermind." Matt breathed a half-laugh.



"I was. I am." Mello replied, curtly. "I was fucking good at my job."



"Did I say you wasn\'t?"



Mello kissed the top of his head. "Love you, Matty."



"Volim te. So what am I looking at precisely?" He jabbed a finger at the screen. "I haven\'t read anything so far that you can\'t easily glean from the official reports. You haven\'t been sitting here for hours on end just linking disparate facts and figures into a nice tidy document. At least, I fucking hope you haven\'t."



Mello sighed. "Your faith in me is truly engaging, Matt. I\'m going to cut your hair, by the way. It\'s gone really long at the back again." He unfurled and rushed to wash his hands, before returning to grab the scissors. "I haven\'t finished with the paste. I\'ll do your arse and legs in a minute. I\'m just enjoying sitting here too much." He regained his perch and began snipping at back of Matt\'s head. He didn\'t bother properly measuring out the strands. Matt kept his hair purposefully messy. He hadn\'t been to a proper hair-dressers since he was an adolescent. "Have you found what I\'ve actually been doing yet?"



"Possibly." Matt replied cagily.



"Try the next folder. You\'re looking in my notes, not my conclusion, guapo." Mello chuckled, dropping clumps of red hair onto the arm of his settee. He waited as his husband found the report and read it. A couple of minutes later, there was a gasp from below. "You were right. It is a set up."



"Mell! This is fucking..." Matt was outraged, twisting beneath him. Mello raised the scissors, so not to cut his scalp. "Does Hal know?"



"I find it hard to believe that she does."



Beneath the goggles, Matt\'s eyes narrowed. "You wouldn\'t be allowing the fact that she\'s your friend, your only friend, influence your conclusions here, would you, Mello?"



Mello surveyed him coldly, "My only friend?"



"Well, apart from me." Matt shrugged. "I don\'t count, I\'m your husband. She set you up before!"



Mello smiled, "She was acting as a true friend then. She was trying to watch your back."



The green eyes glinted, angrily, "That would be a first. She nearly got me killed in Japan. She diverted those cars off you onto me and you know it. I don\'t trust Hal."



"Yes you do." Mello grabbed a fistful of hair and forced Matt\'s head back around, so he could at least trim the right side as short as the left. "You wouldn\'t have placed her in charge of the House, if you didn\'t."



"That wasn\'t trust." Matt scowled. "That was choosing the one person in the world who I thought might be acceptable to all parties, whilst creating a Board, so that we would retain overall power in decision-making. Why do you persist in thinking that what I was doing for Wammy\'s House was based in altruism? I told Roger that I\'m going to destroy everything that he built and I still am. It was rooted in revenge, Mello, and I don\'t need to trust the stooge Watari to do that."



Mello paused on the verge of taking off an inch of hair in front of Matt\'s ear. Sometimes he even believed his husband, when he ranted like this, but the evidence was too contradictory. The resolution they had reached to safeguard the future of the House was beneficial for the children, while also maintaining a stronger infrastructure for the Watari Network. Matt had failed on many points of reform, all of them had favouring the welfare of the children, but nothing he had suggested had seemed to have the destruction of the system in mind. It was either an extremely complicated plan, which had by-passed a whole gang of geniuses, or it was the most incompetent strategy that Mello had ever encountered. He had just assumed that Matt had been mollified by the collaboration with their peers and the policies that they had secured. He asked, cautiously, "You still do want to bring down Watari?"



Matt blew out his cheeks, staring at the laptop\'s screen again. "What are you going to do, Mello?"



"Work out if you actually have a strategy, then block you every step of the way. What did you think I\'d do?"



"About this!" Matt snapped. His finger scrolled the document up and down, too fast to read. "You\'re going to have to drop the case."



Mello stood up off him and patted his arm. "Turn around, I want to see if your hair is level before I do the front. Then I want to walk through everything that I\'ve discovered and concluded. You are going to tell me if my conclusions are sound."



