darkluna | Fic: Hope and Candle-Wax

Title: Hope and Candle-Wax
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Mello, Matt
Warnings: Swearing and some blood
Word Count: 1700
Notes: Written for

dn_contest. Usual apologies to anyone seeing it twice. :-) The Slovenian translates as "May God guide your steps better than I can," and the title and cut text are from "Icarus Wind" by Thea Gilmore. Thanks to

vashti for beta-ing!

Matt hated flying. Five hours from La Guardia to LAX and no chance in hell of sneaking a smoke. His PSP's batteries gave out somewhere over one of those states whose names he'd never bothered to learn, and there was nothing for him to do but rest his forehead against the cold window and try not to imagine how bad it would be.

"You know where I am, right?" He'd expected the call for years, but he'd never heard Mello sound like that, wrung-out and drifting.

Of course he knew where Mello was; he'd followed along two steps behind for years. Stupid, really, he thought, half-watching the clouds that seemed to be moving while the plane stood still. He'd long since accepted that he'd always be the one dropping everything to answer Mello's call, never the other way around. Mello knew it too, knew he didn't even have to ask Will you come? All he'd said was "How soon can you get here?" And for all that Matt had wanted to protest, I have a life too, you know, he'd heard Mello's answer as surely as if he'd given it: Yeah, and?

And it's less important than yours, and always will be, Matt thought now. And I can't even think of that as a bad thing.

He had a text message waiting when they landed and he turned his phone on again: an address in a neighborhood that probably would've scared him if he'd given himself any time to be scared of his surroundings, and four numbers that turned out to be an entry code.

What are you playing at, M? he wondered as he punched the numbers in.

Mello's voice came thick and muffled from the back of the tiny apartment. "Matt, that better fuckin' be you."

"Yeah, it's—" Matt got to the bedroom door and froze. "—me."

Mello had done a clumsy job bandaging himself, strips of gauze wrapped awkwardly around his head, his arm, lumped over his eye. Matt could still see the burns. Every part of his mind that knew the slightest thing about first aid was screaming Emergency room, now.

"The fuck did you do to yourself?" he said, shakily.

"Blew up a building. Was in it at the time." Half a crooked grin, and even that must have hurt like hell.

The bed was littered with bloody dressings, and the place stank: they don't tell you that, Matt thought, that burnt human is after all burnt meat. He silently cursed himself and swallowed hard. "You are a psycho, you know that?"

"An alive psycho, ha ha, Matty. Joke's on them." Higher than a kite on god knew what; Matt saw syringes in with the mess as he got closer.

What in the hell am I supposed to do?

"Supplies on the nightstand," Mello said, looking him over. "I can't believe you still wear those things."

Matt reached for his goggles instinctively, but he left them on. "Yeah, yeah, fuck you," he said, as if the expected response were a magic formula that could keep them both from noticing that the first time they were seeing each other in years, Matt was unwinding gauze and praying to a God he didn't believe in that he didn't take off too much skin with it.

"How bad?" Mello said, and Matt realized he was standing there with bandages in hand and couldn't possibly be masking his dismay very well.

You can fall apart later, he told himself. "Not good." Red and raw and awful, over half of Mello's face and down his shoulder. It looked like he'd been boiled alive. Worse, even, because some of it was white and some charred and Matt couldn't help but imagine how it felt, how it had felt as it happened. Fall apart later, damn it. One thing at a time now.

"Gotta disinfect it. It's gonna hurt."

Mello nodded, mouth already set in a hard line.

Matt couldn't bear to just pour the peroxide, so he dabbed, and winced when Mello hissed, and told himself that was better than screaming.

A pile of cotton balls, a full tube of Neosporin, and Matt had barely finished taping the dressing around Mello's arm before he shook him off and swung his legs off the bed.

"You are not getting up."

Mello just looked at him. If anything, his glare had gotten more scathing in four years. He'd only ever had one speed: full tilt, and he seemed determined not to change now, even if he could barely walk in a straight line. Matt sighed and followed him into the living room. He was waiting for his laptop to boot up, drumming his fingers on the coffee table.

"When's the last time you slept?"

"Can't sleep, too much to do. Amane, gotta get someone on her. And that fucking picture. Bastards have my name now."

"What?"

