Work Text:
“Matt.”
“Yello, Mello!”
Mello pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it in disbelief.
“Don’t ever say that again,” he ordered after recovering. “I have a job for you.”
“And here I thought you were calling because you love me.”
Mello had to bite his tongue to resist asking Matt if he’s high: Mello knew that he wasn’t. A couple beers in at most, or maybe a line of coke, but that wasn’t something to worry about. And besides, a good mood Matt is much better than a depressed one; more productive.
But those fucking jokes of his.
“You have time until tomorrow evening; I need you to set up the…”
One thing led to another, and, well. Long story short, that was how they ended up in Japan.
***
When Mello first met Matt, he thought to himself: ‘he’s alright, but he is a one time thing’. At that time in his life, Mello still found it not-so-easy to leave a lover in bed alone and slip away while they were asleep: he was trying to break himself out of the Christian mental cage that insisted that sex was something sacred or, God forbid, important. Matt was one of the first test subjects of Mello’s new M.O.: hit it and quit it. So it was extra important to remind himself that Matt might be good, but he is a one time thing.
Six years later, Mello woke up to the sounds of his one-time-thing brushing his teeth and vigorously coughing up a lung in the hotel bathroom. He could hear everything a little too well, and the morning sun was hitting Mello’s eyes a little too directly.
“Smoking kills, man!” he called towards the bathroom.
“It’s not the cigarettes!” came the reply, crimped and crumpled by the toothbrush in Matt’s mouth. “It’s the gag reflex!”
Suffice to say, Mello was a little surprised by that claim: he, if anyone, knew for a fact that Matt’s gag reflex wasn’t so easily triggered. Not by toothbrushes, at the very least.
“The hell are you doing in there that got your gag reflex active?”
Mello sighed and got up. Since he was already awake, there was no point in lying in the sun and letting it blind him any longer. He squinted and headed to the small bathroom, where Matt was, once again, losing horribly in his battle against oxygen. Mello leaned his shoulder against the door frame.
“I think you have a pollen allergy.”
“Never had one in my,” hack-kh, “life, and suddenly now I do?”
“Well, you've never smelled the Japanese Cherry Blossoms either.”
Matt rinsed his mouth and perched himself on the bathtub rim, giving Mello some space to wash his face.
“Cherry is cherry, and I’m not allergic to those.”
Mello glanced at Matt through the mirror, noting with annoyance that the surface was smudged again.
“So you admit it’s the smoking.”
“Like a broken record…”
“When we get back to the US, I’m dragging your ass to an oncologist,” Mello threatened, his words slightly unclear because he was now also brushing his teeth.
“Yeah, let’s wait until we're in the country where it costs an arm and a leg.”
“Jeevas, shut up. Go make me a coffee.”
Matt gave him the finger, cursed under his breath, coughed into his fist, and squeezed his way out of the bathroom. To go and make some coffee.
Since they first met, Mello has tried every kind of sex imaginable, and Matt — every kind of drug imaginable; Mello has changed so much since he was seventeen, he was hardly the same person, and Matt’s own changes had been so subtle, they may have eluded even him. But Mello saw them — and that was the furthest thing in the world from obeying the rule of ‘one time thing’.
Matt and Mello weren’t exactly tight-knit; more like two different strings, braided in a pattern and then unravelled at the end, going their own separate ways, only to end up together again later, in a beautifully woven design, or a tangled, messy knot.
***
The sound of the car door slamming shut was accompanied by Matt’s coughing. Mello threw a pack of antihistamines at him.
“What’s this?” Matt’s Japanese was worse than Mello’s.
“Allergy pills.”
“Mells, for fuck’s sake.”
“Just take one and prove me wrong. At least I’m not making you quit smoking. Yet.”
Matt rolled his eyes and swallowed one of the pills dry, all while holding Mello’s gaze.
And he had the audacity to talk about the gag reflex.
“Did anything happen while I was gone?”
Matt’s yellow gaze was radiating sarcasm and irritation — golly, how dare Mello force him to do the job he dragged him all the way to this country for?
“Nothing. Same as when you were here.”
“We continue then. They have to show up.”
Matt threw his head back and moaned — as in, irritating groaning. Not erotic at all.
“You are aware that they don't, right? Like, they literally can just like, not show up.”
Mello glared at him and clenched his teeth. He was aware, yes. But that was the only lead that Near for sure didn’t have, so it was worth checking thoroughly. Matt would get him everything else once Near had the information, but at this particular parking lot, something was bound to happen.
He just wasn’t sure what.
“Once again, what exactly are we waiting for? And why exactly am I here?”
“Matt, shut up. This car is supposed to be empty, and you talk too much for an empty seat.”
“I just don’t get it.”
“Then try to.”
