Author's Notes:

SPOILERS for the end of the series, just about. Not too much as far as warnings go. Death. Hurrah.

I needed to write, but Primes is being irritating, plus I just updated not too long ago. Enjoy this in the interval. Or hate it. Whatever. Reviewers get spiff points. (And you might just encourage me to work on Primes, too. XP )

-Fly

ooO0OooO0Ooo

Before, when Mail still had his parents, he had gone to church. He had believed, however briefly, in God: an omnipotent, benevolent God who had a master plan for the world.

And then came the sharp, crisp smell of a fired shot, and the blood: red red red blood, staining the carpet and tainting his world.

"I don't know why I bother," Mello said disgustedly. He shook his head, sending straw-blonde bangs scattering over his vision like a curtain over reality. "You don't get it, do you?"

"I can't," Matt said, shrugging. "Sorry."

Mello's lip curled backwards in an alligator sneer. "Don't apologize."

"It's a social convention, Mello—"

The sardonic words were silenced by the blonde's raised hand. Ice glittered in the blue irises—deep blue, a dark blue, as impenetrable and dangerous as the depths of the Weddell Sea. "Like God," he said, and his words dared Matt.

Matt met his gaze steadily. "Yeah," he said. "Like God."

Back then, at the orphanage, religion had lost any of its remaining meaning. Without the rigor of weekly worship, God faded, became some distant figure to be blamed, not worshipped. Religion just wasn't, and Matt didn't care.

Except—there was one kid, a dagger-eyed blonde, who kept to his religion. He prayed.

Every day.

One day, Matt stole his rosary, just for fun, to see what would happen. He got a faceful of fist and a broken wrist for his troubles, but it was fine. The pain was a release, a liberation; when Mello finally stopped, chest heaving, Matt's fingers uncurled from the still-clenched rosary. "Here," he said, pushing the word through his split lips, and the sapphire ice simmered with that strange strain of anger that, even then, had Matt hopelessly addicted.

Mello snatched it from his grasp, leaving Matt's fingertips burning where they had grazed that anger.

"It's the truth," Mello argued, staring at the wall. He leaned against the battered headboard, clutching the bottle in one hand and fingering his rosary with the other. The beads glinted in the dim light, like cracked eyes staring numbly at the world. "You have to see…"

"I don't 'have' to see anything," Matt replied. He leaned against the back of the door, disdain lacing the surface of his gaze like bright venom. "It's irrational."

"You idiot," Mello said. He pointed at the redhead with the hand holding the bottle. "Ego reputo quoniam is est insensatus."

Matt's eyes flashed. "Don't quote Latin at me."

"It's not a quote." Mello took another swig of the bottle, then frowned as empty air grazed his lips. He dropped it to the bed. "It means, 'I believe because it is irrational.'"

"I don't see why you keep bringing it up," Matt snapped. The goggles tinted his vision orange, but every time this happened, he considered switching to red lenses just for the sake of irony. "It's none of your concern."

Mello was already off the bed, his previously abandoned gun clutched in one white-knuckled hand. The rosary glinted out from his fist. "You idiot," he croaked. He stalked towards the gamer, his footsteps quaking on the splintering boards. Matt's face remained impassive, smooth and unfeeling as marble. "You idiot," Mello said again, for the third time, and he jammed the barrel of the gun into the soft curve of skin between Matt's cheek and throat.

"Did it ever occur to you," Mello demanded, his voice raw and slurred at the same time, "that maybe—just maybe—I got enough fucking rationality at Wammy?"

Matt's marble mask remained unbroken. "Mel," he said, quietly, and the manic glint of sapphire ice faded, to be replaced with the normal, potent mix of anger and disgust.

Mello shoved him aside and left, leaving Matt alone in the miserable wreckage of their shared life.

Sometimes Matt and Mello actually struck a balance. It usually came in random pauses and silent breaths, attained during lazy afternoons of mutual ignorance or during the brittle lapses that followed arguments. Never did balance occur when they were actually talking—Matt's way of introduction had established the combative nature of their friendship from the start.

It was a friendship, though, Matt reflected. He glanced over at the dim outline of Mello's shadow across the room. How long had he spent messing with Wammy's assignment program to get it to place them in the same room?

His stomach still ached from their fight that afternoon.

Matt closed his eyes, and he thought: This is it. Contentment.

They left the apartment one night on a whim—well, Matt's whim. He needed to get out, needed to shake out the crick in his neck and the bleary aching in his eyes. He could only sit hunched at a computer for so many days without sleep before it began to wear on him.

Mello followed reluctantly, but he followed, and that's what mattered.

They got on Matt's bike. Wind snarled in their faces and tore at Matt's rust-stained bangs, snapping away hunger and exhaustion and worry and fatigue until it was just them, just the two of them, and the wind and the roar of motion and the darkness of a deserted world.