"The eyes." Mello shook his head as if trying to jar his thoughts into order. "Soichiro Yagami. Didn't mean for him to die, I swear."

"Mello, I don't—"

"Had it in my fuckin' hands and I lost it. New plan, that one's not gonna fly again." He looked up at Matt, shaking his head again. "I was so damn close."

"I don't understand any of this."

It took a long time to explain, as Mello typed and scowled and tried to act like he wasn't swaying where he sat, a jumbled story that sounded like a mashup of a Tarantino movie and some kind of crazy horror flick, except that the body count was all too real.

"I hafta find out what the little wanker's been up to."

Matt understood that right away.

Mello was speed-reading off the screen, muttering to himself.

"You have to rest."

"Told you. Can't."

"You'll work better if you do. Come on, M. I'll wake you after an hour. Please."

Mello started to reach up to touch his face, but jerked his hand away. "Fine."

Matt tried to help him to the bedroom without seeming to help him, hovering behind him like an idiot. The fact that Mello didn't snap at him proved how out of it he really was. He didn't even object when Matt got a glass of water and watched as he swallowed more painkillers.

"Give me something to do while you rest. Then maybe you can actually relax."

"Fat fuckin' chance," Mello said, but he looked less pissed. "I bet you could piggyback us onto the SPK's surveillance."

"Pff, pie." He started to go, but Mello reached out and caught his sleeve. "Wait. Stay with me. Til I fall asleep."

It was the drugs talking, had to be, but how could Matt say no? He sat on the edge of the bed and, after a moment, took Mello's hand, marveling that the strongest person he knew could be so physically delicate. Cold, bony fingers, and chipped black nail polish.

"Don't look," Mello said. "Overdue at my manicurist."

"Cute."

"I knew you'd come."

"Arrogant prick."

"Always." He stared at the ceiling. Matt recognized that look: the wheels in his mind spinning too fast to stop, no matter how many sedatives were in his system. He wouldn't be out for a while. Matt stretched out next to him, on top of the covers, and Mello held a debate about whether to contact someone on the inside (of where? Matt wondered) and if so, who, that didn't appear to need Matt's participation at all.

The windows darkened and Mello was still fighting sleep, murmuring now in a language Matt didn't recognize, which sounded like Russian but probably wasn't. Things like prayers, snatches of poetry, long angry rants that left his voice even more ragged.

"She left me, you know," he said, abruptly switching to English. "On the fucking doorstep, in a fucking basket, with a fucking note pinned to my chest. Some goddamn fairy tale it turned out to be."

Matt listened to all of it, and pretended he didn't notice the tears creeping from under the gauze, and swore that when Mello was well again, he'd never mention anything he'd heard. It would be even worse for him than the physical pain, knowing he'd lost control so completely. Matt hoped he wouldn't remember. A lot of people thought Mello was out of control anyway, that the heart he wore on his sleeve was the whole story. But Mello, the real Mello, was someone not even Matt knew.

"Know what you should do?"

Matt opened his eyes. He didn't want to sleep until he was sure Mello was out and going to stay that way. "No, what?"

"Go back. Back to New York, back to Winchester, I don't care."

He'd call it a moment of weakness, later, Matt thought.

Four years, and nothing had changed. But Matt had known all along, hadn't he, that it would come to this someday? That Mello's bravery and ambition would cross the line they had always straddled, into outright recklessness and insanity, and bring him only blood and fire in the end. He'd known, too, that trying to sway Mello from anything he'd decided would be like trying to reason with a hurricane. Some people were like that: they blazed bright and burned up. And if you were trailing along behind them, the best you could do was fight the temptation to burn along with them.

So he answered the "save yourself" Mello hadn't really said. "You know I'm not gonna do that."

"Yeah. I know." He turned on his side, pressed his face into the pillow—he was burning with fever; Matt could feel the heat coming off him even from here. "Brother, we're both set on our paths. Yours at least will take you out of the woods. Maj Bog vodič vaš lestev rajši mimo morem." It was slurry and trailing off as Mello finally gave in to sleep, and Matt didn't know what any of it meant except that Bog was God.

He waited until Mello's breathing had evened out, and then he carefully shifted down and slipped his arms around him, and echoed what he was pretty sure Mello had meant. "God better keep you safe too."