There was a lull.
“We won’t even be able to hear anything.”
“Matt, for the love of—”
Of course, Mello already knew all of that. If Matt truly can see no point in their stakeout, then maybe it isn't worth it… On the other hand, it’s simply hard for anything to hold Matt’s attention for long; and Mello’s job isn’t to entertain him, but to solve the case.
And if seeing someone in that parking lot is going to help them track the gang members, which will help them find out who they're dealing with, which will help them understand who in the police department has a vested interest in hindering the investigation... Which will help them in finding evidence, which will help them solve the case, which will help them learn who L's contact in the police department is, and why the HELL had the greatest detective handed this case over to NEAR instead of Mello, who was also in contact with him; and why can't L find the rat himself, and why is there a second signature style that has been appearing in his investigations…
Well, if all that happens, Mello’s going to pay Matt looooads of money and then suck him off, or whatever.
***
In the stillness of the night, Mello felt as if the entire street could hear them. The headlights were off, and the man they'd been following for the last half hour had parked in front of a depressingly unremarkable apartment building. It was gaping at them with empty communal balconies and tiny windows; the corner store sign was flashing epileptically. Matt covered his mouth with his hands and tried to cough more quietly.
Mello took pity and gently poked him in the face with a bottle of water until he took it.
“Maybe it’s a dust allergy?”
“Only,” coughing, “Japanese dust?”
“You barely coughed after you took the pill. Take another one.”
“Does it wear off that quickly?”
Mello reached out and took the pack of pills, reading the kanji on the back. They were supposed to last twelve hours, and it had only been about eight... But Matt hadn't coughed for almost the entire time they'd been sitting in that parking lot waiting for the deal. He'd whined, yes, but he hadn't coughed.
“Take another one,” Mello repeated.
Matt grabbed the pack from him and took a pill, and then, for some reason, started trying to read the instructions that Mello had been examining before.
No one else came in or out of the building in front of them. Mello turned towards Matt to tell him they were ready to go back to the hotel, only to find him painstakingly typing the instructions into the translator.
Stubborn bastard.
***
“You always wince at the last sip of your coffee.”
Mello put down his cup and raised his eyes.
“Do I?” He questioned. “No. I didn’t wince just now.”
Had he become so relaxed around Matt that he lost control of his own facial expressions?
“Yup, now you didn’t. But you usually do, right?”
“I guess, yeah. It’s too bitter for me.”
It seems they'd had this conversation before, and Matt had asked why he even bothered drinking the last sip, and this piece of indisputable logic had Mello stumped: what else could he do — not drink it? Add sugar only to the last sip, so that he wouldn't wince? What nonsense. Matt seems to care more about Mello's aversion to the last sip than Mello himself does.
“And was it fine now?” Matt prodded.
Mello contemplated it. He wasn't used to thinking about coffee so much.
“Yeah. It had that, kinda earthy aftertaste, instead of bitter.”
Matt smirked proudly.
“That's because I added salt. A pinch of salt neutralizes the bitterness and acidity,” Mello didn't seem to care, but he couldn't bring himself to say it. “Did you know I once worked as a barista for a month?”
And Mello did know.
***
The last subtle change in Matt is that he's been better. It's an objective fact, and Mello isn't sure how to feel about it.
He should be glad, probably, or maybe not feel anything at all: what does he care? But since they last saw each other, Matt did who-knows-what, maybe quit taking something, or maybe started taking something new; and now he jokes and smiles, flirts with Mello for no good reason other than to flirt and to antagonize him, and strolls through the world as if he remembered why it isn’t pointless.
It’s cool. It’s nice to look at. And Mello tries so hard to ignore the filthy, sooty feeling in his chest, a reminder that Matt got better without Mello there. He’s obviously fine when with Mello, too.
Two days ago, Matt said to him after sex, “Can you not drag me by the hair so much?”
Mello was surprised, not by the request itself, but by Matt saying it. Like, talking. With words. Not just in the heat of the moment, or when it was really getting to him, but just a note without a second thought, an app review: four point five stars, the service was nice, but.
Because Matt doesn't voice his complaints. Not like that: not without a fight so that he can… Mello’s overthinking it.
“I thought you liked it.”
“I like it when you tug my hair, like, just for the sake of it. Not when you drag me by the scalp wherever you need me to be, like I’m that dude from Ratatouille.”
Thanks, MATT, for the mental image of the dude and the rat from Ratatouille having sex. God, Mello’s regretting every decision in his life, solely because they led him here.
“Fucking ew. You’re nuts.”
Matt apparently realized what Mello was imagining and just snickered nastily.
And that was it.