Behind him, Mello's hands encircled his waist, and that's how it had always been: the coarse contact of flesh on flesh, life on life, existences that lay, not tangential, but coincidal. They were one and the same, even now; despite religion and atheism, obsessive drive and devoted apathy, they were still one mind, despite the jagged edges.

"Promise me something," Mello said abruptly as he leaned over Matt's shoulder. Matt could smell the fresh, ripe scent of rotting flesh emanating from Mello's scar, but he didn't mind. Didn't care. Matt never cared.

"Anything," he said, dryly, but Mello knew truth when he heard it. Matt's fingers continued to crawl across the keyboard with arachnoid dexterity, and he could feel the weight of a second set of eyes following their passage.

"Promise me," Mello said, "that you won't get yourself killed."

The fingers stilled in their expedition. Matt rolled his eyes upward to meet Mello's gaze: the fierce glare of ice met the bland sheen of emerald, and Matt said: "You first."

His words had the predicted effect. Mello's jaw clenched, sending the veins taut beneath the surface of his throat. "No."

"Why?"

Mello's nails dug into his shoulder, biting through the cloth and into the skin. "Because."

Matt's eyes blazed with the first flare of emotion he had shown since Mello had initiated the conversation. "This is about God again, isn't it?"

"Matt—"

It was a warning, a rebuke, and a threat, but Matt ignored it. His gaze slipped away from Mello's, and he addressed the wall, the better to maintain his composure. "I don't care for religion, Mello. I've told you as much." His breath rattled in his chest, and he reached for a cigarette. "I've already given you my fucking life, for what little it's worth. What else do you want?"

Mello, for once, didn't allow anger to seep into his voice, but Matt could read it in his tensed fingertips nonetheless: the cold, raw burn of steel. "You," he said, and stopped. Matt waited for the word that would follow it—the inevitable you idiot, the common you moron, or the now-familiar you bastard. Either that, or the phrases: you don't get it, you're being stupid, you don't see, do you?

No word came.

The cigarette fell limp in Matt's fingers, and he twisted his neck around to meet Mello's eyes. They never had changed from the day they first met, when Matt snitched his rosary: sharp and bright and clear, like salt, like blood.

"Now do you get it?" Mello demanded. Matt could read the aggravation in his voice as easily as a children's primer. "Honestly." The nails dug into his shoulder again. "You're supposed to be a fucking genius, Matt."

Matt stared at him, then realized that his jaw had fallen slack. He grinned, the crooked grin that only emerged in Mello's presence, but it tasted bitter even to him. "That's a morbid way of thinking, Mello."

"Is that the best insult you can come up with?"

"Have some more faith in God," Matt retorted, and god damn it, he was supposed to keep his smile from slipping into melancholy. "If you're right, he ought to be a bit understanding, yeah? If a bloke like you can make it into heaven, I'm sure I can, too. After all, compared with what you've done—"

"Shut up," Mello said, and stalked off.

Matt laughed, then reached for his lighter, too quickly. The cigarette shook as he lit it.

He closed his eyes.

"Mello," he called, keeping the apathy carefully preserved in his voice. The blonde's voice echoed from the kitchen.

"What is it now?"

"I promise," Matt said, and he tasted ash on his tongue.

They left without much of a goodbye. Just a quick press of flesh on flesh, Matt's hand on Mello's shoulder, and an awkward exchanging of words.

I promise, Matt had said, but Mello's eyes still looked empty, devoid of the ordinary bite of glacial ice.

Matt left, knowing his own lie for what it was, knowing Mello's silence for what it was, too, and knowing that—in the end—it didn't matter, anyway.

"We all die eventually," he said aloud, testing the words. The wind threw them back in his face, mocking. "We all die," he repeated, more strongly, but his throat caught, and he bit back the words.

Atheism was a lonely god.

Matt died in a gravitational collapse, in a storm of supernovae and an explosion of ricocheting bullets. The first shot stabbed through his side; the second ripped through his arm. And then it was all piercing light, light and pain, pain so red-hot that it beat any drug Matt had ever done. Nicotine ash melded with the acrid snarl of gunfire, and Matt existed for all of one second before his life splintered like the spiderweb cracking of a broken mirror.

Mello watched it from his truck, on the mini-television set, as the news played the same footage over—and over—and over—

Mello died in an inferno, as his heart clenched and sent electric jolts ripping through his veins. The ruins of the church, of his life, clattered down around him, and fire ripped through his world as his own blood rebelled.

The rosary remained in his grip, clutched like a broken lifeline—the self-same one that Matt had stolen, all those years ago.

Mello had his faith in the Church, in Heaven, in God, but he had his despair in them as well, because what good is being saved if it's not you who matters—

Matt didn't trust his faith with anything so simple. Matt, his faith had lain with someone, not something, but he had his despair, too, nurtured carefully over the years, the despair that came with finality, with the void—

As Matt fell, blood pouring from a thousand new orifices, reality draining into white, his teeth clenched around the cigarette, and this—

Fire take all.