"Two things." Matt interupted. "Your conclusions are going to be sound, because they usually are, and you\'re not doing the front. You only did that three weeks ago and you took way too much off. My fringe is barely covering my eyes as it is. You aren\'t touching the front."



"Once you\'ve double-checked my findings, I\'m going to work out how much Hal knew. Then I\'m tracing this back to the source. It\'s not Jason. The man stunk of civil servant. Someone out there has it in for me and I\'m going to find out who it is. Then," he smirked, licking at his chocolate, "I\'m going to fuck them right up."



Matt lit a cigarette. He\'d sat up and leaned against the settee. He could feel the fibres sticking to the ointment on his back. "You realise there\'s an obvious candidate for the source, don\'t you?"



Mello nodded. "Yes there is, but shall I tell you why it\'s not Near?"



"Yes."



"Because Hal wouldn\'t allow herself to be used as a tool, by Near, for setting me up."



"You\'re basing that on her actions in the Kira case again." Matt warned. "She had a vested interest in keeping both of you out there hunting Kira, because that doubled the chances of someone catching him. Kira\'s gone. Her career now is better formed around alliance with Near, and all his contacts, than with you. She\'s fundamentally a policewoman for all her fancy titles. You\'ve just said yourself that you\'re a criminal mastermind. Association with you is actually dangerous for her. Have you never stopped to think of that?"



Mello nodded. He had done nothing but think about it for a day and half. "You think that her motivation is revenge or career, but you are missing one big one. Friendship. Besides I can\'t believe that she\'d call me up to ask me about wallpapering Wammy\'s House, if she was secretly trying to frame me for Mafia drug operations."



Matt peered warily at him. "Doesn\'t \'being framed\' imply that someone\'s innocent?" He sighed. "Mello, you have such a fucking blind spot for her. Just because she fancies the arse off you, you think she\'s a good woman. Look at the evidence! She didn\'t tell you about Mikami. She told you only what Near fed her to tell you. That says to me that it was less friendship and more a case of Near using her to use you."



"Fuck you!" Mello roared, but there was no real temper behind it. He had considered all of this yesterday and already rode the waves of emotion back into calm deduction. "Matt, you wouldn\'t recognise friendship if it leapt up and bit you on the arse. Don\'t look at me like that. If you think I\'ve been a good friend to you over the years, then you\'re even more stupid than you act. I\'ve treated you like absolute dirt and you\'ve kept on coming back for more. You\'ve never had a good friend, so I have no idea what you are basing your conjecture on."



Matt bowed his head, inspecting the cigarette between his fingers. "Mell, have I ever told you that you can be such a fucking wanker at times?"



Mello shrugged. "I\'m telling you the truth. Not so much now, but in the past, definitely. I have not been a good friend to you. I\'ve used you." He watched Matt touch his collar and relented a little. "Mail, don\'t get defensive. I\'m talking as a detective here, not as your..."



"No, you\'re talking like a twat." Matt pointed back to the laptop. "I\'m talking like a detective, when I say that you can\'t discount Hal\'s intentions on the basis that you think she\'s your friend."



"And your portfolio is so much stronger than mine." Mello snapped. Nevertheless, he eased forward and sat, straddling Matt\'s lap. "I\'m doing your fringe. I like to see your eyes."



"Fuck off!" Matt caught the hand with the scissors and dug his thumb into Mello\'s wrist to make him drop them. Mello reacted quickly, dropping his chocolate and bringing his other hand around to deliver a resounding slap across Matt\'s face. It knocked the goggles halfway around his head. Matt held his cheek and peered back, looking hurt.



Mello growled, "I will do your fringe, Matt, and I will have loyalty from you."



Matt\'s voice cracked. "You already have loyalty. What you want is blind obedience. You want me to stop saying all the things that you don\'t want to hear."



