For the record, alcohol never did fix and never does fix anything. Matt was just coming to that conclusion as he polished off his third full bottle of booze, still in pain, and was telling his 'getting shot' story for the fourth time. Mello was listening like it was the first.

"I thought I was going to die," Matt finished again, eyes wide with the intensity he was trying to convey. His arm was out to the side in what would have been a broad, dramatic gesture had it not been ruined by his bloody, limp other arm. He just looked like some kind of messed up rooster, greeting the morning at midnight, or the last slot machine in a rundown Vegas motel.

"Shit," Mello commented sympathetically, sounding quite a bit like he was just trying to swallow his own tongue.

"Mmnnehh,"-which was never a good way to begin a sentence- "'m sorry, Matt," he continued to whine in a tone that never existed in any form of sobriety, let alone Mello's. "I never meant for you to get shot, err, hurt, you know?"

Matt released a sound that was stuck somewhere between a bark and a giggle as he leaned back over the arm of the couch to stare at Mello, upside down. As odd as the position was, the pillow beneath his back made it slightly comfortable, so he stayed that way. He also took a moment to study the way the world blurred and then came back into double-focus with the movement.

"It's okay," he drawled. "I'd do anything for you, Mellsy." He was lying. After consuming that much alcohol, he was still capable, even if it wasn't entirely on purpose. Maybe later, when he was sober, he'd wonder if he was an alcoholic. "You're my best friend." But that was true.

"I'm your only friend, dumbass," was what Mello was supposed to say, but he just smirked crookedly, finishing his second bottle. He didn't drink as much or as often as Matt, therefore making him capable of getting much drunker on much less alcohol, but even as he was, he was able to hold his tongue… to an extent.

Drunken Matt was only too willing to fill the silence.

"You know, when I woke up in that morgue, I didn't even notice I was fucked up at first! I was too busy wondering if you were okay!" He laughed because he was too out of it to decide whether that was true or not. He was just set on getting a reaction out of his friend, to get him to do or say anything that he'd never admit in the morning, go out of his comfort zone, and maybe even be human.

It may even have worked because Mello opened his mouth as if to speak but, lost in his own determined little world, Matt cut him off.

"What are we going to do now, anyway? Nearfuck has the Kira thing covered, and he'll take over the detective business after that, but we need to do something with our lives to get money, and how are you supposed to beat Near, and stuff?" That had sounded a lot better in his head. Or, more accurately, it had never been in his head. It was as though his lips formulated his thoughts instead of his brain.

Again, Mello tried to answer and, again, Matt-the ever-talkative drunk-cut him off.

"Are we gonna keep going after K'ra? 'Cause, I know that you said Near was gonna do something eventually or soon and I'm all shot up now and you're drunk so will there even be time?"

Mello's eyes narrowed purposefully. He was going to answer this time, damn it!

"I-"

"No, not you, we, you idiot. We're in this together so you need to stop saying 'I' and say 'we' instead because I'm part of it anyway so-"

That was where Mello stopped listening and got irritated. He did not like being interrupted, especially not by Matt, and especially not by a drunk Matt. A plan began to formulate. His brow furrowed with the effort… and then his impulsiveness just took over. Fuck planning, anyway.

What Mello meant to do was say "put a sock in it" and hit Matt, but Matt was drunk and therefore wouldn't let him speak, anyway, so the words were out of the question, and Matt was severely hurt, so violence was out, too. So, then, he meant to literally stuff a sock-or anything else-into Matt's mouth, but he couldn't find anything, so he used his tongue instead.

Admittedly, that was not exactly the next logical step in that thinking process (and in no way was 'sock' equivalent to 'lips') but, in his defense, Mello was impaired and feeling guilty about getting his friend shot, which was why he didn't pull away immediately. That and Matt's chapped lips were softer and warmer than they looked. Also, Matt had drunk enough Jack Daniels that the taste of his chapped lips was enough to send a trail of fire down Mello's throat.

But when he finally did choose to pull away and free Matt's mouth and tongue from his sinister clutches, a bare, sweaty hand came out of nowhere and entwined itself in Mello's hair, keeping his head still. Now he realized that Matt was drunk and horny and being not at all unreceptive to Mello's advances so he responded eagerly, as well.

