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He waited exactly forty-two minutes after Mello left the SPK headquarters, knowing without turning to look at the clock, knowing because that’s how long it took for him to stack the dice in a replica of the Empire State Building, if he did it carefully.
Near always did everything carefully.
He knocked the dice down, but even that was done so they fell in order, black dots on white squares, falling in the area where no one else would step on them, where he could pick them up later. He didn’t feel like it at the moment, and there was no time if he was actually contemplating going through with this crazy half-impulse that he could not bring himself to put into a thought, to put into words, knowing that his reasoning would force him to reject it.
And that would be best, of course, but Near still found himself standing abruptly, halting the
muttered conversation of the others in the SPK, who turned their eyes to him, expectantly, apprehensively.
“I’m going for a walk,” he announced flatly.
None of them commented that he didn’t have shoes on, that they were in the middle of New York City, that it was dark out, that a kid like him would be a perfect target for any mugger or pervert.
And, of course, none of them dared to mention who might still be close by. Waiting.
But still, he grabbed a standard, police-issue shotgun as he left, door swinging back and forth a few times before it shut, settling in its frame. He didn’t want them looking for him.
Near walked down the hall, a compromise, because half of him wanted to run forward; half of him wanted to turn back. He could feel the eyes of the cameras on him, the same eyes that had been on Mello less than an hour ago.
Mello . . .
He reached the sidewalk, came to the edge, remembered, as he always did, to look both ways. (Not like Mello though; Mello never did; Mello just ran ahead without thinking, and that was why a quarter of Mello’s face looked like he had made a blowtorch angry.) Left. Right. Left again. One car coming from that direction. He stood, head bowed, one foot suspended of the sidewalk. Breathed between the seconds. Waiting.
The car passed, illuminating him for a second with its sightless eyes, unseeing, just as he knew the driver hadn’t seen him, too preoccupied with a cell phone or coffee or whatever filled his or her pointless life.
A shiver that had nothing to do with the night air traveled up his back. Near exhaled, slowly, letting one foot fall to the asphalt, then the other, and hurried across the street.
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Mello passed by the false, glaring lights of the convenience store, hesitating. It was a stupid name he thought, stupid because it helped light up and eliminate the darkness that was supposed to come with night, just like most of the other damned buildings in this city. Stupid, fucking American city where no one wanted privacy because privacy meant a place to get mugged and raped and killed on dark city streets, remains eaten by sewer rats, never to be found, memory passing into obscurity.
Or maybe too much privacy meant being lonely . . .
Grinding his teeth almost audibly, Mello pushed through the door and into the false, glaring lights, ignoring the tired gaze of the teenage girl at the counter, chewing gum, with too much lipstick and too much jewelry, a gaze that followed him. Not that that would prevent him from shoplifting if he was determined; he was extremely capable of outwitting such a girl on her best day.
There hadn't been much time for anything except saving his own ass, with the building blowing up around him, and so he was short on money, especially after purchasing the hoodie he was now wearing to ward off the pervy old men that stopped him in the street, promising him “a good time”, whereupon he was forced to resort to his limited, but adequate, knowledge of self-defense. He didn’t want to pull out his gun if he didn’t have to. Too much unwanted attention. Fortunately, a knee to the groin caused the bastards, or at least the ones he’d run into, to waddle off, cursing him, to look for some other victim. And that was just fine with Mello.
But the hoodie had only left him with a few dollars, and now that he was no longer living in Hal Ridner's bathroom, the threat of starvation was imminent. Mello sighed. This was no way to live. He needed to hook up with Matt, and soon.
He grabbed the largest Hershey bar off the shelf, without looking, and headed towards the counter. The girl’s eyes opened slightly wider, possibly surprised that he actually appeared to have the intention of acquiring something the legal way, or possibly scared that he now intended to demand the money in the cash register. Who knew what people with a normal I.Q. thought.
An aisle away, Mello turned, stopped, noticing something, cursing himself as he did so. The anger must have showed on his face, because the girl leaned back from the counter, poised, debating whether to run, discreetly dial the emergency number, or keep her city-born paranoia from dictating her actions. Then she saw he was only looking at the aisle with board games and jigsaw puzzles and wondered.
