Let me say this before we dive on in: this is how I see it happening. If you subtract the possibility of MattxMello (and you know that pained me to say, seeing as I adore that pairing), this is how I see it going down.

Mello may be no hero, but he's no monster, either. In spite of the circumstances I've put him in here…well, you'll see.

That being said, this was one of my favourite fics to write. I adore everything about Mello. I like writing his fucked up mentality. Which, in short, means that I like fucking him up even more. -innocent smile-

I don't own Death Note. Lyrics are Placebo.

slapdash.

-

[don't go and lose your face

in some stranger's place,

and don't forget to breathe

and pay before you leave.]

-

Mello's done it before. He's fucked a girl, just once. A street walker with mournful eyes. She had a birthmark on the side of her neck, a little brown horseshoe, and Mello thinks that might have been what drew him in, that unalterable flaw, because he knows what it's like to have those things. Things you can't change. Things that mark and morph your skin for the whole dark city to see.

He had taken her melancholy smile and her birthmark into a motel, had sat her down on the bed and looked her over real slow. There was a sorrow in her stare that she'd be better off concealing, especially around people like Mello, people that know how to make you hurt. He's felt sadness, too. He's felt a little lost, like a speck of dirt in a prince's clothes. Who'd have thought.

In Mello's distorted mind, you preserve your worth by hiding the ugly things, sadness being the ringleader. You put yourself out there based on what people are afraid of, like the grim curl of his smirk, or the pretty way he holds his gun when faced with someone in the way of the prize. You take your sadness and you cover it up, you kick it under the rubble of a destroyed hideout, you keep your face turned at an angle so no one sees the damage.

At first, he had considered letting her go. She only looked, what, eighteen years old? Barely legal? What the fuck was she thinking, letting this blue-eyed beast with the scar-tissue whisk her away on a motorbike like some twisted fairytale? He's no knight on a stallion. He's a hurricane on two wheels, a pretty face with a gruesome death wish.

But then, she had tucked her bottom lip beneath her teeth, retired onto her back on dingy white sheets, spread her legs so that she resembled some distraught snow angel. Limp hair fanned out over the pillow like dark water. "Go ahead," she murmured, a little unsteady, shaky. "It's okay."

The sex was rough, bruising, borderline numbing, and Mello had watched the girl's tiny white hands grip the headboard behind her, heard her whimper and whine and cry like a pained animal, and there had been a thread of sweat beading under her eyes that glistened like a spiderweb. Like tears. How fitting. He had found himself kissing that strand of weakness, pressing his lips to her blushing skin, making hot stamps of sin on that horseshoe birthmark until he came, god, yes, he came, hard and unforgiving and with an agonized groan into her dove-white neck.

And it was over. You don't bask in the afterglow with a whore, no matter how scared and doe-eyed she'd been while watching him nervously roll on a condom, propped up on her elbows, or how she'd squinted her eyes shut and sucked in a trepid breath in anticipation of the first push. Maybe she was new to the stroll. Maybe it had been a first account on both sides.

Even now, weeks later, he doesn't let himself think about that possibility. A youthful, smoldering act of horny defiance. Defiance against what? Mello didn't and doesn't care.

She cleaned herself up in the rusted bathroom and Mello stood in the doorway, eyes on her through the hazy reflection of the mirror. There was blood between her legs that hadn't been there in the beginning. She was dabbing at her inner thighs with a wet paper towel, wincing, fragile, beautiful.

And for reasons unknown, Mello had looked away, hair falling over his eyes and his hideous scarring, and mumbled, "Sorry."

The girl's smile had been one that's normally given at funerals; small, distant, soft sympathy for the fallen. A virgin's smile, had it not been for Mello and his thirst for something breakable. "Me, too," she murmured over the sound of running water and city sirens outside the periphery of the window.

This isn't how it's supposed to be, he had thought as he walked towards her, took the paper towel from her hand and began cleaning her himself, gritting his teeth the whole time. You're not what you're supposed to be.

What made it worse is that she let him. She let him dab at her thighs, wash away red tracks of blood, mend her and make her clean just to get dirtied again by some stranger. Part of it made him sick. Hit me, he thought. Beat me to the fucking ground for what I've done to you, you stupid girl. Kira kills people like me, and you've let me fuck you raw, until I made you bleed, you idiot.

She had looked down at him, all sad eyes and damp hair beneath the slapdash overhead light. And she had said nothing, done nothing, asked for nothing but bloodless thighs for some other man to dig his nails into. That is, if she decided that Mello hadn't scared her away from sex for good. In which case, good for her. Those sad eyes weren't cut out for that sort of malevolence anyway.

Sure, in the aftermath of washing and paying the girl up, Mello had considered bringing her back to his shitty nook of the world, the one he still shares with a sleepy-eyed Matt. Maybe just for the night. She needed food, not like he would have much to offer upon arrival, but she was a waif, for god's sake. Her pretty bones had been on the verge of poking their white faces out from her shoulders, her sides, her bruised hips.

But Mello is no hero. He's not the good guy in this equation and he knows it. He accepts it. Hell, he caters to it with every scowl and scar he picks up out of the fire. He's got so many scowls. He's got so many scars. He's got a nice mug, there are still some hints of holy majesty when he tightens his jaw like this or when he narrows his eyes just like that, but as far as "good" goes, he's fucking penniless, he's got nothing. Nothing but black on black and a hatred for the world that he's harbored since he could first understand that life isn't what picture books and prospects tell you it's going to be.

It's a filthy, filthy world, and in reality, Mihael Keehl is probably the filthiest thing in it.

So he had sent her on her way. Disposed of the bloody paper towels, spared her another twenty, and watched her do an ashamed shuffle out into the hatred of the city night. She'd be swallowed up again by someone that would leave the bloodtracks on her thighs for decoration, a trophy of primitive arrogance, a gold star.

He had done the human thing in cleaning her up, nothing more. Being human doesn't make you a hero. It makes you another rat in the chase. Another target for the kill. Kill or be killed. Die or…

Die.

There's no alternative.

The digital numbers on the nightstand clock had read three-forty in the morning. Time of darkness in spite of the hour of morning. Mello pulled the hood of his jacket over his head, pocketed his gun, and sloped back out into the war, unchanged.