They were drunk, high off of the pure euphoria of life (when you expect nothing but death), and making out upside down in a dark hotel room for no reason at all (if it could really be called that, considering neither was coherent enough to know exactly what was going on, so it was more sloppy teeth and saliva than anything).

When Mello finally pulled back and Matt sat up, sparing his neck an extra amount of pain from being contorted in irregular positions, they wiped their lips with the backs of their hands simultaneously. Mello spoke first, seizing his opportunity to get a word in.

"I can taste your tongue in my mouth," he observed, laughing in a singsong voice, rather than saying anything important. To be perfectly truthful, he couldn't quite recall what he'd wanted to say in the first place.

Matt snorted and laughed, clearly amused. He threw his head back again and declared, "You're pretty."

Mello smirked, slightly off center, and pulled the bottle from Matt's hand. He met with no resistance. They'd both definitely had more than enough, and any more would undeniably be overkill for their poor, pickled livers.

"I'm tired," the redhead then declared out of the blue and passed out right there on the sofa, bloody and mostly naked and reeking of booze.

Instead of giving any semblance of a damn, Mello dropped the bottle-it spilled, giving the room an entirely unpleasant odor of rubbing alcohol-and stumbled off to bed back in his own room.

No, alcohol never fixed anything at all.

In reality, it just created more problems.

When Matt wasn't awake when Mello came into his room to retrieve the aspirin (he had one hell of a hangover), he dismissed it as laziness and left the hotel feeling mildly irritated.

When Matt wasn't awake when he got back late that night, Mello grumbled and threw the balled-up sock from the stripping/bandaging escapade at the redhead, who didn't so much as stir. Mello went back to his hotel room and tended to the laptop he'd rescued from their secret hiding place.

The next morning, Matt was still in the same position in which Mello had last seen him, sock-in-face included. Mello grumbled something about sloth being one of the seven deadly sins and the inconvenience that he hadn't found that sock on the night of their drunken celebration-he couldn't quite remember why he had wanted a sock, only that he had desperately desired one-as he kicked the heavy door shut behind him.

Matt still wasn't awake when Mello dragged the heavy suitcase full of their remaining electronics through the front door of Matt's hotel room. Mello was really only the slightest bit irked that the arrival hadn't triggered some sort of reaction in Matt's nerd senses that would cause him to wake up, and he was even less irked that Matt hadn't then jumped up and interrogated him as to where he had been all day, because he 'had been worried, damn it.'

So Mello opened the suitcase, grabbed the PSP, and tossed it at his sleeping accomplice. Nothing. That was bothersome. He went back to the bag and his fingers hovered over a pack of cigarettes-desperate times called for desperate measures-before grabbing it, as well. If anything would get a response out of Matt, nicotine would.

The carton of cigarettes was one of four, as Matt had been absolutely sure that, if he survived, he'd be too lazy/drunk to go to the store to buy some, and if only Mello survived, he'd need a depressing reminder of his fallen friend…and maybe even a smoke, himself. If neither of them survived, then hey, free cigarettes for whatever lucky loser happened to stumble upon their suitcase.

When the only reaction Matt gave when the corner of the box bounced off of his skull was a pained and not-completely-there groan, Mello knew that it was cause for…concern.

In a matter of seconds, he was over by the couch, checking pulses and inspecting wounds and listening for breath. There was something wrong with Matt. His pulse was weak, his breathing was strained and, oh God, he didn't know why.

He should have noticed sooner. His best friend was lying there, dying on the couch, and Mello had thrown things at him, called him lazy, ignored the symptoms! How was he supposed to be number one if he missed something so obvious? God. Near would have noticed. Near noticed everything. Matt should be working with him. Matt's stupidity would balance well with Near's intelligence.

… No, no. This was an infection in its early stages and it was Matt's own fault for not cleaning and tending to the damage properly. Near was a bastard, and Matt was his idiot. Mello stopped the pacing he didn't know he'd started in the first place-his thoughts always came faster in movement-and flipped Matt over, taking no caution to spare any discomfort. Sure enough, the exit wound from the shoulder shot was showing the telltale signs of an infection to come. It was inflamed and Matt seemed to be running a high fever…

Thankfully, though, it wasn't too bad yet. It obviously hurt a lot regardless because somehow, Matt was managing to be unconscious, difficult, and noisy in vocalizing his discomfort simultaneously while Mello was trying to remove the bandage.