Mello also wondered, wondered as he dropped the chocolate bar and swiped the toughest jigsaw puzzle, continuing on the way to the counter. Stupid, stupid, stupid, he’s not even going to come, so then why am I bothering? He dropped the few crumpled bills, falling like diseased autumn leaves in this polluted city, a few inches away from her periwinkle nails, resting tensely next to the cash register, and left without asking for change. She blinked, like a startled doe, watching the door swing shut behind him.
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Mello could remember the first time he saw Near--really saw him, after all those numberless hours and nameless classes of watching him. Watching him always be just a little bit better, getting 100% on a test instead of Mello's 99.5%, raising his hand a split-second faster, defining a vocabulary term slightly more in depth. And Mello watched him, wondering when he'd get his chance to be first. Waiting.
There had never been a time without Near. Time and time again of telling and telling himself that he was more than a year older changed nothing. He could not remember that mythical time in his infancy, and so it did not exist. Near was always there; the perfect, white seraph sent to torment him from heaven or his own personal hell. Always just half a fucking percent better, and couldn't even be happy about it, damn him, allowing the other children to gawk at him without actually showing off, isolating himself without being a snob. And never, never betraying the slightest emotion, later, when Mello showed up at his door, angry, yelling himself hoarse because he--couldn't--stand someone being better than him, knocking over carefuly stacked books, blocks, card houses, almost hitting Near a thousand times, but never could quite do it. And he didn't know why. Just like he didn't know how Near could watch him, with such insufferable patience, until he was done. Just watched him. Waiting.
It was one of those rare, beautiful days in England, where it rained frequently, sunny, not too hot or too cold, the blue sky cloudless, the air smelling of summer. Mello was elected to fetch the football for the match that had no need to be announced on a day like this, and so 13:00 found him barging down the stairs, two at a time, nearly sending his gangly, fourteen-year-old frame sprawling on the ground floor like an old bear rug, but it wasn't like that had never happened.
He landed at the bottom, shook the tangled, blonde hair out of his face, one hand reaching for the doorknob when a splash of white in the adjoining room caught his eye. On impulse, he turned halfway and--stopped.
Near, only Near, age twelve, sitting on the floor and twirling his hair, completely absorbed in a puzzle spread in front of him.
Only Near, but then why, why, was his heart pounding double-speed all of a sudden, and his breath catching in his throat? It was as if he were looking at another person, Near-but-not-Near, but no, that wasn't it; he'd seen him there countless times. Isolated. A marble statue, soaked in bleach, with penetrating black eyes. All too familiar and repetitive, enough to make him scream, so, so, if Near wasn't different, then what was wrong with him?
"Do you need something, Mello?" Near asked without looking up, in three seconds fitting in a puzzle piece.
Startled, Mello dropped the football, which in eight more seconds rolled to Near, and he ran after it, but Near picked it up first. Blinked. Turned it over in his hands. And Mello could only stand there. Waiting.
"Can I have it back now, Near?" he asked, snappishly, two seconds sooner than was polite, showing impatience.
But Near only looked at him, blinked twice, looked back at the football. "It's like us, don't you think?" he mused. "Black and white."
"Conflicting natures?" Mello asked, voice dry with barely suppressed sarcasm, determined, as always, not to get left behind.
"Not exactly," Near said, after a pause, shaking his head. "More like . . . yin and yang, almost. Two halves, two opposites, forming a whole."
Mello found himself in need of a chocolate bar, to stop himself from using incorrect grammar, as his mind was finding it difficult to form a complex sentence. "What?" he choked out finally, solving the problem with the use of a single word.
"It should not surprise you that I think of people as puzzles," Near elaborated, staring at the one spread out in front of him. "Usually, I can keep all my pieces together. But you . . . come over sometimes . . . mad at me . . . and I get all knocked apart and when I try to put myself back together I find some of your pieces mixed up with mine so it's like I'm infused with bits of you but it's like you're supposed to be there, somehow . . . " He paused. "That was a run-on sentence, wasn't it?"
"Y-yeah," Mello stammered. "Not enough commas."
Near folded his hands on the football, like a prayer to no one, and placed his head on them. "Did that even make any sense?" he laughed, almost bitterly.
"Makes perfect sense," Mello said, shocked into honesty.