Mello remembered Matt passing out during sex once, just emerging from the depths of yet another drug binge, and Mello was horrified because Matt hadn't even said anything. He'd just stopped moving, and that was it, and he'd never moved much before that, he was tired, but he was always tired back then, and Mello was almost shaking, wondering if he’d noticed way too late that Matt had lost consciousness. There was no way to tell.
Then Matt woke up and said ‘oops’. Fucking ‘oops’!
So now it felt a little strange and a little intoxicating, like a free fall, the weightless feeling of almost-flying, of giving up control to the whooshing air: Matt, who was both happy and sober, for an extended duration. Matt, who was grounded and sane. Matt, whose hands didn't need to be grasped until they bruised, whose wrists didn't need to be gripped with all your might, risking to crack the bone, just to keep him from leaving. It's all metaphorical, by the way. Literal, too, but that's far less significant.
All the while Matt had still been leaving, and so had Mello: unbraiding, like strings, unable to hold the pretence of the pattern, and then coming back together; but every single time Mello was still consumed by the need to clamp his jaws around Matt, like a rabid dog, so that he wouldn’t escape, wouldn’t suddenly slip away somewhere. In the metaphorical and in literal sense.
And now, look, Matt's asking not to pull his hair so much, and Mello realizes that it doesn't bother him. His stupid jokes bother him, his attitude bothers him, the word ‘ratatouille’ now bothers him too, but this casual demand for selective tenderness is fine. It works.
His jaws unclench, his hands release the wrist and weave into the hair instead — tender and metaphorical. He’s not afraid to let Matt out of his sight anymore.
Mello fears this will only make it harder to let him go. It's easy to lose a lone string in your hand, always slipping — it’s so much harder to hold the pattern weaved and try to guess whether or not it has a place for another person-string. In the end, it was always Mello who ran away, because he knew this was it: he needed a detox from Matt, from the constant anxiety and jitters, from the fact that his fingers on other’s skin stopped leaving anything but bruises. Mello ran away when it stopped being hot and started being... different: devoted, or maybe desperate. Not either/or, but two ways to say the same thing. Mello forced himself to look at other people when he realized he didn't want to; he packed his things and disappeared from Matt's life for a few more weeks or months when he realized he was dangerously close to never leaving him.
Mello was used to those detoxes of his. So what was he supposed to do with Matt so… non-toxic? How will he be able to get away from him when things get too good, if they don’t also get too bad?
A Venus flytrap.
***
“You know, Matt, Freud had said that coughing is—”
“You want me so bad.”
“Freud—”
“Honey, why are you talking about another man in our bed? Do you want to sleep on the couch?”
“You are insufferable.”
Matt laughed and took another drag, his long, sweaty limbs spread across Mello's bed. Matt's bed had been cluttered with electronics since the day before yesterday.
Matt’s voice was deep and slightly hoarse from coughing, cigarettes, and sex.
***
‘Matt’s okay now, no need to worry about him’, his ass. ‘Mello’s not afraid to let Matt out of his sight anymore’, hilarious, do another one!
Fuck this shit.
***
“Stop yelling.”
“...You’re telling me not to YELL?”
“Yeah, don’t fucking yell, imagine that! I can’t be blamed for getting hit over the head with a bat and getting kidnapped!”
“Yes, you can,” Mello assured. Then caught himself: “Over the head? Are you dizzy?”
“Fuck off.”
Calmer now: “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Your pastor would die of shame for you.”
“That doesn’t sound like ‘one’ at all. What the fuck, Matt, you can’t even count to one, you useless piece of shit. All you do is smoke and get kidnapped by the yakuza.”
Matt remained silent for a few seconds, seemingly hoping that Mello would take back his words under the warning gaze (yellow, like the caution tape). Matt couldn't seriously count on that.
Then their argument was interrupted by distant footsteps, and, well, the rest is history. They stole a car — a convertible, to avoid the hassle of opening the doors.
And off they went.
Mello shot back at the car pursuing them, then Matt tugged at his jacket and told him to buckle up, and Mello understood the real fun was about to begin. They glided through the orange streets of waking Tokyo, swerving through alleys and speeding on the highway; they burst onto the freeway, kicking up hurricanes of dust, weaving through traffic and breaking all speed limits on short empty stretches of the road. Mello no longer knew if they were being followed or where they were, lost in the maelstrom of streets, forgetting which lane they were supposed to be in, constantly thinking they'd crossed into oncoming traffic. But he wasn't about to stop Matt: he kept complaining that their rental car was too boring and ‘wack’ so he’s gonna let him drive a non-wack one, especially in such befitting conditions.
At another sharp turn, Mello suddenly realized that Matt could never quit this: no matter how much he changed, no matter how much he sobered up, he would remain the same adrenaline junkie as Mello was. And it was exhilarating.
Matt burst into a hoarse laugh that echoed along the entire track.