Mello stared. He wanted Matt to fight back or shut up, not this halfway point. He didn\'t want to hear the redhead sitting there, pointing out all of Mello\'s deficiencies to him. He reached out, pulled the goggles off and dropped them onto the floor. Matt didn\'t stop him, as Mello cut a chunk out of his fringe. "There we go. Such beautiful eyes, guapo. My very favourite shade of green."



"I\'m on your side, Mello. Will you please stop being so afraid?"



"Do I look afraid, Matty?"



"Yes." Matt\'s watched him, eyes wounded and wary, as Mello cut the hair above his eyebrows. He hissed back, "Walk me through your evidence."



Matt\'s attitude was stepping on Mello\'s last nerve, not least because he was making sense. If Mello had to review the case for his defence of Hal, then he was forced to admit that it was more likely that the woman could turn against him. His own conclusions were more intuitive than fixed in firm fact. It irked him. He met Matt\'s gaze and outstared him, leaning in to kiss him, as his husband looked away. "I love you, Matt, but shut the fuck up. Ok?"



Mello stepped back off him and pulled the memory stick from the laptop without closing any of the documents first. The machine beeped in protest, but Mello ignored it. He inserted the stick into his desktop and filled the monitors with notes and diagrams. "Are you happy that I\'ve demonstrated what\'s Mafia and where the other eleven non-Mafia gangs are? The results are consistent with those concluded by the American investigators anyway." He watched Matt nod sullenly and so turned back to his screens, flicking over to the second folder. "Are you happy that I\'ve proved at least reasonable doubt that a pharmaceutical company might have manufactured narcotics?"



Matt rubbed his face. "I believe that you\'ve done that."



"Enough to order an investigation?"



"Yes." Matt was staring at the final screen. "And yes, you present a strong case for the request for that coming from the Pennsylvanian senator. Mello, honestly, angel, you cannot go to an agent working for the CIA, or FBI, or whoever the fuck he is, and tell him that a senator stopped a crime wave in his state by taking over where the Mafia left off. Yes, he probably gained another term of office on the back of the political kudos; and yes, it does look like the company benefitted greatly from the embargo on imported drugs, legal drugs, that followed shortly afterwards. But, shit, Mell! Where it\'s not conjecture, it\'s backed up by your knowledge gleaned from being part of this! Strong conjecture, I\'ll give you that, but not enough to convict anyone. This conclusion is never going to be made public, especially since you\'ve highlighted a few other states where the example might have been followed. Things like this bring down administrations! And the testimony you\'re including could put you away."



"I was never asked to prove anything. The remit asked for me to highlight leads for further investigations by the Drug Enforcement Agency. They are drawing blanks, because they are still looking towards the underworld and foreign import. They are trying to work out which borders to watch, when all the time, it\'s happening in the middle of an American city." Mello smirked, happy that Matt was agreeing with his conclusions at least. "Someone is getting very rich off the backhanders here. My guess is that it\'s that senator and the CEO of the company."



"But Mell!" Matt held the top of his head with both hands. "You only knew he was corrupt in the first place, because you knew that he was in the pay of the Mafia a couple of years ago. The evidence incriminates you!"



"Yes, it does." Mello sat down on his computer chair, taking up another of the half-eaten bars of chocolate that he had scattered around his room. "But the remit said to open up firm investigative leads. I\'ve opened up firm investigative leads. But yes, it wasn\'t nearly as difficult as I was anticipating. I find it hard to believe that someone hadn\'t already reached the conclusion that I would have the evidence to fill in the blanks."



"Near is behind this."



"Possibly." Mello considered it again, as he had several times before. "But unlikely."



Matt exhaled loudly. "Back away from this case, Mello. Please? For me? I never ask anything of you, but back away from this one, please."



"Hell no." Mello bit off a chunk of chocolate and crunched it viciously. "Because if someone is out to get me, and it certainly looks like they are, then I want to smoke them out now. Then I want to eradicate their puny threat before it even becomes a problem."