And then one of the kids waiting for the football ran inside and yelled for Mello to get his ass out there before they rigged up a bucket of water (or something worse) over the door, and he grabbed the football back from Near, ran to the hall, out the door, going, going, gone.
Later, he woud ask Matt, Matt, Matt what does it mean when you look at someone and your heart starts pounding and you can't breathe and you can't think straight?
But when Matt told him, snickering, and demanding to know who she was, Mello wished he hadn't asked.
When he couldn't stand Matt bothering him anymore, he ran out to the woods behind the orphanage and stayed there past curfew, which was stupid, in retrospect, because he was then forced to stay inside for a week, where he kept running into Near about every five minutes, or at least that's what it felt like it. But at the time, he couldn't see anything beyond the moonlight showing in splotches through the leaves, thinking, black on white on black on white on white on black on black on black on white . . .
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Near knew America had named the convenience store as such because it was fast. Get in, get out, drive away slightly above the speed limit, and don’t stop to think that taking the time to go to an actual supermarket would have been both healthier and less expensive. He wondered vaguely if Mello was American, but decided that Mello was Mello like stars were stars and water was water; he could be broken down and described chemically, but other than that, there was no point explaining the unexplainable.
The lights didn’t bother Near, who had spent most of his life indoors, and was thus far more likely to be bothered by natural illumination. What did bother him was that he didn’t know what made him turn, open the door, stride in purposefully as if he’d been planning to go there all along, not even wincing when his bare feet touched the cold, vinyl flooring, though there would have been no witnesses except for the wide-eyed girl at the counter, who was probably too stupid to notice such things, anyway. Actually, he knew why he was there, but not why he was bothering with this secret Christmas/birthday tradition when he’d probably just get his head blown off. Literallly.
The cashier barely had time to relax even slightly when she saw that it was only a kid before Near went to the same aisle as that other boy, the scary one, picked up the same type of chocolate bar, began to walk towards the counter with a passing glance down the games and puzzles aisle, and came to a dead stop. Then her hands shook, metal bracelets clinking like the jingle of forgotten windchimes. Too coincidental.
Near was, in fact, staring at another chocolate bar, one that had been dropped on the shelf right below the jigsaw puzzles. He didn’t really want to ask, but he had to know—“He was here, wasn’t he?”
She almost fell over when the slight British accent was barely audible above the humming of the freezers, but grabbed ahold of the counter and managed to stay upright. “Yeah,” she whispered, energetic nodding causing her hoop earings to bob. Some things didn’t need to be explained, even to a normal person.
Near picked up the other chocolate bar and paid for both (It didn’t matter, as he, unlike Mello, had ridiculous amounts of money at his disposal.), not waiting for change, though more out of charity than impatience, and deciding to ignore how terrified the girl suddenly was.
He left, remembering his birthday, eleven years ago, the first one that Mello had come to his room around lights out, dropped a puzzle on his bed, and left without a word. The box it came in wasn’t wrapped, unless one counted the note taped to the front: “Happy Birthday. Don’t worry; there’s no anthrax.” So the exchange was started, chocolate bars and puzzles dropped off unceremoniously, with misdirected contempt, every birthday, every Christmas, just as secret as their names.
And Near had to stop himself form running the next few blocks, to where he knew Mello was. Waiting.
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Near could also remember the first time he really saw Mello, but for him it was realisation, not a new feeling entirely, but rather all the tally marks from over the years adding up in a single moment and hitting him in the head.
It started before he could recall, had been going on since the cradle, for all he knew. The test scores would be called back, his first, Mello’s second, and Mello would glare daggers at him. Near could feel them stabbing, hurting so much that he devised a scheme so the papers would be handed back instead of called out, but Mello found out anyway and glared all the same.
I wish you were smarter than me, too.
And he never knew why, until one day he sat down to think, and it came to him, so ridiculously simple and complicated at once that he wondered why it had never occurred to him before. He loved Mello. That was it. He loved him, no questioning or analysis necessary.
But Mello hated him, and that left Near in his own purgatory. The only looks were glares; the only words were snarls; the only touches were meant to cause pain. He dreaded the times when Mello barged into his room, screaming at him, after which he couldn’t help crying for at least half an hour, damnable, automatic waterworks. He hated being called on in class, knowing that his mouth would always spit out the right answer on its own. And they wondered why he was so reserved.