"Shit," Mello sighed-more out of the regret of his ruined day and future days than for worry over his best friend's condition-and set his mind to unwrapping and disinfecting.

The entire process took about twenty minutes and when he was done, he snapped a bite of chocolate thoughtfully and rested his hand on his hip, somewhat satisfied with his work. Not too shabby. Definitely better than what Near could do.

'But Near wouldn't have had to,' that helpfully irritating voice in his head supplied. Even true as it was, he was determined to not be affected by it. So he'd fucked up. Who was going to say anything about it? Mello had made far more progress in the Kira case than Near had-and ever could without him, indirectly saving his life-and that stupid albino bastard had just clung onto his back and reaped the benefits of his labors.

With this hatred fresh on his mind, Mello sauntered back out of the hotel room to go illegally obtain more things that would be necessary for survival until Matt was well enough to move all of their shit again.

On a completely unrelated and mildly alarming note, he and Matt officially had nothing to work towards, nothing to do, no real earthly purpose. He probably could get reenrolled with the Kira case as the only person who knew both his name and saw his face was very, very dead, but that only would work for the immediate future. For plans beyond the next few weeks (days?), he'd have to think of something else. But as Mello was very uninterested in thinking about things that wouldn't happen for a while, he continued his thoughts and ideas on beating Near. The face-to-face meeting between the Japanese NPA task force and the SPK had occurred a couple of days ago, but he didn't know the outcome. When Matt woke up, he'd have some serious hacking to do.

Technically, he knew that he should inform Near that they had survived. It was common courtesy, after all, considering the three of them had been good friends until the rankings came into play, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. The little sheep most likely wouldn't know the difference anyway.

Mello stopped at a gas station to pick up a bar of chocolate on his way to the hiding place. He didn't need it, really, and nothing sold at such low prices would ever satiate his cravings, but since he didn't have Matt-or anyone else-to complain and talk to, he was bored. Slapping a couple of dollars on the counter and muttering a low "keep the change," he slid out of the little shop and toward his motorcycle. The candy was already halfway melted when he unwrapped it, but given the L.A. sunshine, that couldn't be helped. By the time he straddled the bike, he was already licking the melted chocolate off of his leather gloves and cursing the way his skintight pants became less and less practical as time ticked toward noon.

The hiding place was really nothing more than an empty lot bordered by the back of a small library and an alleyway, scarcely more than five feet across. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence that he had to hop over (another testament to the terrible combination that was leather pants and criminal activity), but he'd done it so many times that it didn't even register in his brain. The toe of his combat boot sunk in where Matt's suitcase had been buried, so he dug it in further to see if he'd left anything behind. There was no surprise when he met with nothing, as everything was supposed to be contained within boxes and bags, all of which were accounted for back at the hotel.

There was surprise, however, when he approached the place where the documents and important files had been hidden and found that the soil had been disturbed. All of the old information from the Kira case was in those files. The contact information for a number of the remaining mafia contacts was there, along with aliases and IP addresses of some of the world's most skilled computer hackers. There was probably even information about Near in there, not that it was really all that important. All of his and Matt's fake identification and billing information had been there, too, along with their passports and receipts for less-than-legal purchases.

Someone had this box of documents, and that someone not only had access to some of his and Matt's finances, but also knew what they looked like, where they lived, that they'd worked with the mafia, and that they'd worked on the Kira case. They were screwed.

Instantly, he went on guard. The gun in his motorcycle jacket suddenly felt fifty times heavier.

Surely, the police would have located them at the hotel and arrested them already, he thought. In CSI and Law and Order and Criminal Minds, didn't they always do stakeouts of this sort of thing? Had he been followed? Was he being watched? It was so hard for him to act normally that every rise and sink of his shoulders felt like an exaggerated movement. No, he definitely would have noticed a cop sitting around. He was in the mafia for Christ's sake, that sort of thing had always had the hairs on the nape of his neck standing on end. Despite his unease, though, he did not feel insecure about his instincts and proceeded with great caution back to his motorcycle.

As sure as he was that no one was watching, he didn't want to press the issue by lingering too long. He nudged the kickstand back and took off; the roar of the engine between his legs was a small comfort. As he leaned over the handlebars and zoomed through traffic at a neck breaking speed, he almost felt safe.