***
They abandoned the car under a bridge and returned to the hotel by bus. Matt slept until three in the afternoon, coughing worse than ever, but this brought a strange sense of calmness to Mello, because it only confirmed his dust theory.
While Matt slept, Mello was running his hand through Matt’s hair and analyzing the data they had, munching on a chocolate bar. In theory, that stupid kidnapping could be considered an informational foray.
***
“You need the virus TODAY?”
“Yes, Matt, today! Or else Near might solve this case!”
“But we already solved it! Is that not enough?”
“It isn’t,” Mello stated honestly, as if implying Matt was an idiot for assuming otherwise. Implying, ‘of course it's not enough’. Implying, ‘how can it ever be enough?’
Matt rolled his eyes and started mumbling as he typed:
“I work day and night. When you called me to come to Japan, I thought it would be all, like, anime and kimonos and onigiri. But it’s just work.”
Mello decided not to let it slide, because Matt was getting on his nerves:
“It’s because I've called you here to work. And we ate onigiri for dinner last night.”
“You don’t get it.”
“Can you stop whining?!”
And Matt looked at him through his yellow censure, the color of lemon candies from the ground-floor cat cafe across the street, his face illuminated by the sunset spilling outside the windows, a fiery red, the color of the convertible they'd stolen while fleeing from the yakuza a week ago. Matt gave him a look that said, ‘of course I can't’, ‘how can I not whine?’, and it awakened something in Mello... Something red and yellow, not fiery, but rather viscous and rotten, stained with vile and shameful (rare, thank God, rare) memories of when Mello told Matt to shut up, and he did.
“Dude,” echoed the voice of his years-long one-time-thing, “that is so not kawaii.”
Matt’s really asking for a slap to the back of the head right now!
Mello's just afraid his fingers will gently comb through Matt's hair, stroking it softly, and it will not have the disciplinary effect Mello intends.
But if it wasn’t for that, he would totally slap him!
***
Matt looked absolutely disgusting in the airplane seat next to him. He sat awkwardly, his mouth slightly open, drooling in his sleep.
This infuriated Mello beyond belief, so he carefully wiped away the drool. And then licked it off from his finger, because, well… there were no tissues nearby!
And this dirty plane, packed to the brim with people, didn't deserve Matt's drool on its seat.
Matt's neck will hurt when they land. He needs to tell him somehow... Needs to say something... Needs to…
No, he doesn’t. But he wants to tell him—
“Are you hungry?”
Matt rubbed his eyes tiredly, processing the question for about ten seconds. They were waiting for their luggage. Matt's goggles hung around his neck, and his transparent gaze was sleepy and somehow too honest.
“Huh? Well, yeah. I'll probably eat first and then go to sleep,” he yawned.
“Do you want to eat together?”
“Here?”
“No, there's a good Chinese place a block from the airport. It takes longer to get out of the parking lot than to get there.”
Matt stared at Mello, confused. He should have bought him coffee.
“And... then what?” Matt asked, clearly hesitant.
Is this an invitation or a set-up? Suggestion or distress?
“And then I'd like to sleep... Um, you could basically stay at my place. If you want.”
Now Matt looked at him with genuine suspicion, because Mello didn't do that. If they met up for work, especially after spending so much time together, Mello ran away as soon as the job was done and vanished from sight in a futile attempt to create distance between them. No farewell breakfasts or offers to spend the day.
Mello had never cheated Matt out of his money, so chances were he wasn't worried about that. He probably thought Mello already had the next job lined up for him. So Matt cautiously asked again:
“And then what?”
“Well, I need to see if your coughing gets better, and if it doesn’t, I need to get you an oncologist appointment, as I promised. And then drag you there. So, um, you know.”
“Uh-huh.”
There was a brief silence.
Mello was ready to crawl out of his skin.
“I'd rather go home and drop off the equipment,” Matt said hesitantly, “and rest until the evening. But tomorrow or the day after, you can come over, to like, help sort the data. From the case. And to keep an eye on the coughing.”
Mello exhaled.
Did he do it? Just like that? Just one word, and they keep going?
“Uh... Yeah. Yeah, cool. Come on, you'll follow me to that restaurant.”
“Are you sure it’s open?”
“You bet.”
“Alright then… Can’t you just send me the address?”
He glanced over his shoulder at Matt, so rumpled and soft and bleary-eyed. Mello grinned.
“That would be boring.”
***
They were the only customers. The sun outlined pale shapes on the floor, climbing the chair legs like morning glory; and Matt knocked back his glass of lemonade because he was too tired, and apologized profusely to the employee, and cast angry, delightfully transparent glances at Mello for not looking guilty enough.
And he didn't cough once.
Mello knew it was all that damn Japanese dust.