It happened after dinner one night, as he stood outside of the bathroom in a terry cloth robe, towel over his arm, waiting for his turn in the shower. As usual, Mello had beaten him there and was taking much longer than necessary, a full-out metro sexual at age fourteen. Near himself had recently turned thirteen, and years of experience had taught him to keep a constant vigil outside any bathroom occupied by Mello, because if he left for half a minute, Matt was sure to skip in ahead of him--a years-old ritual that must have been funny, though he failed to see the humour in it. So he’d brought a transformer action figure to keep busy, or at least keep from decomposing into a heap of boredom, and folded it into one of five different positions while he waited, like a ghost in the dark, for the bathroom to be available.
Maybe he really didn’t need to, he thought, because he’d been inside all day, because he’d showered the previous night, because the only light in the hallway came from under the bathroom door and the dark was making him sleepy. He was about to give it up when the water stopped, causing him to look up expectantly, hands automatically changing the transformer from human-figure to spaceship. Still, it was five more torturous minutes before the door finally opened in a gust of steam.
Near blinked in the sudden brightness, eyes adjusting quickly. He opened his mouth to say something mildly sarcastic, but almost immediately forgot what it was because Mello was standing just outside the open door, white towel draped around his waist, hair soaking wet, bare skin showing the beginnings of a summer tan. And for some reason, he couldn’t stop staring.
He wanted to say, Mello, Mello, I think you forgot to dry your hair, but that would have been inexcusably stupid because it was obviously combed, and Mello was not so negligent that he’d forget to dry his hair when he’d taken the time to comb it. So he watched the trails of water dripping from the tips of Mello’s hair, snaking down his naked chest and concave stomach, being absorbed by the towel.
Mello saw him looking, and for the briefest second betrayed surprise; for the briefest second, they stood as two mirror images, open-mouthed, staring. Waiting. Then a slow inevitable smirk tugged the corners of Mello’s mouth upwards and he grinned at Near, almost cockily. Near was frozen except for his hands, which still moved on their own, frozen as Mello swept past him in three seconds—fold the head in, pull the wings out—hair flipping just enough for a drop of water to fly loose and land on Near’s cheek. Five more seconds and he was down the hall, towel sinking ever-lower down his hips, Near’s heart suddenly jumping up to his throat when he couldn’t tear his eyes away. After one half-turn to purposely reveal the lingering smirk, the door clicked shut behind him.
He stood there for nineteen seconds before remembering himself enough to move woodenly into the bathroom and set the transformer on the counter, a cross between fighter jet and submarine. Near turned the water cold, then hot, then cold, then hot, trying to decide if it was easier to freeze the tumult of feelings, or burn them away.
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The alleyway was sandwiched between a closed Chinese take-out and an abandoned apartment building. It was like a hundred others in the city--dark, about ten metres long, and smelling vaguely of sewage and piss. Half of it was illuminated by one of those awful, garishly orange street lights perched out on the cracked sidewalk. Near knew he’d be there, but his heart still gave an involuntary lurch when he saw the hooded figure standing just outside the ring of light. Waiting.
Mello gave no sign of recognition, not when Near rounded the corner of the old, brick building, not nine seconds later when he stopped, rooted on the edge of light and shadow. Waiting. Only his eyes moved, glittering in the scant light reflected off the grimy pavement, liquid, black beetles, drinking Near in, and noting the changes four years could make.
Near sighed, a tired sound, more apt to be emitted by a man of sixty than a boy of sixteen. He took the chocolate bars out of his pants pocket and handed them to Mello, who grabbed them and almost reluctantly shoved the chocolate in the pocket of his hoodie.
“Fuckhead.” It could have been a greeting or an insult; he wasn’t even sure himself.
“You’re welcome,” Near replied, expression neutral.
Mello snorted, producing a box from some hidden compartment and tossing it lightly to Near--the expected jigsaw puzzle, which Near caught, barely, and did not bother to thank him for.
Mello crossed his arms, leaned against the wall, his apparent relaxation a mirage. “So. Why’d you come?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” Near blurted, not expecting the question.
Mello laughed, short and humourless. “Of course you do. You don’t act on impulses, right? You have . . . reasons for things, don’t you, Nia? That’s supposedly why you were always able to beat me.“
“I wanted to see you,” he admitted, voice a little less steady than before.
“You just saw me.”
“Alone.”
“Why?”
“Why did I ever want to see you alone?” Almost angry.
Mello’s gaze fell a little, the first sign of discomfort. “Nothing’s the same now.”
“Then why are you here?” he demanded.
Mello smiled, empty and jagged. “I thought you might be.”
The silence stretched awkwardly. A car three streets over honked its horn.
Near exhaled. “So that’s it, then?”
A shrug. “Yeah.”
Near turned back towards the street, and heard the almost inaudible, yet unmistakable, sound of metal scraping against denim. “You know, it was stupid to come here alone. Especially for you.”
For the second time in one night, Near had a gun aimed at his head. Reflexively, he pulled his own out, pointed it back at Mello. Close range, impossible to miss, whoever shot last would be dead. They stood there, frozen, one light, one dark, thirty seconds and forever. Waiting.
“You forgot to take your safety hatch off . . . Mihael,” Near said, voice empty. One-word gamble, no more secrets. If this boy was going to kill him, it would be now.
Just get Kira for me.
Mello snapped the safety hatch off, the sound echoing once between the buildings, and pulled the trigger.
Click.
Near looked up in surprise as Mello’s gun clattered to the ground, noise like the hollows of catacombs, reflecting an untimely death. “I’d never point a fucking loaded gun at your head . . . Nate.”
Mello’s posture shifted, opened up almost intangibly, would have been invisible if Near had not seen it before, had not known what to recognise, but, of course, he did, and dropped his own gun. Half a second later he collapsed into Mello’s open arms, melted together, hearts pounding, breath coming in gasps, joined at the lips like they hadn’t been in four years.
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They both remembered the first time they’d done this. Four years ago, three weeks after Near had first seen Mello, give or take a few days.
It was a Saturday morning, after breakfast, in Mello’s room. The previous day, his test was handed back with an abysmal score--only ninety-five percent, much to the confusion of the teachers, who, at a loss for how to instruct the second in the academy better than they already had, or perhaps just scared of his nasty temper, had decided that Near--with his usual perfect score--would tutor him in the finer points of quantum physics.
Mello was less than pleased with the arrangements. Despite much protesting, and even an offer to retake the test, Saturday morning still found him sitting at the desk in his bedroom, left leg jiggling restlessly, glaring out the window at the summer weather. Where, as far as he was concerned, he was supposed to be at the moment, not being tutored in something he already knew, or at least knew well enough.
“I understand this, Near,” he growled, interrupting a lecture over the basics and shoving a few corrected problems at him.
Near accepted the paper wordlessly, and began writing on it. “These are the same ones you got wrong on the exam,” he noted. “Correcting them would be a simple matter. Try these,” he ordered, indicating the new equations he’d just made up.
A muscle below Mello’s right eye twitched. “I already told you that I get it. Just tell that to the damn teachers, and then you can sod off and play with action figures or puzzles or whatever maddening enterprise you undertake when you’re by your boring self.”
“It’s my responsibility to make sure you do, in fact, understand this, as you claim,” Near protested calmly, twirling a lock of hair. “Solve these equations. If you get them right, then we’re done, and you can sod off and play soccer or torture small children or whatever sickening enterprise you undertake when you’re by your psychotic self.”
Mello leaned backwards and snatched a chocolate bar off his bedside table, fingers deftly removing the brown-and-silver wrapper. “Ido get it. It’s just that . . . Matt brought some girl over around 23:00 and kept me up half the night. So I was bloody exhausted taking the test. Don’t report him because he’ll kill me, and I’ll use the last off my strength to ensure that you’re the one who accompanies me to the afterlife.”
“I’m touched,” Near replied, more than a little sarcastic, and took the chocolate--wrapper halfway peeled down, like a banana--from Mello. “Solve the equations.” He tore off a square, successful in his attempt to aggravate Mello, and popped it in his mouth.
Near fully expected Mello to make an unnecessarily large fuss over his precious chocolate, and fully expected that he’d have to hold it for ransom until the damned equations were solved, but forgot to take into account that Mello rarely did what was fully expected.
Thus, he received a tremendous, but not wholly unpleasant, shock when Mello grabbed him under the chin, tilted his head back, and proceeded to retrieve his chocolate out of Near’s mouth with his tongue.
Mello pulled back a few centimetres to chew and swallow, keeping hold of Near’s chin. Pale hands trembling like snowdrifts made alive by wind, Near broke off another piece of chocolate and stuck it in his mouth, and was still shocked when Mello repeated the unexpected, sloppily, because he’d never kissed anyone before and didn’t really know what he was doing, acting on emotions, as people often defined it, not that it mattered, because Near didn’t know the difference, and was too far gone to care.
Gone, because twenty-three, forty-two, sixty-eight seconds after Mello’s chocolate was finished, he was still kissing Near, aggressively, pinning him against the desk. It was two more minutes before he finally let go, panting, and allowed Near to settle correctly in his chair and try to regain something of his composure.
“Holy fuck,” Mello breathed. “I would never have guessed, but chocolate tastes one hell of a lot better with your spit.”
“Mero,” Near gasped, “please just solve the fucking, fucking, equations.”
“Alright.” No room left for argument in the newly heavy atmosphere of the room, like turning on a sauna.
He solved them flawlessly, though in handwriting messy enough to make Near cringe. Or, rather, would have been enough to make him cringe if he hadn’t been preoccupied by trying his damnedest, and failing miserably, to contemplate what they’d just done.
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Near curled his fingers around the greasy, blonde strands of Mello’s hair as his other hand snaked up the back of Mello’s hoodie, palm resting on the bumpy spine. Still felt like a goddamned anorexic, no matter how many chocolate bars he ate. In turn, Mello’s hand fisted in Near’s soft locks, and grabbed his ass, pulling him closer.
Belatedly, Near realised that Mello’s tongue was probably the most unsanitary thing he’d ever allowed in his general vicinity, much less in his mouth. In fact, the way their tongues twisted around each other, slick with more saliva than he’d known two mouths could hold, reminded him rather strongly of a picture he’d seen in a biology textbook several years ago, of two slugs mating. He wondered why this didn’t make him want to be violently sick all over the alleyway.
Mello, however, was too lost in his own overpowering lust to consider the logistics of a situation clearly lacking in anything of the sort.
Near had never really thought about it before, but now he was forced to compare and contrast himself with Mello, and compare and contrast what they were like now with what they’d been like four years ago. Near felt the rough stubble as his thumb traced Mello’s cheekbone, and the more-pronounced Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. All so different from the peach fuzz and cracking voice, signs of the pubescent boyhood that he’d still been in the clutches of four years ago. Near didn’t think he’d done anything besides getting taller.
Mello slammed Near against the wall, causing the back of his head to impact the bricks so hard that lights exploded before his eyes, pinning his hands against the wall to either side of his head. Near swallowed a whimper, but was given no time to recover before Mello released one of his hands and twisted his hair at the tender spot, nails digging into the scalp.
“Ouch,” Near mumbled, blinking away tears as Mello began kissing his neck, using his teeth a bit more than was strictly necessary.
“I could just--fucking--take you--right here.” The words came in bursts of hot air.
“Unadvisable,” Near choked, half-amazed that his brain was still functioning.
Mello lifted his head, looked Near in the eyes, calculating. “Cheap motel, a few blocks down,” he said. “Pretty sleazy, but I don’t think it’s dirty enough to have a roach infestation in the bathroom. You got money?”
Near nodded dumbly, regarded him with a mixture of incredulity and reluctant adoration. "How do you . . . What is it that you do that makes me want to go through with this insanity?"
"You have a cock, and it likes me," Mello replied simply, already dragging him towards the sidewalk.
He loathed to admit, even to himself, that Mello was probably right.
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The dark, motley of the wallpaper wound in sinuous patterns, dizzying, infinite between the boundaries marked by the water-stained ceiling and the faded, threadbare carpet, and where the old paper curled up at the seams, yellowed, like diseased tree bark. Near’s knuckles turned white, clutching the bed sheet, resisting the urge to cry out when Mello pulled out of him.
Mercilessly, he was flipped from stomach to back and Mello kissed him, again, roughly. Mello didn’t seem to be able to stop kissing him; Near thought their lips must be bruised by now, dark as the wallpaper, and caked with dried saliva. Yet, the last thing he wanted was for it to stop, even when Mello found the sensitive part, where neck joined shoulder, and bit, causing him to gasp as his nails carved ten half-moons into Mello’s back.
Near held his hand up, squinting, trying to see if any blood coloured his nails, but the room was too dark, lit up only by another awful, orange street light through a gap in the curtains. The chink of light fell on the nightstand, where one of Mello’s leather gloves, with the fingers cut off, was caught on the drawer handle. The rest of their clothes were strewn haphazardly on either side of the bed, along with the two pillows, knocked off by flailing arms or legs.
“Nia . . . “ Mello whispered against his mouth, hair, which, as he’d showered first, was thankfully no longer covered in grease, dusting his cheeks like spider gossamer.
Near reached up, touching the scar on Mello’s face, and sighed. “You idiot.”
He felt, rather than saw, Mello smile. “But I’m still alive. Counts for something, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose,” he admitted reluctantly, as Mello flopped down next to him, catching his breath. “When did you find out my name, anyway?”
“When did you find out mine?” he retorted, mussing Near’s hair absently.
“Asked you first,” Near said, a bit childishly.
Mello laughed. “I knew where the files were, of course. Anyone with half a brain did. The night I left, I picked a few locks, found out your name. I thought . . . I could use it against you.”
“But you obviously didn’t,” Near mused. “I’m still here.”
“I can’t beat you if you’re dead,” Mello shrugged. And I can’t say any more than that out loud. “So? My name?” he asked abruptly, purposely changing the subject.
Near traced the stains in the ceiling with his eyes, idly imagining a sea urchin here, a group of nebulae there. “What was I? Six? Seven? I just . . . snuck in there one day, and looked you up.”
Mello looked at him oddly, raised his eyebrows. "For no reason?"
"No. I just felt like it." Near didn't tell him how he'd tried to figure out the reason himself, for years, and came up with nothing, nothing, nothing.
Mello stretched, yawned. Sleep, exhaustion, lack of caffeine, tugged at his eyelids. He fought it. “You’re strange,” he decided.
Near read the display on the alarm clock, red numbers etched in black, almost satanic, in an organised way. 1:07. He cursed softly. “Fuck. It’s late.”
Mello regarded him through half-closed eyes, losing the battle to stay awake. “What? Are you leaving now?” A knife’s edge crept into his voice, which the echo of a yawn failed to hide completely.
“I’m not walking the streets of New York City, alone, at one in the morning,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’ll go back to headquarters when it’s light out.”
“What’ll your people say?” Mello asked, frown blinking across his face like a cloud of smoke.
Near looked at him, looked at the ceiling, looked at the wallpaper, blinked. “I have no idea,” he answered quietly. “I always know how people will react, individually, as a group, no matter what is thrown at them, but now I don’t. I mean, I can’t tell them where I was. I can’t tell them anything. I . . . I just . . . I have no idea.” The knowledge scared him in a vague way, to be felt in the pit of his stomach, reminding him of his childhood dislike of the outdoors. The unexplainable, the unpredictable, around every corner, the not knowing, not even being able to make an educated guess about the what or when something was probable to happen, leaving him with the inevitable feeling that something would.
Silence descended on the dark room, twisting, inflating, taught as a drum and soft as kitten’s fur. Near closed his eyes when he thought Mello was asleep, surprised when a pair of arms gripped him tightly, possessively, and Mello kissed him again, for five long seconds, sighed. Like Near was carved from ice, and would be gone, melted away, with the rising sun.
“God,” he said, voice shaking. “I think I might actually love you.” A pause. “Shit. I can’t believe I just said that.”
Near smiled against his chest. Exhaled. Tired. “’The heart feels what the eyes cannot see, and knows what the mind cannot understand,’” he quoted.
“Nor can it be fully explained by outdated, hackneyed clichés,” Mello grumbled, pissed at himself.
Near half-shrugged. For one selfish moment, he wished that it was someone else in his position, wished he wasn't smart enough, wished only to salvage the stolen sixteen-year-old life, video games and high school, never to be.
One selfish moment, passed like a breath.
Then he remembered, L had died for this.
He remembered that the SPK--Lester, Ridner, Giovanni--were still there.
And so was Kira, a black menace, the twisted grim reaper who had killed L.
Waiting.
~End